Saturday, October 4, 2025
Friday, October 3, 2025
OpenAI’s New Video App Is Jaw-Dropping (for Better and Worse)
This week, we — the two authors of this article — spent hours scrolling through a feed of short-form videos that featured ourselves in different scenarios.
In one hyper-realistic nine-second video, we were shown skydiving (and grinning) with pizzas as parachutes.
In another, Eli hit a game-winning home run in a baseball stadium full of robots.
In yet another, Mike was caught in a “Matrix”-style duel against Ronald McDonald, using cheeseburgers as weapons.
“I’m genuinely blown away,” Eli messaged Mike about the cheeseburger video, before liking the content. Mike kept sending videos — which included him ballroom dancing with his dog and sitting on a throne of rats — to other New York Times colleagues (all of whom found the clips slightly disturbing).
The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora’s underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis this week.
After we spent less than a day with the app, what became clear to us was that Sora had gone beyond being an A.I.-video generation app. Instead, it is, in effect, a social network in disguise; a clone of TikTok down to its user interface, algorithmic video suggestions and ability to follow and interact with friends. The powerful A.I. model that Sora is built on makes it simpler to produce clips, giving people an almost unlimited ability to generate as many A.I. videos as they want.
It was also disconcerting.
Almost instantly, Sora’s early-access users were spinning up videos made with copyrighted material plucked from pop culture. (We saw more “Rick and Morty” and Pikachu videos than we would have liked.) And when Mike posted one Sora video to his personal Instagram page, a half-dozen friends asked if it was him in the video, raising questions about whether we might lose touch with reality.
Worse still, being able to quickly and easily generate video likenesses of people could pour gasoline on disinformation, creating clips of fake events that look so real that they might spur people into real-world action. While some of this was already possible with other A.I. video generators, Sora could turbocharge it.
It is early days, and there is no guarantee Sora will have legs. But OpenAI appears to have created the type of product that companies like Meta and X have sought to build: a way to bring A.I. to the masses that people can share, enticing one another to create posts and regularly use their apps and services.
The race to create similar apps is heating up. Last week, Meta released a social media feed in its dedicated A.I. app called Vibes, which uses an A.I. video generator from the start-up Midjourney. Google hosts Veo, its version of a similar product.
With the social internet moving people from sharing text messages to posting photos and now to watching billions of hours of video, tech executives say A.I. video tools will be formative to the next generation of social media. (...)
In one hyper-realistic nine-second video, we were shown skydiving (and grinning) with pizzas as parachutes.
In yet another, Mike was caught in a “Matrix”-style duel against Ronald McDonald, using cheeseburgers as weapons.
“I’m genuinely blown away,” Eli messaged Mike about the cheeseburger video, before liking the content. Mike kept sending videos — which included him ballroom dancing with his dog and sitting on a throne of rats — to other New York Times colleagues (all of whom found the clips slightly disturbing).
The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora’s underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis this week.
After we spent less than a day with the app, what became clear to us was that Sora had gone beyond being an A.I.-video generation app. Instead, it is, in effect, a social network in disguise; a clone of TikTok down to its user interface, algorithmic video suggestions and ability to follow and interact with friends. The powerful A.I. model that Sora is built on makes it simpler to produce clips, giving people an almost unlimited ability to generate as many A.I. videos as they want.
It was also disconcerting.
Almost instantly, Sora’s early-access users were spinning up videos made with copyrighted material plucked from pop culture. (We saw more “Rick and Morty” and Pikachu videos than we would have liked.) And when Mike posted one Sora video to his personal Instagram page, a half-dozen friends asked if it was him in the video, raising questions about whether we might lose touch with reality.
Worse still, being able to quickly and easily generate video likenesses of people could pour gasoline on disinformation, creating clips of fake events that look so real that they might spur people into real-world action. While some of this was already possible with other A.I. video generators, Sora could turbocharge it.
It is early days, and there is no guarantee Sora will have legs. But OpenAI appears to have created the type of product that companies like Meta and X have sought to build: a way to bring A.I. to the masses that people can share, enticing one another to create posts and regularly use their apps and services.
The race to create similar apps is heating up. Last week, Meta released a social media feed in its dedicated A.I. app called Vibes, which uses an A.I. video generator from the start-up Midjourney. Google hosts Veo, its version of a similar product.
With the social internet moving people from sharing text messages to posting photos and now to watching billions of hours of video, tech executives say A.I. video tools will be formative to the next generation of social media. (...)
Hollywood has spent the past 36 hours concerned over how Sora could make it simple for users to rip off likenesses with no compensation. A day after the app’s release, executives at the talent agency WME sent a memo to agents saying they would fight to defend their clients’ work, according to a copy viewed by The Times.
“There is a strong need for real protections for artists and creatives as they encounter A.I. models using their intellectual property, as well as their name, image and likeness,” the memo said. WME said it had told OpenAI that all of its clients were opting out of having their likenesses or intellectual property included in Sora’s videos.
Still, Sora’s broad appeal was immediately clear. Neither of us knows the first thing about creating videos, yet all it took was a kernel of an idea, two or three minutes of processing time and a boatload of computing power to spit out a video of Mike arm-wrestling Eli for the title of “best tech reporter.” (Eli won.)
Not everyone was charmed. After Mike showed his partner an eerily realistic Sora video of himself playing the psychopathic character Anton Chigurh from the 2007 film adaptation of the book “No Country for Old Men,” she had a simple request.
“Please never, ever show me this kind of video again,” she said.
[ed. Fake everything, here we come. In the future, a premium will be placed on human interactions (including relationships), certified human-produced products (eg. art), and anything else that derives clearly from human-related efforts. Because it'll be hard to tell. See also: this post about Tilly Norwood (DS).]
“There is a strong need for real protections for artists and creatives as they encounter A.I. models using their intellectual property, as well as their name, image and likeness,” the memo said. WME said it had told OpenAI that all of its clients were opting out of having their likenesses or intellectual property included in Sora’s videos.
Still, Sora’s broad appeal was immediately clear. Neither of us knows the first thing about creating videos, yet all it took was a kernel of an idea, two or three minutes of processing time and a boatload of computing power to spit out a video of Mike arm-wrestling Eli for the title of “best tech reporter.” (Eli won.)
Not everyone was charmed. After Mike showed his partner an eerily realistic Sora video of himself playing the psychopathic character Anton Chigurh from the 2007 film adaptation of the book “No Country for Old Men,” she had a simple request.
“Please never, ever show me this kind of video again,” she said.
by Mike Isaac and Eli Tan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sora
The Sufferable Evil
Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
What happened next should be the biggest story in America.
Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment in her nightgown to find armed agents yelling “police.” She had a gun pointed in her face. She was handcuffed. She was held until 3 AM before being released. Fisher isn’t suspected of any crime. She lives in the building.
Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.
Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”
Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”
Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.
Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.
This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.
And we’ve already moved on to the next story.
Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.
They suffer while evils are sufferable.
And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.
The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself. (...)
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.
What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.
This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
And America yawned. (...)
This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.
In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.” (...)
Why are we accommodating this?
The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.
Because it’s sufferable.
This is the logic that makes tyranny possible. (...)
President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?
This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been... silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil.
What happened next should be the biggest story in America.
Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.
Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”
Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”
Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.
Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.
This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.
And we’ve already moved on to the next story.
Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.
They suffer while evils are sufferable.
And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.
The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself. (...)
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.
What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.
This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
And America yawned. (...)
This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.
In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.” (...)
Why are we accommodating this?
The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.
Because it’s sufferable.
This is the logic that makes tyranny possible. (...)
President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?
This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been... silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil.
by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Image: uncredited
[ed. Next 'No Kings' rally is scheduled for October 18 (in your home town).]
The Garage Is the New Porch
In Houston, when football season kicks off, so does garage season.
In this car-bound city, and beyond, vehicles are being pushed aside to give the garage a second act.
Take Melissa Spence: On many evenings, she can be found relaxing with friends in her garage, feet up on a cooler, Michelob Ultra in hand. She and her husband, Joseph Spence, park on the street, and, where a car would be in the garage, there are instead a half dozen yard chairs, a rug, a big-screen TV, and string lights crisscrossing the ceiling. A mesh screen hangs where the retracted garage door would close, and when you push it to the side, as you might a hippie’s beaded curtain, it’s like entering a magical, mysterious realm.
“It’s become that third space you can go,” Ms. Spence, 49, said, referring to the sociological concept that the home is a person’s first space, work is their second and their third is an informal gathering spot. “People drop by to say hi or pick up the guitar and play,” she said. “It’s a really friendly room now.”
The American garage’s reincarnation looks different depending on the resident: It might be a hideaway man cave, a she-shed, a home theater, a workshop, a crafting zone or a band practice room.
Why hang out here, instead of a house’s air-conditioned living room? For many, the garage opens up an opportunity for interactions with neighbors and passers-by that closing yourself inside a home does not. In a city like Houston, where car-focused living minimizes the chance of running into people, the revived garage is a tool to create the human interaction that some people crave.
In Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood, Jane Haas, 53, spent many of this summer’s evenings sitting in her garage in a folding chair next to her dog and a fan, with Motown playing on the radio. “We’re getting older and I guess we’re becoming porch people,” she said one night, as a neighbor walked by and said hello. “But since we don’t have a porch, this is the place where friends will drop by for a drink or to maybe watch sports with us when we bring our TV down. Our garage has become our front porch.”
The mythology of the garage’s reimagined potential runs deep in modern American culture. For businesses like Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, Disney and Harley-Davidson, the garage is the backdrop of their origin story. Those companies’ founders took that common, square structure that was originally built to house a certain vision of American success and transformed it to house their own version of the American dream. [ed. As did countless garage bands.]
by Shannon Sims, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Meridith Kohut
In this car-bound city, and beyond, vehicles are being pushed aside to give the garage a second act.
Take Melissa Spence: On many evenings, she can be found relaxing with friends in her garage, feet up on a cooler, Michelob Ultra in hand. She and her husband, Joseph Spence, park on the street, and, where a car would be in the garage, there are instead a half dozen yard chairs, a rug, a big-screen TV, and string lights crisscrossing the ceiling. A mesh screen hangs where the retracted garage door would close, and when you push it to the side, as you might a hippie’s beaded curtain, it’s like entering a magical, mysterious realm.
The American garage’s reincarnation looks different depending on the resident: It might be a hideaway man cave, a she-shed, a home theater, a workshop, a crafting zone or a band practice room.
Why hang out here, instead of a house’s air-conditioned living room? For many, the garage opens up an opportunity for interactions with neighbors and passers-by that closing yourself inside a home does not. In a city like Houston, where car-focused living minimizes the chance of running into people, the revived garage is a tool to create the human interaction that some people crave.
In Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood, Jane Haas, 53, spent many of this summer’s evenings sitting in her garage in a folding chair next to her dog and a fan, with Motown playing on the radio. “We’re getting older and I guess we’re becoming porch people,” she said one night, as a neighbor walked by and said hello. “But since we don’t have a porch, this is the place where friends will drop by for a drink or to maybe watch sports with us when we bring our TV down. Our garage has become our front porch.”
The mythology of the garage’s reimagined potential runs deep in modern American culture. For businesses like Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, Disney and Harley-Davidson, the garage is the backdrop of their origin story. Those companies’ founders took that common, square structure that was originally built to house a certain vision of American success and transformed it to house their own version of the American dream. [ed. As did countless garage bands.]
by Shannon Sims, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Meridith Kohut
[ed. I've often wondered why more people (on the mainland) don't do this. In Hawaii, garages (and carports) have always been a focal point for parties, tailgating, music making, and just about everything else. Great for promoting and maintaining neighborly interactions and community cohesion (unless you party too much!).]
The War Between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is Officially Over...
Silicon Valley needs creativity, but hates to pay for it. So the war rages on.
But we are now entering the final stage of the war. Silicon Valley is now swallowing up Hollywood. The pace at which this is happening is frightening.
The main protagonist here is a man named David Ellison—a tech scion who wants to be the biggest mogul in the movie industry. A few days ago, his father Larry Ellison became (briefly) the richest man in the world.
Ellison is founder of Oracle, a database software company with a market cap of almost a trillion dollars. That’s nice work if you can get it. But his son David wanted to do something more fun than databases, so he dropped out of college to dabble in movies.
But this quickly became more than dabbling. He produced hit franchise films, notably the Mission Impossible movies. He didn’t care much about artsy cinema—and instead churned out Baywatch and Spy Kids. Like his dad, he knows how to make money.
And then he went on a spending spree. It’s not hard to do that in Hollywood if you have a big pile of cash. Many of the legendary properties from the past have fallen on hard times, and can be acquired from their current owners at a very reasonable price.
So David Ellison bought up National Amusements and merged it into his production company. This gave him control over
Oracle, the company founded by David Ellison’s father, will now be one of the new owners of TikTok. So in one generation, the Ellison family has gone from software entrepreneurs to the biggest powerhouse in film and media.
What’s next?
The most attractive remaining asset in Hollywood is Disney. It’s just a matter of time before it gets swallowed up by the techies. The most likely outcome is Apple acquiring Disney, but some other Silicon Valley powerhouse could also do this deal.
There’s so much money in NorCal, and a lot of techies would like to own their own famous mouse (along with theme parks and all the rest). Musk could do it. Zuckerberg could do it. Alphabet could do it. Even some company you don’t think much about, like Broadcom (market cap = $1.6 trillion), could easily finance this deal.
There’s heavy irony in this fact. That’s because Disney helped launch Silicon Valley.
There’s a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that’s called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But that birthing only happened because Walt Disney gave Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard an order for eight audio oscillators—which gave them enough cash and confidence to create their garage-born company.
Hewlett-Packard trained the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. So an Apple buyout of Disney would simply take things full circle.
There are still some chess pieces on the board, and a few moves left to be made—but the winner of this game is already obvious. Hollywood, or what’s left of it, will become a subsidiary of tech interests. I don’t see any other outcome.
But we are now entering the final stage of the war. Silicon Valley is now swallowing up Hollywood. The pace at which this is happening is frightening.
The main protagonist here is a man named David Ellison—a tech scion who wants to be the biggest mogul in the movie industry. A few days ago, his father Larry Ellison became (briefly) the richest man in the world.
But this quickly became more than dabbling. He produced hit franchise films, notably the Mission Impossible movies. He didn’t care much about artsy cinema—and instead churned out Baywatch and Spy Kids. Like his dad, he knows how to make money.
And then he went on a spending spree. It’s not hard to do that in Hollywood if you have a big pile of cash. Many of the legendary properties from the past have fallen on hard times, and can be acquired from their current owners at a very reasonable price.
So David Ellison bought up National Amusements and merged it into his production company. This gave him control over
- Paramount Pictures
- CBS (and CBS News)
- MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other cable TV channels
- Paramount+ and Pluto TV streaming platforms
- HBO
- CNN
- TNT
Oracle, the company founded by David Ellison’s father, will now be one of the new owners of TikTok. So in one generation, the Ellison family has gone from software entrepreneurs to the biggest powerhouse in film and media.
What’s next?
The most attractive remaining asset in Hollywood is Disney. It’s just a matter of time before it gets swallowed up by the techies. The most likely outcome is Apple acquiring Disney, but some other Silicon Valley powerhouse could also do this deal.
There’s so much money in NorCal, and a lot of techies would like to own their own famous mouse (along with theme parks and all the rest). Musk could do it. Zuckerberg could do it. Alphabet could do it. Even some company you don’t think much about, like Broadcom (market cap = $1.6 trillion), could easily finance this deal.
There’s heavy irony in this fact. That’s because Disney helped launch Silicon Valley.
There’s a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that’s called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But that birthing only happened because Walt Disney gave Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard an order for eight audio oscillators—which gave them enough cash and confidence to create their garage-born company.
Hewlett-Packard trained the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. So an Apple buyout of Disney would simply take things full circle.
There are still some chess pieces on the board, and a few moves left to be made—but the winner of this game is already obvious. Hollywood, or what’s left of it, will become a subsidiary of tech interests. I don’t see any other outcome.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Hollywood Boulevard in the 1930s
Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist
Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.
In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)
Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.
The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.
Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)
Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?
Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.
As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.
Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.
As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.
Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.
Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?
Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.
But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.
Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.
You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.
Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?
Osman: Yeah.
Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?
Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.
My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.
I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.
In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)
Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —
Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”
When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.
In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.
Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.
But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.
Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.
But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.
My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.
My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)
Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.
Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.
The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.
Cottle: That’s my goal.
Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?
That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.
And that feels like a revolutionary act.
In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)
The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.
Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)
Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?
Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.
As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.
Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.
As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.
Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.
Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?
Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.
But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.
Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.
You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.
Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?
Osman: Yeah.
Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?
Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.
My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.
I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.
In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)
Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —
Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”
When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.
In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.
Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.
But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.
Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.
But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.
My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.
My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)
Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.
Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.
The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.
Cottle: That’s my goal.
Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?
That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.
And that feels like a revolutionary act.
by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse. I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]
Thursday, October 2, 2025
Devour the Flesh
In the sterile womb of Jersey City, if you sit and watch a while, you can bear witness to the beating heart of corporate America. Here, along the waterfront, where banks and commercial entities alike feign importance, you can watch this organ function in all its pulsating, bloody, slimy glory: senior managers in starchy button-downs, shouldering duffel bags, talking about frenetic nothings on the phone; junior analysts, hiding happy hour hangovers with oat lattes and Chill Mint nicotine gum; women wearing ballet flats and cropped fit Zara blazers; men disguising receding hairlines with gelled crew cuts, swaggering in and out of glass buildings with their artfully hidden secrets. Everyone has been reduced to the same amount of nothing—no more than cells delivering oxygen to the vascular organ, ciphers turning around and around in revolving doors. Everyone is equally insignificant in the face of A Business Plan. They coagulate into a viscous soup, being pulled through aortas that channel them from the train station to the office door. The line for Just Salad in the adjoining mall wraps around the floor during lunch. They have a system so you won’t ever have to wait more than fifteen minutes for your Crispy Chicken Poblano.
There is a strong idea of fraternity here, not because of a shared commonality between individuals, but rather the compulsion that you are nothings beating within the same fleshy walls, so there must be inherent community within it. It must be true. The men sitting atop this system, who hide their sexual hunger and bloodthirst and baldness, spread their pink legs wide across leather seats and rhapsodize about how everyone here is part of a family, a community, a team. They wax lyrical about it like they are preparing to make everyone jerk off over a cookie. Of course, they have no qualms about turning on these idealisms in the face of a dangling carrot. Money is the siren’s call; greed, a Hydra. True sustenance is slim. They want people who are hungry, they say. They want people who are insatiable.
Most of this is because of politics. Politics, we say, tearing our hair out once more! Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy, intended to make news outlets and the public alike feel like we’re being whiplashed with news while explicitly and covertly executing fascist policy, has entered in full force in the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term. Every day feels like you’re being bashed in the face like a birthday piñata: No more Department of Education! The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America! Tariffs! No tariffs! We’re gutting USAID and the CFPB—you didn’t know what they did for you as an America? No one taught you that in school? You didn’t read about it in the news that was paywalled because Marc Benioff bought TIME and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post? That’s your own fault! Fuck you! Tariffs again! Mass deportations! AI is gutting white collar jobs! They’re bombing Iran for fun! World War III! And now, here’s Elon Musk being ugly.
It is difficult to be online, to read the news, to open up your phone without your brain activating your fight-or-flight response because all of your synapses lit up like a Christmas tree. The future seems to be at a crossroads, every decision unsure and halting about what is really coming next. On the bad days, we are all just grasping to the last life raft of a boat being blown up by a bunch of the un-funniest losers you’ve ever seen in your life. Rent is skyrocketing, people are asking ChatGPT to make them weekly grocery lists, the rich are only getting richer. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet we scroll onto the next post anyway.
Nihilism and doomerism run rampant as a result. Trust in the government, in media and in society is at an all-time low. Everyone asks, are we cooked? For the first time in a long time, it really seems that way.
I do not think fondly of the limited time I spent on the waterfront in Jersey City last year. I think about the months I felt disrespected, belittled, objectified. I think about the Mexican restaurant where blazered ciphers would gather for company tab margaritas and I felt a self-disgust so deep in my bones I thought I might be having some kind of deathly allergic reaction to cotija cheese. I think about the route I would take along the water in the moments I had alone, walking past the starchy shirts, the hungover interns, the brassy highlights and misshapen executives, staring at my hollowing reflection in the Hudson River, wondering if it would please get eaten by the water: Drown drown drown drown drown.
All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.
When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”
I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it.
All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.
When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”
I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it.
[ed. Always nice to discover a new young writer with talent, wit, and deadly aim. See also: The Whimsy War Manifesto:]
***
Here is my synthesis of 2025 so far: the status quo is a bad day, and the likelihood of a world-ending day is far likelier than a good one, so when a good day does come around, it feels like licking the Pearly Gates with your own parched tongue.Most of this is because of politics. Politics, we say, tearing our hair out once more! Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy, intended to make news outlets and the public alike feel like we’re being whiplashed with news while explicitly and covertly executing fascist policy, has entered in full force in the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term. Every day feels like you’re being bashed in the face like a birthday piñata: No more Department of Education! The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America! Tariffs! No tariffs! We’re gutting USAID and the CFPB—you didn’t know what they did for you as an America? No one taught you that in school? You didn’t read about it in the news that was paywalled because Marc Benioff bought TIME and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post? That’s your own fault! Fuck you! Tariffs again! Mass deportations! AI is gutting white collar jobs! They’re bombing Iran for fun! World War III! And now, here’s Elon Musk being ugly.
It is difficult to be online, to read the news, to open up your phone without your brain activating your fight-or-flight response because all of your synapses lit up like a Christmas tree. The future seems to be at a crossroads, every decision unsure and halting about what is really coming next. On the bad days, we are all just grasping to the last life raft of a boat being blown up by a bunch of the un-funniest losers you’ve ever seen in your life. Rent is skyrocketing, people are asking ChatGPT to make them weekly grocery lists, the rich are only getting richer. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet we scroll onto the next post anyway.
Nihilism and doomerism run rampant as a result. Trust in the government, in media and in society is at an all-time low. Everyone asks, are we cooked? For the first time in a long time, it really seems that way.
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Jane Goodall Chronicled the Social Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91
Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
The British-born Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when the National Geographic Society, which was financially supporting her field studies in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania, published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of Flo, David Greybeard, Fifi and other members of the troop of primates she had observed.
On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Dr. Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).
Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her arduous research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.
Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the networks. In December 1965, CBS News broadcast a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.” (...)
And in becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Dr. Goodall opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women — including Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott and Penny Patterson — came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.
by Keith Schneider, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jane Goodall Institute
Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described her struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika
On the scientific merits alone, Dr. Goodall’s discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”
On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her arduous research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.
Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the networks. In December 1965, CBS News broadcast a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.” (...)
And in becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Dr. Goodall opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women — including Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott and Penny Patterson — came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.
by Keith Schneider, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jane Goodall Institute
Letters From An American: September 30, 2025
Last Thursday, September 25, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suddenly announced he was calling about 800 of the nation’s top military generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted advisors, to meet at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, today. Such a meeting was unprecedented, and its suddenness meant military leaders across the world had to drop everything to run to Washington, D.C., at enormous financial cost for the country. Under those extraordinary circumstances, speculation about what Hegseth intended to say or do at the meeting has been widespread.
Now we know. This morning, in front of a giant flag backdrop that echoed the opening scene from the movie Patton, Hegseth harangued the career military leaders, pacing as if he were giving a TED talk. The event was streamed live to the public, making it clear that the hurry to get everyone to Washington, D.C., in person was not about secrecy.
In his speech, Hegseth reiterated his vision of a military based in what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Ignoring the military’s mission of preventing wars through deterrence, its professional and highly educated officer corps, and its modern structure as a triumph of logistics, he told the military leaders that today was “the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”
He claimed that “we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.” But then Hegseth, who became defense secretary from his position as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, complained that “our warriors” are not “led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders.”
He claimed that “foolish and reckless politicians” had forced the military “to focus on the wrong things” and that it had promoted too many leaders “based on their race, based on gender quotas.” “We became the woke department,” he said. “We are done with that sh*t.” He is loosening rules about hazing and bullying, changing physical fitness reforms with the idea that they will get women out of combat roles, and prohibiting beards, which will force Black men out of the service, for Black men suffer at a much higher rate than white men do from a chronic skin condition that makes shaving painful and can cause scarring.
He also said he was tired of seeing “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals,” and that he would institute a second physical fitness test every year.
“[I]f the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
The military leaders listened to Hegseth without expression, in keeping with the military’s longstanding tradition of rejecting partisanship. While Hegseth paused for applause that did not materialize, he seemed to be playing to the cameras rather than his live audience.
In contrast, when President Donald J. Trump took the stage, he seemed uncomfortable at the lack of audience participation in what was essentially a rally speech. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he began. “This is very interesting. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room.”
The president who received five draft deferments—four for college, one for bad feet—continued to a room full of career officers: “Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we’re all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room.”
For the next 70 minutes, he spoke slowly, slurring words, delivering to the hundreds of professionals who had rushed from around the world to attend this meeting a rambling, incoherent stream of words that jumped from what appeared to be prepared remarks to his own improvisation. He covered the “Gulf of America,” the seven or eight wars he claims to have ended, the “millions and millions of lives” he has saved, nuclear weapons (one of the two “n-words” he informed the military leaders you can’t say), his demanding “beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper” with “the real gold writing” when he signs things (“I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature,” he said), finding $31 billion on “the tariff shelf,” making Canada the 51st state, his dislike of the “aesthetics” of certain Navy ships, wild claims about his 2024 electoral victory, the press, America First, immigrants from prisons and mental institutions, and Venezuelans not daring to go out in boats for fear the U.S. will “blow [them] out of existence.”
The speech was highly partisan, attacking former president Joe Biden by name eleven times, calling him “the auto pen” and claiming his administration was really run by “radical left lunatics.” “We were not respected with Biden,” Trump said.
“They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”
Like Hegseth’s, Trump’s speech seemed to have been designed to announce a new mission for the military. He claimed the U.S. has domestic enemies, “insurrectionists” “paid by the radical left,” and said that cities “that are run by the radical-left Democrats…they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within…. And I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.” Trump told the audience that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now.”
A former defense official told Jack Detsch and Leo Shane III of Politico the meeting was “a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing. It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”
Either one of those speeches, in full view of the American public and foreign governments, would be enough to torpedo an administration before Trump. But the day was not over.
Now we know. This morning, in front of a giant flag backdrop that echoed the opening scene from the movie Patton, Hegseth harangued the career military leaders, pacing as if he were giving a TED talk. The event was streamed live to the public, making it clear that the hurry to get everyone to Washington, D.C., in person was not about secrecy.
In his speech, Hegseth reiterated his vision of a military based in what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Ignoring the military’s mission of preventing wars through deterrence, its professional and highly educated officer corps, and its modern structure as a triumph of logistics, he told the military leaders that today was “the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”
He claimed that “we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.” But then Hegseth, who became defense secretary from his position as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, complained that “our warriors” are not “led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders.”
He claimed that “foolish and reckless politicians” had forced the military “to focus on the wrong things” and that it had promoted too many leaders “based on their race, based on gender quotas.” “We became the woke department,” he said. “We are done with that sh*t.” He is loosening rules about hazing and bullying, changing physical fitness reforms with the idea that they will get women out of combat roles, and prohibiting beards, which will force Black men out of the service, for Black men suffer at a much higher rate than white men do from a chronic skin condition that makes shaving painful and can cause scarring.
He also said he was tired of seeing “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals,” and that he would institute a second physical fitness test every year.
“[I]f the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
The military leaders listened to Hegseth without expression, in keeping with the military’s longstanding tradition of rejecting partisanship. While Hegseth paused for applause that did not materialize, he seemed to be playing to the cameras rather than his live audience.
In contrast, when President Donald J. Trump took the stage, he seemed uncomfortable at the lack of audience participation in what was essentially a rally speech. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he began. “This is very interesting. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room.”
The president who received five draft deferments—four for college, one for bad feet—continued to a room full of career officers: “Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we’re all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room.”
For the next 70 minutes, he spoke slowly, slurring words, delivering to the hundreds of professionals who had rushed from around the world to attend this meeting a rambling, incoherent stream of words that jumped from what appeared to be prepared remarks to his own improvisation. He covered the “Gulf of America,” the seven or eight wars he claims to have ended, the “millions and millions of lives” he has saved, nuclear weapons (one of the two “n-words” he informed the military leaders you can’t say), his demanding “beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper” with “the real gold writing” when he signs things (“I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature,” he said), finding $31 billion on “the tariff shelf,” making Canada the 51st state, his dislike of the “aesthetics” of certain Navy ships, wild claims about his 2024 electoral victory, the press, America First, immigrants from prisons and mental institutions, and Venezuelans not daring to go out in boats for fear the U.S. will “blow [them] out of existence.”
The speech was highly partisan, attacking former president Joe Biden by name eleven times, calling him “the auto pen” and claiming his administration was really run by “radical left lunatics.” “We were not respected with Biden,” Trump said.
“They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”
Like Hegseth’s, Trump’s speech seemed to have been designed to announce a new mission for the military. He claimed the U.S. has domestic enemies, “insurrectionists” “paid by the radical left,” and said that cities “that are run by the radical-left Democrats…they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within…. And I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.” Trump told the audience that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now.”
A former defense official told Jack Detsch and Leo Shane III of Politico the meeting was “a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing. It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”
Either one of those speeches, in full view of the American public and foreign governments, would be enough to torpedo an administration before Trump. But the day was not over.
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American | Read more:
[ed. The quotes say it all. See also: The Silence of the Generals; Doing Vlad's Business; and Collateral Damage: All from the same link:]
***
This Washington Post investigation into some of the human costs of the murder of USAID will take your breath away:Fever ravaged the body of 5-year-old Suza Kenyaba as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two-room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pigtailed girl who liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life.Pure cruelty. Pure waste. We’ve repeatedly written this year about the staggering damage done by DOGE’s clownishly arrogant annihilation of USAID: children starving to death in war zones while already-purchased food aid rotted on shelves because the people in charge of distributing it had been fired; babies dying of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa because Elon Musk’s crack team of geniuses decided treating them for pennies a day was too much bother—or, what might be worse, just callously turned off their spigot of money without bothering to figure out what it was for. The toll is unimaginable. We owe it to the dead to remember. We owe it to their loved ones to fix it.
That medication, already purchased by a U.S.-taxpayer-funded program, was tantalizingly close—a little more than seven miles away. But it hadn’t reached the clinic where Suza was being treated because President Donald Trump’s suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos.
The injections Suza needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USAID and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.
Less than a week after her symptoms began, Suza was dead. Congolese government data shows that in Suza’s province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year.
Unreasonable
The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don’t quite work are the glory of the process, a form of inquiry through which you catch sight of your errors and then reconsider, revise, or dispose of your categories. My father’s fairy-tale pronouncement was many years ago now. I have only two daughters: an industrious, loving, and optimistic twenty-one-year-old and a funny, joyful, and resilient ten-year-old. Maybe I have a third daughter: my work. (...)
The head of the lab, Bogdan, moved here from Serbia a quarter century ago. He grows peppers in tomato tins on his office windowsill, and he has gathered us to discuss what he has termed the current macro-environment. It has been decreed, he tells us, that we must turn away three of the five Ph.D. candidates we’ve accepted. The federal funding for the Bee Diversity and Native Pollinator Surveys has been cancelled, though there is still state-level funding. The funding for the Sub-Saharan Pollinator Project is frozen, not cancelled, but it is unlikely to be unfrozen in time for us to make use of the hundred-and-seventy-seven bee boxes currently in the field, in anticipation of the late spring and summer. The project on the diversity and frequency of pathogens in wild solitary bees—which is funded mostly through the Department of Agriculture—is also on hold, even though hundreds of the bees in question have already been tagged with tiny radio trackers. Bogdan has made an emergency application to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but—he throws up his hands. What do people think?
The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.
That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.
Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.
When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.
So that explains it.
These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction. (...)
When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.
Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.
When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.
My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.
I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.
It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.
The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.
Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.
You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. (...)
After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.
The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?
It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability. (...)
When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.
You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.
That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.
Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.
He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.
The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.
Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.
O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.
by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.
That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.
Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.
When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.
So that explains it.
These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction. (...)
When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.
Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.
When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.
My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.
I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.
It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.
The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.
Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.
You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. (...)
After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.
The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?
It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability. (...)
When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.
You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.
That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.
Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.
He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.
The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.
Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.
O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.
by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Stephen Doyle
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