Nothing could be bought any more with a penny, not even penny candy. Moreover, the cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin.
The final pennies were minted on Wednesday afternoon in Philadelphia. Top Treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded
In its heyday, the penny had immense cultural impact. It was the going rate for thoughts. It was a symbol of frugality, saved and/or earned. It could sometimes be pretty and other times arrive from heaven. And how many ideas would never have come to light without a penny dropping?
When picked up, it was said to bring good luck for a 24-hour period, an assertion commonly made, but one that was never proven by any scientific double-blind studies.
On the darker side, a penny could undoubtedly be bad, especially when turning up. (...)
The American penny was born in 1793 in Philadelphia. Its parent was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, who was the chief author of the Coinage Act, which birthed the penny and its siblings.
The penny went through several reinventions. At birth, it depicted Lady Liberty. In 1909, Abraham Lincoln took over the front for the rest of its life.
The reverse of the coin was where it showed more variety, with a 15-link chain, a wreath, wheat stalks and the Lincoln Memorial all getting moments. In 2009, the variations increased, with a log cabin and other designs. Most recently it depicted a Union shield.
The penny was at first strictly a copper coin. In 1943, because of hunger for copper for the war effort, it changed for a year into zinc-coated steel. Starting in 1982, and until its death, the penny, so associated with its copper color, was in fact 97.5 percent zinc and merely 2.5 percent copper plating.
As the penny entered its long decline, it more and more frequently found itself casually tossed into a jar in someone’s home or ignominiously dropped in a “Take a Penny” tray at retailers. Calls grew for it to be euthanized, citing its obsolescence. In the end, President Trump signed its death warrant in February.
Even after death, the penny will not vanish for a while longer. There are some 250 billion pennies in circulation and they will be out there, gathering dust, or maybe, very, very rarely, being used to help pay for something. As the last pennies slowly disappear, businesses will have no choice but to round transactions to the nearest nickel when dealing with cash.
With the penny’s demise, coin enthusiasts’ worried eyes now turn toward its longtime associate, the nickel. Its purchasing power has also shrunk to nearly nothing, and it costs more than a dime to make.
The government’s plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism.
A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.
It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as “high”, “medium” or “low” impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to “influence councillors”.
Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.
For £45-a-time, they are offering the tool to people who, like them, could not afford a specialist lawyer to help navigate labyrinthine planning laws. They said it would help “everyone have a voice, to level the playing field and make the whole process fairer”. (...)
Hannah George, a co-founder of Objector, denied the platform was about automating nimbyism.
“It’s just about making the planning system fair,” she said. “At the moment, from our experience, it’s not. And with the government on this ‘build, baby, build’ mission, we see that only going one way.”
Objector has said while AI-created errors are a concern, it uses two different AI models and cross-checks the results in an effort to reduce the risk of “hallucinations” – a term used to describe when AIs make things up.
The current Objector system is designed to tackle small planning applications, for example, repurposing a local office building or a neighbour’s home extension. A capability to challenge much larger applications, such as a housing estate on greenbelt land, is in development, said George.
The Labour government has been promoting AI as one solution to clearing planning backlogs. It recently launched a tool called Extract, which aims to speed up planning processes and help the government carry out its mission to build 1.5m new homes.
But there may be an AI “arms race” developing, said John Myers, the director of the Yimby Alliance, a campaign calling for more homes to be built with the support of local communities.
“This will turbocharge objections to planning applications and will lead to people finding obscure reasons [for opposing developments] that they have not found before,” he said.
A new dynamic could emerge “where one side tries to deploy AI to accelerate the process, and the other side deploys AI to stop it,” he said. “I don’t see an end to that until we find a way to bring forward developments people want.” (...)
Paul Smith, the managing director of Strategic Land Group, a consultancy, this month reported on the rising use of AI by people to oppose planning applications.
“AI objections undermine the whole rationale for public consultation,” he wrote in Building magazine. “Local communities, we are told, know their areas best … So, we should ask them what they think.
“But if all local residents are doing is deciding they don’t like the scheme before uploading the application documents to a computer to find out why they don’t like it, is there really any point in asking them at all?”
by Aisha Down and Robert Booth, The Guardian | Read more:
Ken Parker, an iconoclastic guitar maker who upended entrenched luthier traditions by producing hyper-engineered, flyweight guitars seemingly designed for an art gallery, if not the 23rd century, died on Oct. 5 at his home in Gloucester, Mass. He was 73. (...)
In 1993, Mr. Parker founded Parker Guitars in Wilmington, Mass., with Larry Fishman, who oversaw the management of the company and the electronics of the guitars. Mr. Parker leveraged his extensive experience in woodworking and guitar repair, along with his maverick streak, to build groundbreaking guitars that went on to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Which is not to say he thought of guitars as art objects. “I’m a toolmaker,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 profile in The New Yorker. “I make tools for musicians.”
In Mr. Parker’s view, guitar innovation stalled after the debut in the 1950s of hallowed models like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul — guitars that Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and countless others used to amplify a generation. His goal was to bundle together all available advances in technology and materials and build a guitar for a new age.
“I didn’t feel like I had some secret broth that I could smear on a Strat,” Mr. Parker said in 2023 interview with the music site Reverb. “That’s like trying to improve on a smile,” he added. “I mean, what do you do? It’s already developed.”
His alternative was the Parker Fly, a head-turning guitar that relied heavily on composite materials and looked like a prop from “Flash Gordon.”
Priced at around $2,000, the Fly was never a big seller, but it did find admirers among an array of notable musicians including Joni Mitchell, Adrian Belew and Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails once said he recorded about 80 percent of the guitar parts for the band’s platinum-selling 1999 album, “The Fragile,” on a Parker Fly.
In practical terms, the Fly lived up to its name, weighing about five pounds — roughly half of many Les Pauls. Mr. Parker accomplished this in part by shaving away all extraneous material and using lighter woods for the body, like poplar and spruce, instead of traditional hardwoods like ash or mahogany. He then reinforced the back and neck with an thin external skeleton of carbon, fiberglass and epoxy resin for strength.
The Fly also offered an array of tones. Its pickups (devices that translate string motion into an electronic form that gets passed on to an amplifier) could approximate the rich, muscular sound of classic Gibson humbuckers or the shimmer and quack of the single-coil Stratocaster pickups. Its piezo pickups could conjure the airy sounds of an acoustic.
The guitar featured a composite fingerboard with glued-on, wear-resistant stainless steel frets, locking tuners and a strikingly angular cutaway headstock that reduced weight and helped its overall balance. The Fly also had a distinctive flat-spring vibrato system to improve responsiveness over a standard tremolo bar.
And then there were its looks. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. In the Reverb interview, Mr. Parker recalled that Joni Mitchell once told him: “Looks like you found it on a beach. But then it also looks like it came from outer space.” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones asked, “Nice guitar, but why does it have to look like a bleeding assault rifle?”
[ed. Great guitars, and Mr. Parker was a true innovator. They'll always have a prominent place in guitar design history. See also: History of the Parker Fly(Guitar.com).]
When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.
The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital. A new structure of surveillance
The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.
What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.
Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.
SocialNet is a surveillance tool developed by ShadowDragon, giving OSINT (Open-source intelligence) professionals and governments tools to search and collect publicly available information across more than 200 websites, social networks, and online services simultaneously.
According to recent reporting by 404 Media, the tool creates comprehensive profiles of individuals by aggregating their digital footprints across various platforms, enabling analysts to map connections, track activities, and visualize relationships between people of interest. Which Platforms Are Being Monitored?
The list of monitored platforms is extensive and includes:
Major social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky
Messaging platforms: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord
Content platforms: OnlyFans, JustForFans, TikTok
Payment services: PayPal, Cash App, BuyMeACoffee
Gaming platforms: Roblox, Chess.com
Demographic-specific sites: Black Planet
Special interest networks: FetLife, cigar review sites, hobby forums
After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats saying this is the line—healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first.
Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works.
Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.
Eight Democratic senators voted to end the shutdown last night. The deal they cut? A “guaranteed vote” next month on ACA subsidies that everyone—including Chuck Schumer—knows won’t pass. They traded their only leverage for a promise they know is worthless. They held the line for forty days, then surrendered for nothing.
The base is in open revolt. Gavin Newsom’s response was one word: “Pathetic.” JB Pritzker called it “an empty promise.” AOC reminded everyone that “working people want leaders whose word means something.” Chris Murphy admitted plainly: “There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight.”
And Ro Khanna did what needed doing: he called for Schumer’s removal as Senate minority leader.
This isn’t just fury at a bad deal. This is recognition that the Democratic establishment is operating within a dead framework that keeps producing the same result: managed decline wrapped in sophisticated justifications.
Schumer’s calculation was pure technocratic management. The shutdown polls badly. Healthcare polls well. Get a vote scheduled, minimize political damage, trust that Republicans will take the blame when premiums skyrocket. Classic establishment thinking: read the focus groups, calculate the risk, optimize for damage control.
What he cannot see—what the framework literally prevents him from seeing—is that the fight itself mattered more than any deal. That people weren’t asking for better negotiating tactics. They were asking for proof that Democrats would hold the line on something. Anything. After Chicago. After ICE raids. After warrantless mass detentions. After watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints.
This was the test. Forty days to prove Democrats could fight power instead of accommodating it. And Schumer folded.
Symone Sanders got it immediately: “The hostage taking worked.” That’s the lesson Trump learned last night. That’s why Chris Murphy is right to fear Trump gets stronger, not weaker. When you teach authoritarians that threatening to hurt people produces Democratic capitulation, you haven’t minimized damage—you’ve guaranteed more hostage situations.
The establishment will produce sophisticated analysis explaining why this was actually strategic. They’ll point to the guaranteed vote, the federal worker protections, the political positioning for next month. They’ll treat this as a temporary setback in normal political competition.
But this isn’t normal political competition. This is one side attempting regime change while the other pretends it’s just another negotiation requiring careful positioning.
The base understands what Schumer cannot: you cannot manage your way out of authoritarian consolidation. You cannot focus-group your way to resistance. You cannot optimize yourself into fighting power when your entire framework is built on accommodating it.
The governors get it. Newsom fighting homeowner cartels in California. Pritzker calling out empty promises. They’re not waiting for Senate leadership to figure out what time it is. They’re building the alternative: liberal populism that actually fights concentrated power instead of explaining why fighting is unstrategic.
The progressive caucus gets it. AOC reminding everyone that people’s lives depend on Democrats keeping their word. Khanna calling for new leadership. James Talarico declaring “this moment demands fighters, not folders.”
Even establishment voices like Murphy understand something fundamental broke last night. When your own senator has to record a video saying “there’s no way to sugarcoat this” and “I’m angry—like you”—that’s not spin control. That’s recognition that the base has decided the framework is dead.
Forty days was long enough to prove Democrats could fight. Long enough to make Trump pay a political price for hostage-taking. Long enough to show working people that their leaders’ word means something.
Chuck Schumer surrendered all of that for a vote next month that won’t pass.
Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece. (...)
President Donald J. Trump did not want the shutdown to end this way. He was trying to use the pain he was inflicting on the American people to force Republican senators to end the filibuster and pass a series of measures that would essentially have made him a dictator. The Republican senators were clear they didn’t want to do that. And now, they haven’t. They chose a way out of the shutdown fight that did not support Trump’s ambitions. After nine months in which they appeared to do his bidding, that’s an interesting development.
Trump does not appear to be giving up his position on hurting the country easily. Late last night, three judges from the First Circuit refused to stop the lower court order saying that the administration must pay SNAP benefits in full, and today, the administration went back to the Supreme Court to ask it to freeze those payments.
Trump also posted an attack on air traffic controllers, saying to those who took time off during the shutdown “I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job….” In fact, the country has a shortage of air traffic controllers.
[ed. Bat Poop Coffee? See also: World's most expensive coffee goes on sale in Dubai at $1,000 a cup. Selling for nearly $1,000 a cup, a cafe in Dubai is offering the world's most expensive coffee, brewed from Panamanian beans sold at a premium price. via.]
Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.
On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.
Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.
The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.
The details of Meta’s confidential self-appraisal are drawn from documents created between 2021 and this year across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. Together, they reflect Meta’s efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms – and the company’s hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests.
Meta’s acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions.
“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.
If we can get their cost down to $10, this becomes one of the most cost-effective ways of preventing respiratory transmission. The shelf life is 20 years. That means basically 50 cents per person per year of protection. …
If you’re a government it makes a lot of sense to just stockpile enough to cover your entire population. Right now we spend about $10 billion a year on missile defence. Stockpiling one of these for every single person in the US would be 1% the cost of that.
— Andrew Snyder-Beattie
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.
Andrew’s job at Open Philanthropy is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect as much of humanity as possible in the worst-case scenarios — those with fatality rates near 100% and the collapse of technological civilisation a live possibility.
As Andrew lays out, there are several ways this could happen, including:
A national bioweapons programme gone wrong (most notably Russia or North Korea’s)
AI advances making it easier for terrorists or a rogue AI to release highly engineered pathogens
Mirror bacteria that can evade the immune systems of not only humans, but many animals and potentially plants as well
Most efforts to combat these extreme biorisks have focused on either prevention or new high-tech countermeasures. But prevention may well fail, and high-tech approaches can’t scale to protect billions when, with no sane person willing to leave their home, we’re just weeks from economic collapse.
So Andrew and his biosecurity research team at Open Philanthropy have been seeking an alternative approach. They’re now proposing a four-stage plan using simple technology that could save most people, and is cheap enough it can be prepared without government support. (...)
The approach exploits tiny organisms having no way to penetrate physical barriers or shield themselves from UV, heat, or chemical poisons.
We now know how to make highly effective ‘elastomeric’ face masks that cost $10, can sit in storage for 20 years, and can be used for six months straight without changing the filter. Any rich country could trivially stockpile enough to cover all essential workers.
People can’t wear masks 24/7, but fortunately propylene glycol — already found in vapes and smoke machines — is astonishingly good at killing microbes in the air. And, being a common chemical input, industry already produces enough of the stuff to cover every indoor space we need at all times.
Add to this the wastewater monitoring and metagenomic sequencing that will detect the most dangerous pathogens before they have a chance to wreak havoc, and we might just buy ourselves enough time to develop the cure we’ll need to come out alive.
Has everyone been wrong, and biology is actually defence dominant rather than offence dominant? Is this plan crazy — or so crazy it just might work?
That’s what host Rob Wiblin and Andrew Snyder-Beattie explore in this in-depth conversation. (...)
However, he argues that a concrete, largely low-tech “four pillars” strategy could dramatically reduce this risk by buying us the time needed to survive even the worst-case scenarios.
1. Two primary classes of biological threats could pose an existential risk
Engineered pathogens are a growing concern. The historical Soviet bioweapons programme — which employed tens of thousands of scientists to create threats like smallpox-Ebola chimeras and antibiotic-resistant plague — demonstrates the potential scale. With 40 years of technological progress and the rise of AI, the creation of even more dangerous pathogens has become easier.
Mirror life represents a novel catastrophic risk. All life on Earth uses molecules with a specific “handedness” (e.g., right-handed DNA). If a “mirror-image” bacterium were created with the opposite handedness, our immune systems — and those of nearly all other organisms — would be unable to recognise or fight it. It could become pervasive in the environment, akin to living without an immune system. Andrew estimates a >10% chance of catastrophe if one were released.
2. The “four pillars” plan offers a robust, defence-in-depth strategy
Andrew’s team has developed a plan focused on physical, scalable, and pathogen-agnostic defences to protect society while medical solutions are developed.
Pillar 1: Personal protective equipment (PPE)
The core idea is to stockpile elastomeric respirators, which are vastly superior to N95s. They have a 20-year shelf life, provide a protection factor of 100 (or 10,000 when two people interact), and can be reused for months.
The cost could be driven down to $5–10 per mask, making it “outrageously cost effective” to protect entire populations for about 50 cents per person per year. A philanthropic effort could realistically stockpile enough for all essential workers.
Pillar 2: Biohardening buildings
To create safe indoor spaces, we can use simple, scalable technologies that are already widely available. Propylene glycol vapour (the same chemical used in fog machines and vapes) is extremely safe for humans but deadly to airborne pathogens, disrupting their membranes. The US already produces enough to cover all industrial and much residential floorspace.
For surfaces, common disinfectants like ethanol and hypochlorous acid (which can be made at home with salt, water, and electricity) are sufficient.
In extreme scenarios, homes could be turned into improvised clean rooms using positive air pressure generated by common appliances like furnace fans or leaf blowers pushing air through HEPA filters made from materials like household insulation.
[ed. More....]
by Robert Wiblin and Andrew Snyder-Beattie, 8000 Hours | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. Who knew? Bacteria have left and right-handed versions: Mirror Bacteria]
The worst-case scenario: mirror bacteria
Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Many molecules on Earth can exist in one of two forms: a left-handed version and a right-handed version. A common example of this is sugar: glucose can exist in the right-handed version — that’s the version that we eat — as well as a left-handed version that you cannot digest, which is pretty interesting. These two molecules are identical if you put them in a mirror.
So it’s similar to your hands. Your hands in some sense are identical, but they are mirror images of one another. There are lots of properties where it’s the exact same and there are lots of properties where they’re different. For example, you can’t put a left-handed glove on a right hand.
What’s interesting is that many of the molecules in your body — and in fact all of the big, most important molecules — have this chiral property. So if you imagine a strand of DNA, all the little As, Ts, Cs, and Gs use the right-handed version. And all of the proteins in your body, like the bigger molecules that comprise the bigger machines, all use the left-handed version.
So if you’re a scientist in a laboratory, in the same way that you can create the mirror image version of sugar, you can also create the mirror image version of those little As, Ts, Cs, and Gs. And if you put the mirror image version of those little As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, you can create a mirror-image DNA strand that spins in the opposite direction, and it looks like the mirror image of regular DNA.
One interesting thing is that this is not just true of human biology; this is true of basically all life on Earth: bacteria, humans, plants, everything. All animals use right-handed DNA, left-handed proteins.
So a lot of scientists were thinking, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could create the mirror-image version of not just DNA or proteins, but an entire mirror-image version of a bacteria, like a whole mirror image organism?” There were a number of labs that were looking into this as a possible exciting project. The NSF even funded about a $4 million grant to look into this.
But there’s a major problem with this: your immune system has been trained on molecules that it recognises. And if you flip that molecule to the mirror-image version, your immune system is not going to be able to detect or break down those molecules. What that means is that if this bacteria were to get into your lungs or get into your bloodstream, there is a decent chance that it would grow on achiral nutrients and it would cause a lethal infection.
Now, you might then be asking, “There are plenty of bacteria that cause lethal infections. What makes this so bad?” The reason that this is bad is because it’s not just true of human immune systems; most immune systems on the planet have been trained on a certain chirality. So this would not just potentially infect and kill humans; it would potentially infect and kill many species of animals, possibly even species of plants. Plant immune systems work in a very similar way.
What that means is that this could be very persistent in the environment. It could be kind of pervasive. This would be a lot less like a human-to-human pandemic, but it would be something that is persisting in the soil, persisting in the environment. If there’s a tree that’s infected outside of your house and the wind blows in, then that would potentially infect you.
So it would be much more akin to living without an immune system. And people that have genetic diseases that have certain receptors broken typically die in childhood. It’s a very nasty disease. This would be like the whole world ending up in that situation.
Friday, November 7, 2025
Mark Grantham(Canadian, born 1966), "In the Rain", n.d. via:
[ed. Traveling for the next few days so posts are likely to be infrequent.]
It’s easier to blame the algorithm than the bewildered herd.
One of our era’s most influential narratives is that social media is destroying democracy and perhaps civilisation itself. For the liberal establishment, this story helps to explain the surging success of right-wing populism, as well as collapsing institutional trust, growing polarisation, and an apparent explosion of misinformation and deranged conspiracy theories.
The standard formulation of this narrative treats social media as a dysfunctional technology. Because algorithms and other platform features are designed to capture people’s attention and keep them scrolling, they amplify content that is sensationalist, bias-confirming, and divisive. This viral content then infects public opinion and political debate, driving large numbers of people to adopt misinformed and hateful ideas hostile to liberal democracy. (...)
I will outline a different and more uncomfortable view: Social media’s democratising nature is the most critical factor in understanding its political effects, including its negative ones. It is precisely because social media has democratised the public sphere that it has contributed to trends liberals (including myself) are so worried about.
***
In some ways, this analysis aligns with Brian Klaas’s excellent article, “The Democratization of Information Production is Killing Democracy.” However, Klaas’s argument focuses on how media fragmentation and engagement-maximising algorithms increase the production and consumption of “bad” information, which dupes voters into supporting Trump and other populists.
The story that I find plausible is different. For the most part, social media doesn’t manipulate “good” people into accepting “bad” information. It simply reveals popular perspectives on reality that elites previously excluded from mainstream discourse, often for good reason. It is this public revelation and normalisation of popular ideas that explain social media’s most dramatic and dangerous impacts, including its connection to right-wing populism.
The Case for Democratic Pessimism
“Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The quote expresses a pessimistic view about democracy that is politically incorrect these days, but it was the norm among elites and intellectuals throughout most of history.
Although part of this hostility to democracy was undoubtedly self-serving, it was also driven by the recognition that democracy is absurd on its face. A political system that gives everyone an equal say conflicts with the reality that not everyone has equally valuable things to say. People differ in their wisdom and virtue. A large number of people possess neither of these traits.
Such differences are especially salient in politics, where it’s been known for a long time that most voters are shockingly ignorant and misinformed, with many approaching politics more in the manner of sports hooligans and religious fanatics than the rational deliberators of liberal fantasies.
One reason for this is that politics brings out the worst in us. People are typically fairly rational when it comes to issues of immediate practical importance. But modern politics involves distant, abstract, and complex issues. It is challenging to form accurate opinions in most cases, and there are few incentives to do so. Given this, many people treat politics symbolically, embracing facile slogan-based worldviews that resonate with pre-scientific intuitions and help them signal their tribal allegiances and demonise people they dislike.
“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”
Lippmann’s “Mental Barbarians"
For these reasons and more, the prophetic journalist Walter Lippmann published two highly influential critiques of democracy in the early twentieth century, first in Public Opinion (1922) and then in The Phantom Public (1925). Although Lippmann was a liberal and progressive, he argued that for liberal societies and progressive policies to succeed, “the public must be put in its place [...] so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”
Part of Lippmann’s argument involved a sophisticated analysis of why even intelligent and well-meaning citizens will inevitably form distorted political opinions. But he was also sensitive to the large number of citizens who, for want of a better term, are complete write-offs.
In a passage that is outrageous to modern sensibilities, he observed,
“The mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals, is very considerable… Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians, people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion.”
You don’t have to go quite this far or use this language to acknowledge that there are more than a few grains of truth here. And you can’t understand many pathologies of social media without confronting the fact that its ruthlessly democratising character has given all such people a voice.
The Problems and Positives of Elite Gatekeeping
Elite gatekeeping sounds bad. In many ways, it is bad. The central problem with elitism, including elitist critiques of democracy, is that elites are also human. They might dress up their self-interest, prejudice, and unreason in fancy language, but even the highest-quality punditry and legacy media are biased by propaganda, groupthink, and worse.
These days, right-wing populists draw attention to how much of establishment discourse is subtly and often not-so-subtly biased by progressive (“woke”) values, and they have a point. But this is just one bias among many economic, social, cultural, and political forces that corrupt elite opinion and news media, both today and throughout history.
At the same time, a fair-minded analysis must also acknowledge that elite gatekeeping has many benefits. Outlets like the BBC and the New York Times might subtly select, omit, frame, contextualise, and package reality in misleading ways. But they also typically impose basic standards of professional journalism and exclude many people who have nothing of value to contribute.
Social media welcomes such voices into the conversation. More precisely, platforms that have relaxed “content-moderation” (i.e., elite-gatekeeping) policies do. The result? Deranged conspiracy theories about Jews, medieval discourse about demons and occult forces, the most hyperbolic forms of bigotry imaginable, and countless other popular ideas that were previously excluded from mainstream discourse. More concretely: some of the biggest stars of the social media age, including Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, and Tommy Robinson.
When highly educated, liberal professionals encounter such content on social media platforms, they often assume that there must be something dysfunctional about the platforms. As Francis Fukuyama puts it,
“There is an internal dynamic to online posting that explains the rise of extremist views and materials. Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.”
There is a grain of truth here, but also wishful thinking. The more fundamental reason social media features a vast amount of unsober, unreflective, uninformative, and injudicious content is that it gives a platform to large numbers of shockingly unsober, unreflective, uninformed, and injudicious people who were previously excluded from mainstream discourse.
by Dan Williams, Conspicuous Cognition | Read more:
On September 11, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into seven tech companies that make AI chatbot companion products, including Meta, OpenAI, and Character AI, over concerns that AI chatbots may prompt users, “especially children and teens,” to trust them and form unhealthy dependencies.
Four days later, China published its AI Safety Governance Framework 2.0, explicitly listing “addiction and dependence on anthropomorphized interaction (拟人化交互的沉迷依赖)” among its top ethical risks, even above concerns about AI loss of control. Interestingly, directly following the addiction risk is the risk of “challenging existing social order (挑战现行社会秩序),” including traditional “views on childbirth (生育观).”
What makes AI chatbot interaction so concerning? Why is the U.S. more worried about child interaction, whereas the Chinese government views AI companions as a threat to family-making and childbearing? The answer lies in how different societies build different types of AI companions, which then create distinct societal risks. Drawing from an original market scan of 110 global AI companion platforms and analysis of China’s domestic market, I explore here shows how similar AI technologies produce vastly different companion experiences—American AI girlfriends versus Chinese AI boyfriends—when shaped by cultural values, regulatory frameworks, and geopolitical tensions.
Sexy AI girlfriends: Made in America, for the world
In my team’s recent market scan of the 110 most popular AI companion platforms as of April 2025, we turned Similarweb and Sensor Tower upside down to gather data on traffic, company profiles, and user demographics. At the expense of one teammate developing an Excel sheet allergy and the shared trauma of viewing many NSFW images, we discovered that American AI girlfriends rule the roost in the global market for romantic AI companions: Over half (52%) of these AI companion companies are headquartered in the U.S., drastically ahead of China (10%) in the global market.1 These products are overwhelmingly designed around heterosexual male fantasies: another similar market report this year shows that 17% of all the active apps have “girlfriends” in names, compared to 4% of those with “boyfriends.”
We estimated that dating-themed AI chatbots, designed specifically for romantic or sexual bonding, capture roughly 29 million monthly active users (MAU) and 88 million monthly visits globally across platforms. For comparison, Bluesky has 23.2 million total users and 75.8 million monthly visits as of early 2025. And our estimation is very conservative: We did not count the traffic of platforms containing other kinds of companionships, such as Character AI, which offers AI tutors, pets, and friends, though we think many people go there to use AI boy/girlfriends. We did not count AI companion app downloads, which have reached 220 million since 2022. Nor did we include parasocial engagement with general-purpose AI like GPT-4o, which some people apparently have also fallen in love with.
Behind the explosive popularity of AI companions are two main engagement models. On one side are community-oriented platforms like Fam AI, where users create and share AI companions, such as customizable “girlfriends” in anime or photorealistic styles. These platforms thrive on user-generated content, offering adjustable body types, personalities, and voice/video modes to deepen connections. Users can create new AI characters with just a few paragraphs instructing the model how to act, similar to personalizing a copy of ChatGPT. Many of these platforms use affiliate programs — for example, craveu.ai pays users $120–180 for creating high-engagement characters. The abundance of options and the competition for attention encourage users to frequently switch between different AI companions, creating more transient digital relationships.
In contrast, product-oriented platforms like Replika offer a single evolving AI partners with deeper and longer emotional ties. On Replika’s subreddit, many users report using Replika for years, and some seriously consider themselves “bonded” and “married” to their Replika partner. People also grieve for the loss of their Replika when they sense a subtle personality change and suspect the system behind had reset their chatbots.
A Reddit user sharing her grief when she sensed a personality change in her Replika.
Despite differences in engagement style, both models seek to capitalize on sexuality to attract and retain users. The monetization of sexuality is done mainly through “freemium” models, offering a few free basic functions while charging for advanced features or additional services. Among the top ten most-visited AI companion platforms in our scan, 8 opt for freemium models, with only one currently free and one choosing advertising and in-app currency. Premium accounts typically offer unrestricted interaction and access to unblurred explicit images. They also allow the user to have longer conversations and improve memory capacity for previous conversations. Many mating companion platforms promote explicit ‘NSFW’ (not safe for work) companions, images, and roleplay features as part of the premium features.
Dynamic AI boyfriends: Made in China, for China
On the other side of the Great Firewall, AI is also probing the emotional boundaries of humans. While the underlying LLMs may not differ drastically from their English-speaking counterparts, the fictional worlds and characters that users build around them are strikingly distinct.
One of the most notable contrasts lies in gender dynamics. In the Chinese AI companion market, male characters dominate: most trending products are marketed as AI boyfriends, and leading platforms prominently feature male characters on their main displays, while female characters occupy a more marginal space.
Main website page for Xingye
But looks are not everything that makes humans appealing–the same holds for AI characters. While many platforms still follow the community-oriented model where users create and share AI characters, apps like MiniMax’s Xingye (星野), Tencent-backed Zhumeng Dao (Dream-Building Island 筑梦岛), and Duxiang (独响), built by a startup, go beyond the basics. In addition to customizing AI companions’ personalities, users can generate themes, plots, and side stories, deepening immersion for themselves and others. Conversations are no longer limited to 1:1 exchanges: users can participate in group chats with multiple AI companions (1:N), and AI characters may even send messages to users when they are not using the app, similar to app notifications.
These AI companion products also draw insights from existing popular gaming cultures in China, such as card-drawing games that already have million-dollar markets. For example, Xingye allows users to generate 18 cartoon cards for one fictional character, adapting Japan’s popular gacha game mechanics and trading card culture for AI companions. In gacha games, players pay to randomly draw digital cards or characters, with rare editions commanding premium value. Chinese livestreamers have imported this model, streaming card draws on social media while viewers pay to test their luck for limited-edition collectibles tied to major intellectual properties. Similar to gacha games, AI-generated cards add an element of mystery and excitement when revealed. Users can also create and trade AI character photos on the platform, mimicking real-world card-collecting transactions. (...)
Users: Who is longing for AI’s love?
Young men. This is the most common user base for English-speaking AI companion products, according to our market scan. SimilarWeb data shows the top 55 AI companion platforms globally attract predominantly male users (7:3 ratio), with 18-24-year-olds representing the largest demographic at an even more skewed 8:2 male-to-female ratio. Social media metrics again reinforce this gender pattern, with Reddit’s AI girlfriend community (r/AIGirlfriend) having 44k members compared to fewer than 100 in male-focused AI companion subreddits. Moreover, roughly one-third of the children falsely declared a social media age of 18+, so it is possible that a significant portion of the reported 18-24 users are underage.
A recent Reuters-covered report from an AI girlfriend platform further supports our findings: 50% of young men prefer dating AI partners due to fear of rejection, and 31% of U.S. men aged 18–30 already chat with AI girlfriends. Behind the fear of human rejection lies the manosphere. The “manosphere” is a network of online forums, influencers, and subcultures centered on men’s issues, which has become increasingly popular among young men and boys as their go-to place for advice on approaching intimacy. While the manosphere originated primarily in Western contexts, its discourses have increasingly spread to, and been adapted within, countries across Africa and Asia through social media. In these online spaces, frustrations over dating and shifting gender norms are common, often coupled with narratives portraying women as unreliable or rejecting. AI companions offer a controllable, judgment-free alternative to real-life relationships, aligning with manosphere ideals of feminine compliance and emotional availability. On the subreddit r/MensRights (374k members), users largely endorse the findings of the Reuters report and even celebrate the shift from human to AI relationships.
The desire for a controllable relationship is further illustrated through the many Japanese aesthetics and anime-inspired avatars on AI companion platforms. Even Grok’s Ani bears striking similarity to Misa Amane from the 2006 anime Death Note. These designs often present highly idealized forms of femininity, historically marketed to heterosexual male audiences. In Western contexts, anime-inspired aesthetics intersect with techno-orientalist fantasies, reinforcing the image of East Asia as a hyper-technological land and East Asian femininity as exotic, compliant, and unthreatening. This imagination extends to hypersexualized representations of AI and robots in East Asian forms. The orientalist fantasy of female partners who are cute, devoted, exotic, and endlessly available mirrors the appeal of AI girlfriends celebrated on many “men’s rights” subreddit forums. In essence, the combination of East Asian aesthetics + AI creates a perfect bundle for men who fear rejection or resist the demands of real-life relationships.
Why are adult women believed to be the main drivers of AI companionship? To answer this, we need to understand three trends: 1. Marriage rates have continued to fall to record lows, with 2024 experiencing a 20% decrease from 2023; 2. There are more males than females in China (1.045:1 in 2024, compared to 0.97:1 in the US); 3. There are millions of unmarried rural Chinese men, while their female peers get better education and move to the city. This has created a social landscape in which many unmarried people are unmarried educated women in the city and less-educated men, with fewer pathways for forming traditional romantic bonds.
While the two groups are both arguably longing for relationships, unmarried, educated women in cities are more likely to encounter and adopt new technologies like AI companionship. In contrast, less-educated rural men, despite also similarly longing for relationships, have fewer resources, less exposure to AI, and limited familiarity with parasocial interactions, making AI companions less immediately appealing. Influenced by the strong patriarchal culture in rural areas, most men prioritize finding a real-life partner to marry, have children, and continue the family line.
The gender imbalance, combined with growing resistance in China to traditional patriarchal family structures — driven by concerns over rising domestic abuse or feminist ideals — has led many urban, educated women to seek parasocial forms of romance. AI companions are not the first ones to profit from this demand. Originating in Japan, otome games (乙女ゲーム in Japanese or 乙女游戏/乙游 in Chinese) are storyline-based romance games targeted at women, where players interact with multiple fictional male characters through plots and events.
That said, demand and supply are a classic chicken-and-egg problem. While trends in AI boyfriends or girlfriends suggest some gendered differences in interest, these preferences are also shaped by what products are available. Historically, women’s sexual desires have often been overlooked, and men’s longing for subtle companionship is sometimes dismissed as “too feminine,” which could also explain the scarcity of hypersexual AI boyfriends and dynamic AI girlfriends. Thus, the two different markets may reflect not only inherent differences in demand but also the constraints and biases of what’s offered.
by Zilan Qian, China Talk | Read more: Images:Luvy.ai’s creation page; nsfwlover.com; Xingye
It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed.
Now, you’re probably raising your eyebrows at this claim. Everywhere you look, there are personal trainers, fitness influencers, nutritionists, and even exercise scientists with conflicting information. Go to any gym, and you’ll see different people doing wildly different exercise routines. Surely, that implies building muscle is a complicated subject? Well, no. For 2 reasons:
1. The fitness industry thrives on misinformation, because all the money is made in selling supplements, accessories, and ‘personal training expertise’ that have no scientific legitimacy
2. Most people are cognitive misers who actively avoid mentally demanding tasks and refuse to read anything academic
The result is a very large proportion of fitness enthusiasts have essentially no idea what they’re doing, and even the somewhat knowledgeable ones are still full of misinformation. So, how do we cut through the noise?
Getting Jacked
Think of getting jacked as something like this formula:
GettingJacked = Time * (0.6x + 0.3y + 0.1z)
X is your adherence to primary concepts, y is your adherence to secondary concepts, and z is your adherence to tertiary concepts. Primary and secondary concepts are a collection of just a handful of relatively simple ideas that require little financial investment. If you just focused on these, you would find getting jacked to be relatively straightforward. But tertiary concepts, predominantly supplements, are innumerable, complex, and require tons of money.
The entire fitness industry is built around obfuscation such that the tertiary concepts can be promoted and sold. And it works wonderfully for making money- but terribly for our motivation to actually get into the gym and train properly.
The paradox of choice is a concept introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz which suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decision. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more cognitive effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.
The sheer amount of conflicting information out there certainly makes it difficult to know who to listen to, but it also actively discourages people from getting into fitness at all. And even if you were able to expertly navigate this whole industry of tertiary concepts to find the absolute optimal program, that would still represent just 10% of your results! Nearly everyone should be ignoring Z entirely and instead focusing their efforts on the simple stuff in X and Y.
But what is this simple stuff, you might be wondering? Fortunately, unlike in decades past, we no longer have to rely on the ‘bro-science’ of anecdotes and dubiously extrapolated study conclusions. On the contrary, in the age of information we now have robust research data on what actually matters for getting jacked.
Primary Concepts (60% of Results)
1. Progressive Overload
The most important concept is progressive overloading, which is simply increasing your weight resistance over time as your body adapts. Muscle growth is a continuous cycle: the body adapts to a given stress, and to continue improving, that stress (e.g., weight, reps, sets) must be gradually increased, forcing the body to adapt again. No matter what exercises you’re doing, or for how long, or with what intensity, the most important thing is that you need to constantly be increasing the challenge. Going to the gym every week for 3 years curling the same 20lb dumbbell isn’t going to do anything. But if you’re curling 30lb at the end of year 1, 40lb at the end of year 2, and 50lb at the end of year 3, guess what- you’re getting jacked.
2. Train to Failure (1 RIR)
You also need to be really pushing yourself hard in the gym, because it’s specifically the last few reps right before your muscles fail that seem to drive results. Modern studies have consistently shown that training to 1 rep-in-reserve (RIR)- continuing a set until you have only enough strength left to complete 1 more final rep- maximizes strength gains and muscular hypertrophy while limiting risk of injury. Basically, keep lifting until you have doubts about whether or not you can complete another rep. If you can squat 100lb for 10 reps, for 3 sets in a row, then that first set was almost certainly not being trained to 1 RIR. What those 3 sets should look like is something like 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps- despite you giving it maximum effort on every set. This indicates that you were indeed pushing yourself close to failure and fatiguing yourself in the process.
3. Consume Sufficient Protein
It’s a trope that gym bros are obsessed with protein, but this is for good reason. Muscle growth cannot occur without sufficient protein. And relatively high amounts of protein are required in order to optimize muscle growth. Studies suggest increasing protein has a significant impact on muscle growth up to about 1.6-2.2g/kg (0.7-1g/lb) of body weight with substantially diminishing returns after that. The International Society of Sports Nutrition currently suggests consuming a slightly lower range of 1.4-2.0 g/kg. In other words, if you’re hitting anywhere close to 1g/lb of body weight of daily protein, you’re getting the full benefits. It doesn’t matter much where the protein comes from, though great sources include grilled chicken, Greek yogurt, and protein powder. It also doesn’t matter much how you split this protein up throughout the day, though there is some evidence that protein intake of no more than 40g per meal is optimal. But, in general, just focus on hitting the absolute numbers and the rest will follow.
4. Abs are made in the gym, and revealed in the kitchen
The final basic concept is that nobody can admire your muscle if you’re fat.9 Building muscle mass is step 1, but step 2 is cutting down to a low enough body fat to reveal that muscle. Overall appearance even at the same leanness can vary depending on individual skeletal structure, body fat distribution, and muscle mass- but nonetheless this is what fairly muscular men and women look like at various body fat percentages.
The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has the following classifications for body fat %.
Today’s beauty standards for ‘jacked’ tends to fall somewhere around 12% for men and 20% for women- just making it into the ‘athletes’ category. Most amateur fitness enthusiasts dramatically overestimate how lean they actually are. At 12% body fat for men, you should be seeing:
Defined abs visible when flexed, with a noticeable “V-cut” above the hips
Clear separation between muscle groups, such as rear delts to side delts
Increased vascularity with prominent and visible veins on the arms and shoulders
Sharper facial features, particularly noticeable around the jawline
And at 20% body fat for women:
Muscle definition pops when flexed, particularly in shoulders and quads
Flat stomach (but without sharply segmented abs)
Little excess fat, mostly in hips, thighs, and buttocks- with a smaller waist
Sharper facial features, noticeable around the jawline and cheekbones
Secondary Concepts (30% of Results)
If you’re following the above concepts perfectly, it literally does not matter what else you will do- you will get jacked. But if you really want to optimize your routine, here are a few other concepts to consider.
On an August Sunday 35 years ago, I moved into my freshman-year college dorm. My parents, who had traveled with me from Southern California to New England, took me to buy my first winter coat and snow boots, along with a houseplant that the store clerk described as “hard to kill,” and then we made our way to campus. My new roommate invited me to go shopping for Blu Tack so that we could hang posters in our room. I hugged my parents goodbye and headed out.
This was a fairly typical beginning to 1980s college life. Parents waved from the curb, cried in the parking lot, and maybe sent a care package two weeks later. I scheduled weekly calls with my parents for Sunday evenings, phoning from our room’s landline before heading to dinner. The college experience was marked by rupture, the sometimes messy yet necessary transition from dependence to independence.
These days, the break looks different. And in some cases it doesn’t look like a break at all.
A new term has entered the lexicon of college administrators: the trailing parent. These are the mothers and fathers who follow their children to campus—not just metaphorically, with daily texts about grades, outfits, or friendship drama, but physically. They rent an apartment in Atlanta, Austin, or Boston for four years, a pied-à-terre to facilitate frequent visits. They buy a condo in Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles so that their sophomore can have a place to crash—and so that they can drop by their kid’s place with soup when the sniffles arrive. Some parents trail their study-abroad kids across the world, moving for a semester to Florence or Barcelona to be close by “just in case.”
College administrators and other education colleagues in my circle have told me that although such stories used to be noteworthy, they’re now so common as to barely raise an eyebrow. One recalled that the mom of an Ole Miss first-year stayed in the family’s new campus-adjacent apartment last fall to provide logistical and moral support during sorority rush, lending her daughter a hand in fixing hair or nursing a hangover. A Colorado couple whose daughter had a rocky freshman year told the Associated Press that they bought an apartment in Portland, Oregon, and moved there to live with their daughter while she attended college.
The paradigmatic helicopter parent hovered from a distance and in most cases didn’t follow their child to college. The trailing parent touches down. Danielle Lico, who spent two decades working in student affairs at George Washington University, told me about a mom who several years ago rented a downtown-D.C. condo near campus to live with her daughter, whom she even walked to class. “We had to tell the mom that she wasn’t actually permitted to sit next to her kid in class,” Lico said. “She would sit outside of the classroom, and then they would walk back to the apartment together every day for four years.”
Not all college students love having their parents close by. The administrator of a study-abroad program told me about a mom who moved to France for proximity to her daughter. For weeks, the mother phoned the program’s office, asking to arrange a visit. The daughter refused and didn’t return her mother’s calls. Eventually, the mother gave up and flew home to the United States. Reddit is full of similar accounts: One commenter shared an anecdote about a kid who transferred colleges to get away from his parents, after they bought a home next to his campus.
Some colleges appear to be subtly trying to head off parental overengagement. Brie McCormick, who runs residential life at Northeastern University, told the campus publication Northeastern Global News that she encourages families not to let their kids visit home early in the school year. An overseas-study program on whose board I serve asks moms and dads not to visit until the winter holidays, explaining that children need to establish roots in their new country, uninterrupted. Jason Campbell-Foster, the dean of students at Boston University, wrote in a school publication that he urges parents to trust the scaffolding they’ve built, to “have confidence that you’ve chosen a place that cares for your child, that wants them to be successful, and that will give them the space and support that they need to learn from mistakes.” (...)
Every generation finds new ways to parent, and every generation frets about it. Maybe the trailing parent is simply the next logical step in an era when adolescence stretches longer. Or maybe it’s something more worrisome: an inability to let go, to allow children the gift of separation. An important step toward adulthood is the experience of stumbling—sometimes badly—and discovering that you can stand on your own. It might be hard for an undergraduate to develop independence if their parents are constantly available, helping them navigate every crisis. “We would certainly have parents call anytime we did sorority or fraternity rush and somebody didn’t get into the chapter they wanted,” Danielle Lico told me, and parents would hire “high-powered lawyers to get their kids out of trouble.” If a student is in a spat with a roommate or doesn’t get into a class they want to take, that’s a chance for them to learn to cope with conflict and setbacks—which they won’t get to do if they jump to asking for direction from home. (...)
An unspoken message from the trailing parent is: We don’t think you can handle college on your own. A 20-year-old who grows accustomed to dropping off laundry with a parent each weekend might conclude that they’re not yet ready for the world. But college is, among other things, an exercise in independence. As much as it’s important for students to learn Russian history and statistics, it’s even more important for them to learn to be adults.
Image: Jon Lovette / Getty [ed. This was a significant issue in my last relationship before the term "helicopter parent" ever existed. I couldn't understand why my partner couldn't see how she was creating a sense of learned helplessness in her child, and an impediment to her fledging. When her daughter eventually left for college it only took a couple weeks before she started complaining about her roomate and rooming issues (like smoke outside her window aggravating her asthma) so my partner (the girl's mother) somehow convinced the administration to allow a freshman off-campus exemption (I don't know how she did it), then set her up in an apartment of her own, furnished it, and even bought her a cat. So there she sat, alone, totally divorced from college life. She lasted two sememesters. The girl, who's probably now in her mid-thirties, is still living at home with her mother as far as I know, and both are probably completely happy with that.]
