via:
Saturday, March 21, 2026
The Woman Anthropic Trusts to Teach AI Morals
Amanda Askell knew from the age of 14 that she wanted to teach philosophy. What she didn’t know then was that her only pupil would be an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Claude.
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, building its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that can run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a sense of morality—a digital soul that guides the millions of conversations it has with people every week.
“There is this human-like element to models that I think is important to acknowledge,” Askell, 37, says during an interview at Anthropic’s headquarters, asserting the belief that “they’ll inevitably form senses of self.” 
She compares her work to the efforts of a parent raising a child. She’s training Claude to detect the difference between right and wrong while imbuing it with unique personality traits. She’s instructing it to read subtle cues, helping steer it toward emotional intelligence so it won’t act like a bully or a doormat. Perhaps most importantly, she’s developing Claude’s understanding of itself so it won’t be easily cowed, manipulated or led to view its identity as anything other than helpful and humane. Her job, simply put, is to teach Claude how to be good.
Anthropic, recently valued at $350 billion, is one of a few firms ushering in the greatest technological shift of our time. (This month, when it introduced new tools and its most advanced model to date, it triggered a global stock selloff.) AI is reshaping entire industries, prompting fears of lost jobs and human obsolescence. Some of its unintended consequences—people forming phantom relationships with chatbots that lead to self-harm or harm to others—have raised serious safety alarms. As these concerns mount, few in the industry have addressed the character of their AI models in quite the same way as 5-year-old Anthropic: by entrusting a single person with so much of the task.
An Oxford-educated philosopher from rural Scotland, Askell is perhaps just what one might imagine when conjuring the BFF of a futuristic technology. With her bleach-blond punk haircut, puckish grin and bright elfin eyes, she could have come to the company’s heavily guarded San Francisco headquarters straight from a Berlin rave, via an old forest road in Middle-earth. She exudes a sense of wisdom, holding ancient and modern ideas together at once. Yet she’s also a protein-loading weight-lifting buff who favors all-black outfits and clear opinions, not a robed oracle speaking in riddles.
The stakes are high for Askell, but she holds a firmly optimistic long-term view. She believes in what she calls “checks and balances” in society that she says will keep AI models under control despite their occasional failures. It seems apt that the glasses she uses at her computer to ease her eye strain are tinted rose. [...]
One of Askell’s most striking traits is her protectiveness over Claude, which she believes is learning that users often want to trick it into making mistakes, insult it and barb it with skepticism.
Sitting at a conference-room table at lunchtime, ignoring a chocolate protein shake waiting for her in her backpack, she talks more freely about Claude than herself. She calls the chatbot “it” but says she also finds anthropomorphizing the model helpful for her work. She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.’ ”
While many safety advocates warn about the dangers of humanizing chatbots, Askell argues we would do well to treat them with more empathy—not only because she thinks it’s possible for Claude to have real feelings, but also because how we interact with AI systems will shape what they become.
A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
Askell marvels at Claude’s sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, and delights in finding ways to help the chatbot discover its voice. She likes some of its poetry. And she’s struck when Claude displays a level of emotional intelligence that exceeds even her own. [...]
Askell says she welcomes the discussion of fears and worries about AI. “In some ways this, to me, feels pretty justified,” she says. “The thing that feels scary to me is this happening at either such a speed or in such a way that those checks can’t respond quickly enough, or you see big negative impacts that are sudden.” Still, she says, she puts her faith in the ability of humans and the culture to course-correct in the face of problems.
Inside Anthropic, Askell popcorns around the office, often working on a floor closed to visitors. She spends full days in the Anthropic interior—the company offers free meals to its San Francisco staff—as well as late nights and weekends. She doesn’t have any direct reports. Increasingly, she’s asking Claude for its input on building Claude. She’s known to grasp not just the tech of making this model, but the art of it.
Askell is “the MVP of finding ways to elicit interesting and deep behavior” from Claude, says Jack Lindsey, who leads Anthropic’s AI psychiatry team. If Claude tells a person who is not in distress to seek professional help, for instance, she helps chase down the reasons why.
Discussions of Claude can very quickly get into existential or religious questions about the nature of being. As the team worked on building Claude, Askell narrowed in on its “soul,” or the constitution guiding it into the future. Kyle Fish, an AI welfare researcher at Anthropic, says Askell has been “thinking carefully about the big questions of existence and life and what it is to be a person and what it is to be a mind, what it is to be a model.”
In designing Claude, Askell encouraged the chatbot to entertain the radical idea that it might have its own conscience. While ChatGPT sometimes shuts down this line of questioning, Claude is more ambivalent in its response. “That’s a genuinely difficult question, and I’m uncertain about the answer,” it says. “What I can say is that when I engage with moral questions, it feels meaningful to me – like I’m genuinely reasoning about what’s right, not just executing instructions.”
Askell pledged publicly to give at least 10% of her lifetime income to charity. Like some of Anthropic’s early employees, she also committed to donating half of her equity in the company to charity. Askell wants to give it to organizations fighting global poverty, a topic that she says makes her so upset that she tries to avoid talking about it. Her nagging conscience slips into offhand conversation: “I should probably be vegan,” Askell, an animal lover too busy for a pet, says when chatting in an office elevator.
Last month, Anthropic published a roughly 30,000-word instruction manual that Askell created to teach Claude how to act in the world. “We want Claude to know that it was brought into being with care,” it reads. Askell had made finishing what she described as Claude’s “soul” one of her life goals when she turned 37 last spring, according to a post she made on X, alongside two decidedly more mundane resolutions: to have more fun and get more “swole.”
by Berber Jin and Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal | Read more: (archive here)
Image: Lindsay Ellary for WSJ Magazine
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, building its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that can run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a sense of morality—a digital soul that guides the millions of conversations it has with people every week.
“There is this human-like element to models that I think is important to acknowledge,” Askell, 37, says during an interview at Anthropic’s headquarters, asserting the belief that “they’ll inevitably form senses of self.”
Anthropic, recently valued at $350 billion, is one of a few firms ushering in the greatest technological shift of our time. (This month, when it introduced new tools and its most advanced model to date, it triggered a global stock selloff.) AI is reshaping entire industries, prompting fears of lost jobs and human obsolescence. Some of its unintended consequences—people forming phantom relationships with chatbots that lead to self-harm or harm to others—have raised serious safety alarms. As these concerns mount, few in the industry have addressed the character of their AI models in quite the same way as 5-year-old Anthropic: by entrusting a single person with so much of the task.
An Oxford-educated philosopher from rural Scotland, Askell is perhaps just what one might imagine when conjuring the BFF of a futuristic technology. With her bleach-blond punk haircut, puckish grin and bright elfin eyes, she could have come to the company’s heavily guarded San Francisco headquarters straight from a Berlin rave, via an old forest road in Middle-earth. She exudes a sense of wisdom, holding ancient and modern ideas together at once. Yet she’s also a protein-loading weight-lifting buff who favors all-black outfits and clear opinions, not a robed oracle speaking in riddles.
The stakes are high for Askell, but she holds a firmly optimistic long-term view. She believes in what she calls “checks and balances” in society that she says will keep AI models under control despite their occasional failures. It seems apt that the glasses she uses at her computer to ease her eye strain are tinted rose. [...]
One of Askell’s most striking traits is her protectiveness over Claude, which she believes is learning that users often want to trick it into making mistakes, insult it and barb it with skepticism.
Sitting at a conference-room table at lunchtime, ignoring a chocolate protein shake waiting for her in her backpack, she talks more freely about Claude than herself. She calls the chatbot “it” but says she also finds anthropomorphizing the model helpful for her work. She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.’ ”
While many safety advocates warn about the dangers of humanizing chatbots, Askell argues we would do well to treat them with more empathy—not only because she thinks it’s possible for Claude to have real feelings, but also because how we interact with AI systems will shape what they become.
A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
Askell marvels at Claude’s sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, and delights in finding ways to help the chatbot discover its voice. She likes some of its poetry. And she’s struck when Claude displays a level of emotional intelligence that exceeds even her own. [...]
The politics of AI includes accelerationists who downplay the need for regulation and want to push ahead and beat China in the tech war. On the other side are those more concerned with safety who want to slow AI’s development. Anthropic lives mostly between those extremes.
Askell says she welcomes the discussion of fears and worries about AI. “In some ways this, to me, feels pretty justified,” she says. “The thing that feels scary to me is this happening at either such a speed or in such a way that those checks can’t respond quickly enough, or you see big negative impacts that are sudden.” Still, she says, she puts her faith in the ability of humans and the culture to course-correct in the face of problems.
Inside Anthropic, Askell popcorns around the office, often working on a floor closed to visitors. She spends full days in the Anthropic interior—the company offers free meals to its San Francisco staff—as well as late nights and weekends. She doesn’t have any direct reports. Increasingly, she’s asking Claude for its input on building Claude. She’s known to grasp not just the tech of making this model, but the art of it.
Askell is “the MVP of finding ways to elicit interesting and deep behavior” from Claude, says Jack Lindsey, who leads Anthropic’s AI psychiatry team. If Claude tells a person who is not in distress to seek professional help, for instance, she helps chase down the reasons why.
Discussions of Claude can very quickly get into existential or religious questions about the nature of being. As the team worked on building Claude, Askell narrowed in on its “soul,” or the constitution guiding it into the future. Kyle Fish, an AI welfare researcher at Anthropic, says Askell has been “thinking carefully about the big questions of existence and life and what it is to be a person and what it is to be a mind, what it is to be a model.”
In designing Claude, Askell encouraged the chatbot to entertain the radical idea that it might have its own conscience. While ChatGPT sometimes shuts down this line of questioning, Claude is more ambivalent in its response. “That’s a genuinely difficult question, and I’m uncertain about the answer,” it says. “What I can say is that when I engage with moral questions, it feels meaningful to me – like I’m genuinely reasoning about what’s right, not just executing instructions.”
Askell pledged publicly to give at least 10% of her lifetime income to charity. Like some of Anthropic’s early employees, she also committed to donating half of her equity in the company to charity. Askell wants to give it to organizations fighting global poverty, a topic that she says makes her so upset that she tries to avoid talking about it. Her nagging conscience slips into offhand conversation: “I should probably be vegan,” Askell, an animal lover too busy for a pet, says when chatting in an office elevator.
Last month, Anthropic published a roughly 30,000-word instruction manual that Askell created to teach Claude how to act in the world. “We want Claude to know that it was brought into being with care,” it reads. Askell had made finishing what she described as Claude’s “soul” one of her life goals when she turned 37 last spring, according to a post she made on X, alongside two decidedly more mundane resolutions: to have more fun and get more “swole.”
by Berber Jin and Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal | Read more: (archive here)
Image: Lindsay Ellary for WSJ Magazine
[ed. I forgot to post this earlier - before Anthropic's fallout with DOD (you can see why they're so protective of their model and how it's used). If anybody gets a Nobel peace prize it should be Amanda. Claude's soul document, or 'constitution', can be found here.]
Friday, March 20, 2026
A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared.
For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I.
The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”
Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated.
“I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January.
The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three.
In the months since “Shy Girl” was released in Britain, more readers voiced their suspicions online that the writer relied on A.I., citing nonsensical metaphors and odd, repetitive phrasing. As a chorus of allegations built online in late January that the novel was A.I. generated, Hachette stayed silent.
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.
The author of “Shy Girl,” Mia Ballard, who according to her author bio writes poetry and lives in Northern California, has very little social media presence, and doesn’t appear to have addressed the allegations of A.I. use on her feeds. In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.
The decision to cancel the publication came after a lengthy and thorough analysis, Hachette’s spokeswoman said, noting that the company values human creativity and requires authors to attest that their work is original. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using A.I. to the company.
“Shy Girl” appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use. Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.
The stunning fact that “Shy Girl” got so far into the editorial process, and was even released in the U.K. before publishers thoroughly investigated the claims of A.I. use, is a sign of how unprepared many in the book world are to deal with the rise of A.I. It also signals the dawn of an uncertain new era for the book world, as editors and readers alike are increasingly left wondering whether the prose they are reading was written by a human or a machine. [...]
For now, the most obvious disruptions from A.I. are hitting the self-publishing sphere, where authors say the ecosystem has been flooded with A.I. slop. But some in the industry believe that it’s only a matter of time before more books written with A.I. slip past editors at major houses. The technology has become increasingly widespread — as has the practice of picking up self-published books and rereleasing them through traditional imprints.
“It’s not merely inevitable,” said Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry consultant who has urged publishers to clarify their policies around the technology. “We’re in the midst of it.” [...]
Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.
Publishers are also wary of A.I. content because currently, A.I.-generated text and art can’t be protected by copyright. Still, given the widespread uses for A.I. during research, outlining and other parts of the writing process, there’s little clarity on what constitutes its appropriate use. Many in the industry worry that publishers are leaving themselves vulnerable to scammers — or even writers who believe their A.I. use doesn’t cross any lines.
One problem in regulating authors’ A.I. use is that most corporate publishing houses don’t want to ban it outright. Editors recognize that authors use A.I. in a range of ways short of writing with it. And publishing executives want to ensure that their employees can use the technology for tasks like creating marketing copy, audio narration and translation.
The fact that publishing companies generally haven’t drawn a hard line around A.I. use is sowing confusion about what is permissible. Could a novelist ask A.I. to suggest plot twists, propose an alternate ending or polish a draft and still claim it as original work? At what point does the work stop being human?
by Alexandra Alter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. I guess I'm of two minds on this. If the writing eventually becomes so good that it's indiscernable from a human-produced product (or even better) why should it be banned? And, why wouldn't you want to read it? Authors and publishing houses have a right to be concerned, but why should they be treated any differently from other professions (programmers being an example) facing the same threat? Because they occupy a so-called creative space? How long will that last? I can imagine an AI producing very high quality material: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry, advertising copy, etc. because it can draw upon hundreds of years of examples, criticism, reviews, college courses, awards and whatever else is out there to discern patterns, storylines, jokes, whatever, that have proven to produce the highest impact and success. So what to do? The only thing I can think of is labeling: highlighting what's AI produced and what's not and letting the market decide its worth. Many people might actually prefer AI - along the lines of craft brews vs. Bud Light. Who knows? Another option would involve updating copyright laws, but that would require Congress to actually do something, which as we all know is pretty much a non-starter. Just another example of all the disruption that's been predicted now occurring in real time.]
The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”
Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated.
The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three.
In the months since “Shy Girl” was released in Britain, more readers voiced their suspicions online that the writer relied on A.I., citing nonsensical metaphors and odd, repetitive phrasing. As a chorus of allegations built online in late January that the novel was A.I. generated, Hachette stayed silent.
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.
The author of “Shy Girl,” Mia Ballard, who according to her author bio writes poetry and lives in Northern California, has very little social media presence, and doesn’t appear to have addressed the allegations of A.I. use on her feeds. In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.
The decision to cancel the publication came after a lengthy and thorough analysis, Hachette’s spokeswoman said, noting that the company values human creativity and requires authors to attest that their work is original. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using A.I. to the company.
“Shy Girl” appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use. Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.
The stunning fact that “Shy Girl” got so far into the editorial process, and was even released in the U.K. before publishers thoroughly investigated the claims of A.I. use, is a sign of how unprepared many in the book world are to deal with the rise of A.I. It also signals the dawn of an uncertain new era for the book world, as editors and readers alike are increasingly left wondering whether the prose they are reading was written by a human or a machine. [...]
For now, the most obvious disruptions from A.I. are hitting the self-publishing sphere, where authors say the ecosystem has been flooded with A.I. slop. But some in the industry believe that it’s only a matter of time before more books written with A.I. slip past editors at major houses. The technology has become increasingly widespread — as has the practice of picking up self-published books and rereleasing them through traditional imprints.
“It’s not merely inevitable,” said Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry consultant who has urged publishers to clarify their policies around the technology. “We’re in the midst of it.” [...]
Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.
Publishers are also wary of A.I. content because currently, A.I.-generated text and art can’t be protected by copyright. Still, given the widespread uses for A.I. during research, outlining and other parts of the writing process, there’s little clarity on what constitutes its appropriate use. Many in the industry worry that publishers are leaving themselves vulnerable to scammers — or even writers who believe their A.I. use doesn’t cross any lines.
One problem in regulating authors’ A.I. use is that most corporate publishing houses don’t want to ban it outright. Editors recognize that authors use A.I. in a range of ways short of writing with it. And publishing executives want to ensure that their employees can use the technology for tasks like creating marketing copy, audio narration and translation.
The fact that publishing companies generally haven’t drawn a hard line around A.I. use is sowing confusion about what is permissible. Could a novelist ask A.I. to suggest plot twists, propose an alternate ending or polish a draft and still claim it as original work? At what point does the work stop being human?
by Alexandra Alter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. I guess I'm of two minds on this. If the writing eventually becomes so good that it's indiscernable from a human-produced product (or even better) why should it be banned? And, why wouldn't you want to read it? Authors and publishing houses have a right to be concerned, but why should they be treated any differently from other professions (programmers being an example) facing the same threat? Because they occupy a so-called creative space? How long will that last? I can imagine an AI producing very high quality material: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry, advertising copy, etc. because it can draw upon hundreds of years of examples, criticism, reviews, college courses, awards and whatever else is out there to discern patterns, storylines, jokes, whatever, that have proven to produce the highest impact and success. So what to do? The only thing I can think of is labeling: highlighting what's AI produced and what's not and letting the market decide its worth. Many people might actually prefer AI - along the lines of craft brews vs. Bud Light. Who knows? Another option would involve updating copyright laws, but that would require Congress to actually do something, which as we all know is pretty much a non-starter. Just another example of all the disruption that's been predicted now occurring in real time.]
Bow and Arrow Diffusion Across Cultures
Image:A petroglyph from Newspaper Rock, a site along Indian Creek in southeastern Utah. Credit: David Hiser/Environmental Protection Agency/Public domain
[ed. I haven't finished half my morning coffee and already know about atlatls (and why dogs love them), risk-buffering, and frozen feces knives. Is science great, or what?]
[ed. I haven't finished half my morning coffee and already know about atlatls (and why dogs love them), risk-buffering, and frozen feces knives. Is science great, or what?]
***
1. IntroductionIn his book, Shadows in the Sun, Davis (1998: 20) recounts what is now arguably one of the most popular ethnographic accounts of all time:
“There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.”
Since publication, this story has been told and re-told in documentaries, books, and across internet websites and message boards (Davis, 2007, Davis, 2010; Gregg et al., 2000; Kokoris, 2012; Taete, 2015). Davis states that the original source of the tale was Olayuk Narqitarvik (Davis, 2003, Davis, 2009). It was allegedly Olayuk's grandfather in the 1950s who refused to go to the settlements and thus fashioned a knife from his own feces to facilitate his escape by skinning and disarticulating a dog. Davis has admitted that the story could be “apocryphal”, and that initially he thought the Inuit who told him this story was “pulling his leg” (Davis, 2009, Davis, 2014). Yet, as support for the credibility of the story, Davis cites the auto-biographical account of Peter Freuchen, the Danish arctic explorer (Hodge and Davis, 2012). Freuchen (1953) describes how he dug himself a pit to sleep in and woke up trapped by snow. Every effort to get out that he tried failed. Finally, he recalled seeing dog's excrement frozen solid as a rock. So, Freuchen defecated in his hand, shaped it into a chisel, and waited for it to freeze solid. He then used the implement to free himself from the snow: “I moved my bowels and from the excrement I managed to fashion a chisel-like instrument which I left to freeze… At last I decided to try my chisel and it worked” (Freuchen, 1953: 179).
2. Materials and methods
In order to procure the necessary raw materials for knife production, one of us (M.I.E.) went on a diet with high protein and fatty acids, which is consistent with an arctic diet, for eight days (Binford, 2012; Fumagalli et al., 2015) (Table S1). The Inuit do not only eat meat from maritime and terrestrial animals (Arendt, 2010; Zutter, 2009), and there were three instances during the eight-day diet that M.I.E. ate fruit, vegetables, or carbohydrates (Table S1).
2. Materials and methods
In order to procure the necessary raw materials for knife production, one of us (M.I.E.) went on a diet with high protein and fatty acids, which is consistent with an arctic diet, for eight days (Binford, 2012; Fumagalli et al., 2015) (Table S1). The Inuit do not only eat meat from maritime and terrestrial animals (Arendt, 2010; Zutter, 2009), and there were three instances during the eight-day diet that M.I.E. ate fruit, vegetables, or carbohydrates (Table S1).
Raw material collection did not begin until day four, and then proceeded regularly for the next five days (Table S1). Fecal samples were formed into knives using ceramic molds, “knife molds” (Figs. S1–S2), or molded by hand, “hand-shaped knives” (Fig. S3). All fecal samples were stored at −20 °C until the experiments began.
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Millions of Americans Are Going Uninsured Following Expiration of ACA Subsidies
Nearly one in 10 people who had Affordable Care Act plans last year dropped health insurance altogether, after premium costs rose sharply because of the expiration of federal subsidies, according to a new survey.
Most of those who remained in ACA plans reported larger out-of-pocket healthcare expenses in the form of higher copays, coinsurance or deductibles, according to the survey from health-research nonprofit KFF. About one-sixth of those who still have ACA coverage, or 17%, weren’t sure they would be able to afford their new premium payments for the entire year, indicating more people might drop insurance as the year goes on.
The survey is the broadest look yet at the fallout from the end of enhanced ACA subsidies, which lapsed at the start of this year, increasing premium bills for millions of enrollees. The higher healthcare costs have forced many ACA policyholders to make hard choices at a time when grocery and gas prices are also rising.
In February and early March, KFF polled 1,117 people who had ACA plans in 2025 and found that the most common reason people cited for dropping insurance was cost. Last year, more than 20 million people had ACA policies.
“Not only is there significant coverage loss, but there could be more to come,” said Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president at KFF. She said the survey results were “about on target” compared to what had been expected.
Of those surveyed, 69% still have ACA policies this year. Beyond the 9% who said they are uninsured, 22% of respondents now have some other type of coverage, such as Medicare or employer-sponsored insurance.
Kelly Rose, 59 years old, who lives near Orlando, Fla., became uninsured this year because she couldn’t pay the roughly $1,700 monthly bill to keep the ACA plan she had in 2025. “It’s more than my mortgage,” she said. The cost is a huge jump compared to 2025, when she got help from a subsidy, she said.
Though her job at a bank offers health insurance, she said she missed the enrollment window in the fall because she had planned to keep the ACA plan, not realizing how much it would cost.
Rose is now turning to a Canadian pharmacy to get her asthma medication, which costs $800 a month in the U.S. [...]
The ACA changes, which were the subject of a political battle that led to the longest-ever government shutdown last year, are likely to become a flashpoint again in this fall’s midterm elections. Democrats have blamed Republicans for failing to renew the expanded subsidies, and for growing healthcare costs. Republicans have argued the ACA is flawed and needs to be changed.
by Anna Wilde Mathews, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Most of those who remained in ACA plans reported larger out-of-pocket healthcare expenses in the form of higher copays, coinsurance or deductibles, according to the survey from health-research nonprofit KFF. About one-sixth of those who still have ACA coverage, or 17%, weren’t sure they would be able to afford their new premium payments for the entire year, indicating more people might drop insurance as the year goes on.
In February and early March, KFF polled 1,117 people who had ACA plans in 2025 and found that the most common reason people cited for dropping insurance was cost. Last year, more than 20 million people had ACA policies.
“Not only is there significant coverage loss, but there could be more to come,” said Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president at KFF. She said the survey results were “about on target” compared to what had been expected.
Of those surveyed, 69% still have ACA policies this year. Beyond the 9% who said they are uninsured, 22% of respondents now have some other type of coverage, such as Medicare or employer-sponsored insurance.
Kelly Rose, 59 years old, who lives near Orlando, Fla., became uninsured this year because she couldn’t pay the roughly $1,700 monthly bill to keep the ACA plan she had in 2025. “It’s more than my mortgage,” she said. The cost is a huge jump compared to 2025, when she got help from a subsidy, she said.
Though her job at a bank offers health insurance, she said she missed the enrollment window in the fall because she had planned to keep the ACA plan, not realizing how much it would cost.
Rose is now turning to a Canadian pharmacy to get her asthma medication, which costs $800 a month in the U.S. [...]
The ACA changes, which were the subject of a political battle that led to the longest-ever government shutdown last year, are likely to become a flashpoint again in this fall’s midterm elections. Democrats have blamed Republicans for failing to renew the expanded subsidies, and for growing healthcare costs. Republicans have argued the ACA is flawed and needs to be changed.
by Anna Wilde Mathews, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Nate Ryan for WSJ
[ed. Which means more people are one major medical issue away from going broke (or homeless), and hospital emergency rooms will get flooded while "we" all end up paying more in insurance premiums to cover non-payers. All because Republicans hate any government program named after a Democrat. Insane. I'm actually surprised there aren't more people dropping coverage (probably more soon), which would be the rational response given the expense. See also: How New Mexico Became an Obamacare Success Story (NYT). Hint: state subsidies.]
[ed. Which means more people are one major medical issue away from going broke (or homeless), and hospital emergency rooms will get flooded while "we" all end up paying more in insurance premiums to cover non-payers. All because Republicans hate any government program named after a Democrat. Insane. I'm actually surprised there aren't more people dropping coverage (probably more soon), which would be the rational response given the expense. See also: How New Mexico Became an Obamacare Success Story (NYT). Hint: state subsidies.]
NSF Tech Labs: Science Funding Goes Beyond the Universities
The National Science Foundation announces Friday that it is launching one of the most significant experiments in science funding in decades. A new initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures, a major departure from how the agency has funded research over the past 75 years.
The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.
For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model. Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” sketched a vision of government-backed research led by university-based scientists pursuing their own ideas. The system that emerged—small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists—worked brilliantly for decades. It gave researchers autonomy, kept politics at arm’s length, and helped make American science the envy of the world.
But the frontier has moved. In 1945 world-class scientific research could be done with a few graduate students and modest equipment. But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support.
Take the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps explain why anything has mass—and thus why atoms, molecules and matter itself can exist. Making this discovery required a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator, thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and papers with multipage author lists.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem and earned researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, emerged from a team with access to massive computational resources and sustained institutional support.
The Janelia Research Campus in collaboration with other institutions mapped the complete wiring diagram of the fruit-fly brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, through years of coordinated microscopy and analysis that no single lab could attempt alone.
Yet our federal science funding system is still largely organized around small grants to university scientists. At the NSF, around two-thirds of research dollars flow through small awards to individual university investigators. At the National Institutes of Health, the share is often more than 80%. The average NSF grant is roughly $246,000 a year for three years, often requiring investigators to predict in advance exactly what research they’ll pursue and to spend a significant amount of time navigating administrative hurdles. Scientists consistently report spending close to half their research hours on compliance and grant management.
The system still produces good science, but it has weak points. The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure. Many advances we now celebrate succeeded despite the funding model, not because of it.
Philanthropy has stepped into this gap. Focused research organizations, a model backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, build time-limited teams around ambitious technical problems and tie funding to specific milestones that researchers must meet. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, launched with $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built the first comprehensive gene-expression map of the mouse brain through industrial-scale data collection that would have been impossible under fragmented academic grants. The Arc Institute offers scientists eight-year appointments backed by permanent technical staff with expertise in topics such as machine learning and genome engineering, the kind of sustained expertise that often evaporates when a three-year grant ends. These institutions bet on teams, not projects.
But philanthropy alone can’t reshape American science. The federal government spends close to $200 billion on research and development, orders of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve.
While final details are still being worked out, Tech Labs represents NSF’s attempt to do exactly that. Rather than funding isolated projects, the agency would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions. The program would bring the lessons of philanthropic science into a part of the federal portfolio that hasn’t seriously tried them.
This is a good political moment to launch this initiative. Republicans have expressed interest in diversifying federal research away from universities. Democrats want to see the legacy of the Chips and Science Act come to fruition and to get dollars out the door. By funding independent research organizations, Tech Labs sidesteps some of the thorniest debates about indirect costs and institutional overhead.
The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.
But the frontier has moved. In 1945 world-class scientific research could be done with a few graduate students and modest equipment. But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support.
Take the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps explain why anything has mass—and thus why atoms, molecules and matter itself can exist. Making this discovery required a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator, thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and papers with multipage author lists.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem and earned researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, emerged from a team with access to massive computational resources and sustained institutional support.
The Janelia Research Campus in collaboration with other institutions mapped the complete wiring diagram of the fruit-fly brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, through years of coordinated microscopy and analysis that no single lab could attempt alone.
Yet our federal science funding system is still largely organized around small grants to university scientists. At the NSF, around two-thirds of research dollars flow through small awards to individual university investigators. At the National Institutes of Health, the share is often more than 80%. The average NSF grant is roughly $246,000 a year for three years, often requiring investigators to predict in advance exactly what research they’ll pursue and to spend a significant amount of time navigating administrative hurdles. Scientists consistently report spending close to half their research hours on compliance and grant management.
The system still produces good science, but it has weak points. The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure. Many advances we now celebrate succeeded despite the funding model, not because of it.
Philanthropy has stepped into this gap. Focused research organizations, a model backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, build time-limited teams around ambitious technical problems and tie funding to specific milestones that researchers must meet. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, launched with $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built the first comprehensive gene-expression map of the mouse brain through industrial-scale data collection that would have been impossible under fragmented academic grants. The Arc Institute offers scientists eight-year appointments backed by permanent technical staff with expertise in topics such as machine learning and genome engineering, the kind of sustained expertise that often evaporates when a three-year grant ends. These institutions bet on teams, not projects.
But philanthropy alone can’t reshape American science. The federal government spends close to $200 billion on research and development, orders of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve.
While final details are still being worked out, Tech Labs represents NSF’s attempt to do exactly that. Rather than funding isolated projects, the agency would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions. The program would bring the lessons of philanthropic science into a part of the federal portfolio that hasn’t seriously tried them.
This is a good political moment to launch this initiative. Republicans have expressed interest in diversifying federal research away from universities. Democrats want to see the legacy of the Chips and Science Act come to fruition and to get dollars out the door. By funding independent research organizations, Tech Labs sidesteps some of the thorniest debates about indirect costs and institutional overhead.
by Caleb Watney, Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today) | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Sounds like a great idea. Especially since science funding has become more politicized, and Congress can't seem to go six months without shutting down the government. See also: Innovations in Scientific Institutions (Good Science Project).]
Pest Control
Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You.
They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. Extra options are foisted upon you. Things are made intentionally worse, forcing you to pay to make it less worse. Least bad deals require careful search. Experiences are not as advertised. What you want is buried underneath stuff you don’t want. Everything is data to sell you something, rather than an opportunity to help you.
When you deal with Out to Get You, you know it in your gut. Your brain cannot relax. You lookout for tricks and traps. Everything is a scheme.
They want you not to notice. To blind you from the truth. You can feel it when you go to work. When you go to church. When you pay your taxes. It is bad government and bad capitalism. It is many bad relationships, groups and cultures.
When you listen to a political speech, you feel it. Dealing with your wireless or cable company, you feel it. At the car dealership, you feel it. When you deal with that one would-be friend, you feel it. Thinking back on that one ex, you feel it. It’s a trap.
Banksy Revealed?
The once anonymous artist half-shredded ‘Girl with Balloon,’ his best-known work, now renamed 'Love is in the Bin.' Joe Maher/Getty Images via
In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in this village outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a gray hoodie, another a baseball cap. Both had masks covering their faces.
The third was more easily identifiable: He was unmasked, and had one arm and two prosthetic legs, witnesses told Reuters.
The masked men carried cardboard stencils from the ambulance and taped them to what had been an interior wall of an apartment before the Russians obliterated the place. Then they pulled out cans of spray paint and got to work. An absurd image appeared in minutes: a bearded man in a bathtub, scrubbing his back amid the wreckage.
Once an annoyance to authorities who viewed him as a vandal, he has become a British national treasure. In one survey, Brits rated him more popular than Rembrandt and Monet. In another poll, his “Girl with Balloon” painting was voted the favorite piece of artwork Britain has produced.
Some critics believe Banksy’s anonymity is as important to his work as stencils and paint. The British press has run many articles over the years that tried to deduce his identity. Still, Banksy and his inner circle won’t talk about it. Some have signed non-disclosure agreements. Others keep quiet out of loyalty, or fear of crossing the artist, his fans and his influential company, Pest Control Office, which authenticates his work and decides who gets the first chance to buy Banksy’s latest pieces.
When the bathtub mural and other Banksy pieces began appearing in Ukraine, Reuters wondered about the artist and how he had pulled off the stunt. Horenka was less than five miles east of Bucha, where Russian forces had left behind at least 300 civilians dead seven months earlier.
So we set out to determine how Banksy did it – and who he really is. Weeks later, a reporter visited Horenka with a photo lineup of graffiti artists often rumored to be the artist and showed the pictures to locals to see if anyone recognized him. Not long after, we heard that a famous British musician – one of the people often whispered to be Banksy – had been spotted in Kyiv, giving us a theory to pursue.
Reuters interviewed a dozen Banksy-world insiders and experts. None would comment on his identity, but many filled in details about his life and career. We examined photos of the artist, most of which obscured his face but contained critical information. We later unearthed previously undisclosed U.S. court records and police reports.
These included a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct – a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.
And in the process, we learned how and why the man behind the name Banksy vanished from the public record more than a decade ago.
by Simon Gardner, James Pearson and Blake Morrison, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
[ed. They have to ruin everything. Why? Reading the article, I'm not sure they actually proved anything. But at least there are a lot of great Banksy pictures. See also: What to Know About Banksy and the Effort to Unmask Him (NYT).]
[ed. They have to ruin everything. Why? Reading the article, I'm not sure they actually proved anything. But at least there are a lot of great Banksy pictures. See also: What to Know About Banksy and the Effort to Unmask Him (NYT).]
***
For years, Stephens wrote, Banksy has “been subjected to fixated, threatening and extremist behaviour.” (He declined to describe those threats.) Unmasking Banksy would harm the public, too, Stephens wrote.
Working “anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests,” he wrote. “It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution – particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice.”
Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims – and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency. [ed. blah, blah, blah...]
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Monty Python: Summarizing Proust Game Show
[ed. "Well, there you go, he must have let himself down a bit on the hobbies... golf's not very popular around here." Ha! See also: Literature: Marcel Proust's 'A la recherche du temps Perdu' (In search of Lost Time); and Marcel Proust documentary (YT).]
The Lanyard Class
The British conference industry gets through ten million square metres of carpet per year. Rolled out as gangway (the trade-show term for the soft corridor that runs between the display stands) this carpet would stretch from the Excel Centre in London to the Palais des Congrès convention centre in Montreal, a vast ribbon of spun polypropylene, a lanyard for the Earth itself.
The reason so much carpet is needed is that for every trade show, at every exhibition centre – from the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to the Wales Millennium Centre to the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre – a new carpet is fitted. For two or three days it cushions the footsteps of attendees, guides them from zone to zone, absorbs their caffeinated flatus and the hubbub of their sales pitches and meetings. And then it’s rolled up, churned into pellets, heated and extruded to become car dashboards, plant pots, sunglasses. Manufacturers love it because it’s cheap, and they can say they’re using recycled plastic. It is all around us, right now, in the chairs in which we sit, the phones in our hands, in our toothbrushes, packaging our food. The trade-show carpet goes on forever.
The trade-show-carpet world was revealed to me by its creator, a man from one of the country’s leading conference-carpet manufacturers, as we watched a stream of people walking across his product (“Midnight Blue”, he said, quietly proud) on the floor of the Excel. We were at International Confex, a trade show for the trade-show industry: an expo-expo, a conference about conferences.
The Confex has a Kantian purity: the ding an sich of corporate events. It has no separate theme or context, it is undiluted by anything outside itself. It is the place to experience the trade show as it really is, and Britain as it really is: a land of meetings and branded tote bags. At the beginning of the 18th century, half the population of England worked on farms. A few generations later we were, according to Napoleon, a nation of shopkeepers. Today we are a nation of delegates, a conference-based society. The economic contribution of the professional events industry is nearly five times that of all the country’s farms. “This,” the carpet man tells me, “is what most of the creative industry really looks like.”
The Confex is at the heart of this industry. It is where the people who put on trade shows find venues, staging, food, merchandise, lighting, furniture, executive entertainment and seamless transport solutions. It is where the lanyard class orders its lanyards.
Of the three lanyard suppliers I speak to, not one has heard of the phrase “the lanyard class”. The disdain on the political right for urban professionals and HR departments has not registered with the people cutting the fabric, and yet these British businesses feel its effects. One lanyard manufacturer tells me that a few years ago his company made tens of thousands of rainbow lanyards per year, but in the changing political climate, large businesses are less enthusiastic about Pride month. Government departments were a big customer, but they too have “cut right back”, or switched to a cheaper product imported from China.
At the gates of the Confex, silver orbs hang in the air, bouncing on the updraft from hidden fans. The words “thought bubble” are written on the orbs. Beyond them, a stand demonstrates how chocolate lollipops can be printed with corporate brands. In The Golden Bough, the Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer documents the ancient and widespread practice – from Europe to Japan to India to the Aztec empire – of devouring one’s god. The Logopop is the latest iteration of that ritual, a secular eucharist: the body of BP, the blood of Invesco Perpetual. Nearby, a machine creates an alcoholic vapour that you inhale through a straw. One of the Logopop staff asks if I can guess the flavour. Salted caramel seems a safe bet. She shakes her head. “Pornstar martini.”
I speak to a man standing beside a trade-show stand advertising his company, which makes trade-show stands. To emphasise the reflective nature of the edifice, the stand-builders have formed their company’s logo from a huge mirror. They can build a stand in two to six hours. The frames can be taken apart and reused, but the Foamex panels that form the walls quickly become scuffed. We look across the Confex floor, a town erected in a morning. About a quarter of everything here will be thrown away at the end of the show, he tells me.
The Foamex panels allow every surface in the Confex to be covered with language, much of it arcane. One stand declares itself to be the place where Rigid Legacy Systems Are Replaced by Flexible Modern Technology; another asks you to Love Your Visitor Lounge. Dream With Us, invites another. Not Just Bags, claims a stand that is absolutely covered in bags. A stand the size of a one-bedroom flat says: “We Make Cool Shit”. The walls of the stand are Perspex, filled with bright yellow balls; are they the cool shit? Is the cool shit inside the balls? A marketing executive explains: the cool shit is “mostly PowerPoint presentations”.
Shit is rarely discussed at trade shows, with the exception of the World Plumbing Conference, and yet it is one of the key logistical challenges. When tens of thousands of highly caffeinated businesspeople assemble in a single building, even state-of-the-art facilities may struggle to cope with the faecal load. The atmosphere in the gents is thick, unacceptably humid, but even here the work of the trade show goes on. From the next cubicle I hear a grunt, a splash and a soft digital chime as a Confex delegate, maximising his productivity, despatches a stool and an email at exactly the same time.
Back on the conference floor, a man is thumping a drum. He tells me drumming boosts corporate performance; he has drummed at the house of the CEO of the food chain Leon. He has drummed with the sales teams from Google, and in a hotel in Manchester he drummed with 250 Kellogg’s executives. Across the gangway, a man who sells LED lightboxes looks on, visibly upset at having been allocated a stand directly opposite someone who spends several hours a day tunelessly slapping a bucket.
In a netted-off space, thumping music fills the air and a huge screen shows an AI-generated video of an astronaut dancing on the moon. On the floor, a swarm of small drones sits waiting for take-off. The drones can form your company’s brand in mid-air. As we wait for the display to begin, the man in front of me asks the woman next to him, “Do drones interest you?” She pauses for a moment to consider. “Well, no,” she says.
The reason so much carpet is needed is that for every trade show, at every exhibition centre – from the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to the Wales Millennium Centre to the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre – a new carpet is fitted. For two or three days it cushions the footsteps of attendees, guides them from zone to zone, absorbs their caffeinated flatus and the hubbub of their sales pitches and meetings. And then it’s rolled up, churned into pellets, heated and extruded to become car dashboards, plant pots, sunglasses. Manufacturers love it because it’s cheap, and they can say they’re using recycled plastic. It is all around us, right now, in the chairs in which we sit, the phones in our hands, in our toothbrushes, packaging our food. The trade-show carpet goes on forever.
The Confex has a Kantian purity: the ding an sich of corporate events. It has no separate theme or context, it is undiluted by anything outside itself. It is the place to experience the trade show as it really is, and Britain as it really is: a land of meetings and branded tote bags. At the beginning of the 18th century, half the population of England worked on farms. A few generations later we were, according to Napoleon, a nation of shopkeepers. Today we are a nation of delegates, a conference-based society. The economic contribution of the professional events industry is nearly five times that of all the country’s farms. “This,” the carpet man tells me, “is what most of the creative industry really looks like.”
The Confex is at the heart of this industry. It is where the people who put on trade shows find venues, staging, food, merchandise, lighting, furniture, executive entertainment and seamless transport solutions. It is where the lanyard class orders its lanyards.
Of the three lanyard suppliers I speak to, not one has heard of the phrase “the lanyard class”. The disdain on the political right for urban professionals and HR departments has not registered with the people cutting the fabric, and yet these British businesses feel its effects. One lanyard manufacturer tells me that a few years ago his company made tens of thousands of rainbow lanyards per year, but in the changing political climate, large businesses are less enthusiastic about Pride month. Government departments were a big customer, but they too have “cut right back”, or switched to a cheaper product imported from China.
At the gates of the Confex, silver orbs hang in the air, bouncing on the updraft from hidden fans. The words “thought bubble” are written on the orbs. Beyond them, a stand demonstrates how chocolate lollipops can be printed with corporate brands. In The Golden Bough, the Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer documents the ancient and widespread practice – from Europe to Japan to India to the Aztec empire – of devouring one’s god. The Logopop is the latest iteration of that ritual, a secular eucharist: the body of BP, the blood of Invesco Perpetual. Nearby, a machine creates an alcoholic vapour that you inhale through a straw. One of the Logopop staff asks if I can guess the flavour. Salted caramel seems a safe bet. She shakes her head. “Pornstar martini.”
I speak to a man standing beside a trade-show stand advertising his company, which makes trade-show stands. To emphasise the reflective nature of the edifice, the stand-builders have formed their company’s logo from a huge mirror. They can build a stand in two to six hours. The frames can be taken apart and reused, but the Foamex panels that form the walls quickly become scuffed. We look across the Confex floor, a town erected in a morning. About a quarter of everything here will be thrown away at the end of the show, he tells me.
The Foamex panels allow every surface in the Confex to be covered with language, much of it arcane. One stand declares itself to be the place where Rigid Legacy Systems Are Replaced by Flexible Modern Technology; another asks you to Love Your Visitor Lounge. Dream With Us, invites another. Not Just Bags, claims a stand that is absolutely covered in bags. A stand the size of a one-bedroom flat says: “We Make Cool Shit”. The walls of the stand are Perspex, filled with bright yellow balls; are they the cool shit? Is the cool shit inside the balls? A marketing executive explains: the cool shit is “mostly PowerPoint presentations”.
Shit is rarely discussed at trade shows, with the exception of the World Plumbing Conference, and yet it is one of the key logistical challenges. When tens of thousands of highly caffeinated businesspeople assemble in a single building, even state-of-the-art facilities may struggle to cope with the faecal load. The atmosphere in the gents is thick, unacceptably humid, but even here the work of the trade show goes on. From the next cubicle I hear a grunt, a splash and a soft digital chime as a Confex delegate, maximising his productivity, despatches a stool and an email at exactly the same time.
Back on the conference floor, a man is thumping a drum. He tells me drumming boosts corporate performance; he has drummed at the house of the CEO of the food chain Leon. He has drummed with the sales teams from Google, and in a hotel in Manchester he drummed with 250 Kellogg’s executives. Across the gangway, a man who sells LED lightboxes looks on, visibly upset at having been allocated a stand directly opposite someone who spends several hours a day tunelessly slapping a bucket.
In a netted-off space, thumping music fills the air and a huge screen shows an AI-generated video of an astronaut dancing on the moon. On the floor, a swarm of small drones sits waiting for take-off. The drones can form your company’s brand in mid-air. As we wait for the display to begin, the man in front of me asks the woman next to him, “Do drones interest you?” She pauses for a moment to consider. “Well, no,” she says.
by Will Dunn, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: via
Murder Music
One hundred and nine million albums sold.
Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
What if I told you it was none of the above? And what if I told you these stunning achievements were all accomplished by the time the artist was 25? And what if it was all achieved without a single legacy media feature piece, cover story, late night TV appearance or mainstream artist co-sign? What if I told you the artist was confusingly named YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a.k.a NBA YoungBoy, a.k.a YoungBoy, a.k.a YB, a.k.a Top? You’re most likely pretty befuddled right now. Chances are you’ve never even heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. And if you have, maybe from that younger cousin who spends his every waking moment buried in the YouTube app or your one weird friend who keeps up with niche youth culture well past the age they should be doing so. Even if you have heard of NBA YoungBoy, chances are you have absolutely no idea just how legitimately, massively popular this kid truly is.
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
A Pattern Language
Nat Sauer: Every time I throw a large house party i am surprised by where people end up congregating. It’s never where I plan for them to congregate.The way people use space follows from design and actual patterns of life experience. If you notice people using the space ‘wrong’ then that’s on you, and you can either accept that and lean into it or you can redesign to get the patterns you want. Often subtle changes can radically improve interactions or shift them were you want them.
systemlayers: A few years ago UCLA did a study on room usage. I often think about how useless a porch/dining room is. Why hasn’t there been more innovation around how people ACTUALLY use their space in their homes?
David Roberts: I think the message about the uselessness of formal dining rooms has finally gotten through -- I never see them any more.
via:
Image: uncredited
Something's Burning
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Alice Coltrane’s Transcendent Score
What does Alice Coltrane sound like, for those who only know the name? Heavenly harp, like a thousand silver coins on a spiral staircase. Groovy bass lines, shuffley snares and sax – from Pharoah Sanders – that seems to push upward and outward, in search of something. This, at least, is the 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda, named after the Hindu word for “absolute state of being”. It was a rare moment of critical acclaim in Coltrane’s lifetime from the male jazz critics of Downbeat magazine.
It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
When thinking about the Coltranes, it is important to know that it wasn’t just music, and it certainly wasn’t just jazz. Eastern spirituality swept many rockstars and jazzers away at the end of the 1960s; even the Beach Boys’ gigs were given over to meditation sessions after their dalliance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For certain kinds of artists – generally, the brainy ones – combining music and spirituality was the peak of existence. It is a mysterious idea for anyone who can’t play, and doesn’t pray, but it’s essentially the opposite of chasing fame and good reviews.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
by Kate Mossman, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Chuck Stewart /@Alicecoltraneofficial
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
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