Thursday, May 28, 2026
Feist
[ed. Great choreography, looks dangerous. It was. See also:]
The 3rd video in Feist's series with Patrick Daughters featured choreographed fireworks and was shot in Ohio with Mary Rozzi’s family who are one of America’s oldest family-manufactured fireworks companies, called Rozzi’s Famous Fireworks. Like “1234” it was a single unbroken take, one of only three, as Feist was hit in the eye by a stray firework and had to be transported to the hospital.
“Patrick (Daughters) was there for weeks working on the timing and choreography of all these little charges. I had done dry run after dry run, running through these barrels in a field, but of course without any fireworks. We were only going to get five goes of the full run through, fireworks and all. After we made it through the first pass, and when we gathered around a tiny monitor to see what it looked like, one woman said something like, ‘it looks like what falling in love feels like!’
What the Pope Said About A.I.
Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.
Last year, only months into his papacy, Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, called on developers of artificial intelligence “to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work.” In response, the Silicon Valley billionaire and troll-in-chief Marc Andreessen began mocking the pontiff by tweeting an idiotic meme at him. The Pope raised the grave concern that artificial-intelligence companies were “totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity”; the venture capitalist Peter Thiel reportedly wondered whether the Pope might be in league with the Antichrist. The merchant princes of Silicon Valley appeared concerned that the new Pope would usurp their authority and diminish their power. And now, arguably, he has, in a long-awaited encyclical on artificial intelligence.
For years—for decades—tech leaders have described their investments and inventions, their corporations, and even themselves in religious terms, and specifically in messianic terms. They claimed to be driven by a mission to make the world a better place; they were faithful to the misbegotten gospel of disruptive innovation. A “mission” is, historically, the Christian work of spreading the word of the Gospel; disruptive innovation is a theory of change that participates in the rhetoric of salvation. For a time, Facebook’s stated mission was “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” which is what most clergy of any faith might say is their mission, too, alongside caring for the poor and comforting the suffering. Tech executives, dressed in the ritualized vestments of hoodies, jeans, designer sneakers, and black T-shirts, have acted as if their companies were churches, their TED talks so many homilies, and their products—apps, platforms, and video games—temples, mosques, and chapels. More recently, these same people—men, really—have heralded the arrival of artificial intelligence as ushering in what Mark Zuckerberg calls a “new era for humanity.” This week, the Pope offered his own understanding of that new era in his encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It could hardly be more different from the preachings of the priests of Silicon Valley. They like to say they are saving the world. The Pope fears they are destroying it. [...]
The new encyclical, at nearly forty thousand words, bears reading. It is addressed “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill”—that is, to everyone. In advance of its release, and leery of the inevitable TL;DR reaction, one Texas bishop warned parishioners not to ask a chatbot to summarize it for them. (Earlier this year, the Pope urged priests against using ChatGPT to write their sermons and to instead “use your brains more.”) It is not a beautiful document. It’s often maddeningly, boringly wonky (“this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data”), and it gives every evidence of being written by a committee (“psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships”). Some of it reads like a Silicon Valley press release (“Today, the convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work”). Nevertheless, “Magnifica Humanitas” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.
If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.
Much of the encyclical involves defending the proposition that the Vatican ought to be—and has always been—engaged in making statements about new and very worldly things like artificial intelligence. “The Church is present in history and engages in dialogue with the world,” Leo argues. He agrees with the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world that humanity stands at a crossroads. But at this crossroads, he argues, three questions must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Invoking a Biblical story about hubris, the building of the Tower of Babel, he warns of what he calls the “Babel syndrome”: “namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
Beginning with the fundamental dignity of the human, Leo traces the inalienable, universal equality of persons and their inviolable rights. He establishes, within the Church’s Social Doctrine (traceable to “Rerum Novarum”), principles that include the commitment to the common good, which he defines as “the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.” [...]
The problem is not the technology, the Pope maintains in “Magnifica Humanitas”; it’s the anthropology. Algorithms, forms of automation, and artificial intelligence sort the worthy from the unworthy; they manipulate information and undermine trust; they violate privacy; they enhance the power of the already powerful and reduce the capabilities of the already vulnerable; they make war more ruthless; they undermine democratic governance; they take away the dignity of work, possibly for the mass of humanity. He presses for forms of regulation and especially for democratic control of artificial intelligence, but above all he calls for “disarming” A.I. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” he writes. “It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” He worries that the culture around artificial intelligence undermines the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence. [...]
That the concerns the Pope has raised in “Magnifica Humanitas” are not even remotely new does not make them any less urgent. Yet this history does suggest that calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and, as Arendt put it, to “think what we are doing” have not been heeded. Then again, before this week, they’ve never been sounded by the Pope, the spiritual leader of nearly a fifth of the world’s population.
“Magnifica Humanitas” is in many ways a religious analogue to Claude’s Constitution, released by Anthropic this past January (and on which at least two delegates to the Vatican were consulted). In a move freighted with symbolism, Anthropic’s co-founder Christopher Olah appeared on the dais alongside Leo at the release of the encyclical, which the Pope, in a first for the Church, presented in person, at the Vatican’s Synod Hall. “I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment,” Olah said in his remarks. Executives of other A.I. companies are not likely to express that kind of gratitude. Nor are they likely to cede political power willingly, any more than they are likely to become philanthropists, or volunteer to pay more in taxes, or stop tweeting daft things or selling you tools that you don’t need and that you never asked for and that make you miserable, angrier, and stupider.
The new encyclical, at nearly forty thousand words, bears reading. It is addressed “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill”—that is, to everyone. In advance of its release, and leery of the inevitable TL;DR reaction, one Texas bishop warned parishioners not to ask a chatbot to summarize it for them. (Earlier this year, the Pope urged priests against using ChatGPT to write their sermons and to instead “use your brains more.”) It is not a beautiful document. It’s often maddeningly, boringly wonky (“this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data”), and it gives every evidence of being written by a committee (“psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships”). Some of it reads like a Silicon Valley press release (“Today, the convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work”). Nevertheless, “Magnifica Humanitas” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.
If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.
Much of the encyclical involves defending the proposition that the Vatican ought to be—and has always been—engaged in making statements about new and very worldly things like artificial intelligence. “The Church is present in history and engages in dialogue with the world,” Leo argues. He agrees with the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world that humanity stands at a crossroads. But at this crossroads, he argues, three questions must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Invoking a Biblical story about hubris, the building of the Tower of Babel, he warns of what he calls the “Babel syndrome”: “namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
Beginning with the fundamental dignity of the human, Leo traces the inalienable, universal equality of persons and their inviolable rights. He establishes, within the Church’s Social Doctrine (traceable to “Rerum Novarum”), principles that include the commitment to the common good, which he defines as “the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.” [...]
The problem is not the technology, the Pope maintains in “Magnifica Humanitas”; it’s the anthropology. Algorithms, forms of automation, and artificial intelligence sort the worthy from the unworthy; they manipulate information and undermine trust; they violate privacy; they enhance the power of the already powerful and reduce the capabilities of the already vulnerable; they make war more ruthless; they undermine democratic governance; they take away the dignity of work, possibly for the mass of humanity. He presses for forms of regulation and especially for democratic control of artificial intelligence, but above all he calls for “disarming” A.I. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” he writes. “It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” He worries that the culture around artificial intelligence undermines the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence. [...]
That the concerns the Pope has raised in “Magnifica Humanitas” are not even remotely new does not make them any less urgent. Yet this history does suggest that calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and, as Arendt put it, to “think what we are doing” have not been heeded. Then again, before this week, they’ve never been sounded by the Pope, the spiritual leader of nearly a fifth of the world’s population.
“Magnifica Humanitas” is in many ways a religious analogue to Claude’s Constitution, released by Anthropic this past January (and on which at least two delegates to the Vatican were consulted). In a move freighted with symbolism, Anthropic’s co-founder Christopher Olah appeared on the dais alongside Leo at the release of the encyclical, which the Pope, in a first for the Church, presented in person, at the Vatican’s Synod Hall. “I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment,” Olah said in his remarks. Executives of other A.I. companies are not likely to express that kind of gratitude. Nor are they likely to cede political power willingly, any more than they are likely to become philanthropists, or volunteer to pay more in taxes, or stop tweeting daft things or selling you tools that you don’t need and that you never asked for and that make you miserable, angrier, and stupider.
by Jill Lepore, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Yara Nardi/Reuters
[ed. Maybe tl;dr for most folks, but AIs will certainly read it. Sort of my intent with ARIA: The Great Pause. Every little bit helps.]
[ed. Maybe tl;dr for most folks, but AIs will certainly read it. Sort of my intent with ARIA: The Great Pause. Every little bit helps.]
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Dognosis
At a former pomegranate farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru, a team of specially trained dogs is doing something that some of the world's most sophisticated medical machines cannot — detecting multiple types of cancer from a single breath, at early stages, for two dollars a test.
Dognosis, the Indian startup behind this system, published the results last week of its Phase 2 clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology — the world's most influential cancer journal — making it the largest study of its kind ever conducted and placing canine-based diagnostics firmly into the mainstream of medical science.
What Dognosis Does
The company was co-founded by Akash Kulgod, who built on his Honours thesis at Berkeley, and Itamar Bitan, who brings a decade of Special Ops K9 training experience from Israel. What the two founders realised was that the solution to early cancer detection had been living in our homes the whole time — the dog's nose, a product of fifteen millennia of co-evolution with humans, can detect the faint chemical trace of cancer in breath at a resolution that machines, algorithms, and laboratory tests have never come close to matching.
Therefore, Dognosis is building an ultra-affordable, non-invasive breath-based multi-cancer early detection test that combines trained dogs' exceptional olfactory abilities with brain-computer interfaces and machine learning to create quantitative signatures of disease.
How the Test Works
The test is straightforward: a person breathes normally into a cotton face mask for 10 minutes. The mask is sealed, stored, and later evaluated by trained detection dogs at a central laboratory. Each sample is assessed independently by at least three dogs and their assessments are combined using an advanced Bayesian statistical model that weighs each dog's track record and the participant's background information. No blood is drawn, no scan is needed, and no fasting is required.
The Science: What the Dogs Are Smelling
The dogs are detecting changes in volatile organic compounds — substances produced by the body when diseases like cancer are present. These VOCs create a unique odour signature or volatilome that trained dogs can identify, just as they are trained to detect explosives and drugs.
According to Dognosis, over 40 double-blind trials published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that dogs can detect various diseases, including different types of cancer, with high accuracy, and this ability is now well-established in scientific literature spanning journals including Nature and The Lancet.
The Phase 2 Trial: What It Found
According to the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study was conducted across six hospitals in Karnataka — three each in Hubballi and Bengaluru — in an assessor-masked, multi-centre case-control format. A total of 3,275 participants were enrolled, with 1,773 used for training and 1,502 for testing. The test cohort included 283 treatment-naïve, biopsy-confirmed cancer cases spanning seven major cancer groups and 1,219 controls including healthy volunteers.
The Phase 2 data showed 91% accuracy in detecting cancer-associated VOC breath signals across seven cancer groups, with accuracy stable across cancer types as well as in early stages — when detecting cancer early matters the most. The study was conducted in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs, a UK-based charity and world leader in canine bio-detection research.
"We've known for over two decades that dogs are capable of detecting multiple types of cancers with high accuracy," said Akash Kulgod, chief executive officer of Dognosis. "The challenge has always been building a system around canine olfaction that is reproducible, scalable, and aimed at a clinical problem worth solving."
"Multi-cancer risk stratification from a single breath sample in countries like India is that problem, and this study shows that it can be done," Kulgod said.
Why It Matters
The rise of multi-cancer early detection tests and AI-powered imaging has created an acute need for effective first-tier screening, which breath-based testing is uniquely positioned to fulfil — particularly in low- and middle-income countries where expensive imaging infrastructure remains out of reach for the majority of patients.
At $2 per test, Dognosis's system costs a fraction of existing screening tools, many of which also fail to detect cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages.
Dognosis, the Indian startup behind this system, published the results last week of its Phase 2 clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology — the world's most influential cancer journal — making it the largest study of its kind ever conducted and placing canine-based diagnostics firmly into the mainstream of medical science.
What Dognosis Does
Therefore, Dognosis is building an ultra-affordable, non-invasive breath-based multi-cancer early detection test that combines trained dogs' exceptional olfactory abilities with brain-computer interfaces and machine learning to create quantitative signatures of disease.
How the Test Works
The test is straightforward: a person breathes normally into a cotton face mask for 10 minutes. The mask is sealed, stored, and later evaluated by trained detection dogs at a central laboratory. Each sample is assessed independently by at least three dogs and their assessments are combined using an advanced Bayesian statistical model that weighs each dog's track record and the participant's background information. No blood is drawn, no scan is needed, and no fasting is required.
The Science: What the Dogs Are Smelling
The dogs are detecting changes in volatile organic compounds — substances produced by the body when diseases like cancer are present. These VOCs create a unique odour signature or volatilome that trained dogs can identify, just as they are trained to detect explosives and drugs.
According to Dognosis, over 40 double-blind trials published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that dogs can detect various diseases, including different types of cancer, with high accuracy, and this ability is now well-established in scientific literature spanning journals including Nature and The Lancet.
The Phase 2 Trial: What It Found
According to the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study was conducted across six hospitals in Karnataka — three each in Hubballi and Bengaluru — in an assessor-masked, multi-centre case-control format. A total of 3,275 participants were enrolled, with 1,773 used for training and 1,502 for testing. The test cohort included 283 treatment-naïve, biopsy-confirmed cancer cases spanning seven major cancer groups and 1,219 controls including healthy volunteers.
The Phase 2 data showed 91% accuracy in detecting cancer-associated VOC breath signals across seven cancer groups, with accuracy stable across cancer types as well as in early stages — when detecting cancer early matters the most. The study was conducted in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs, a UK-based charity and world leader in canine bio-detection research.
"We've known for over two decades that dogs are capable of detecting multiple types of cancers with high accuracy," said Akash Kulgod, chief executive officer of Dognosis. "The challenge has always been building a system around canine olfaction that is reproducible, scalable, and aimed at a clinical problem worth solving."
"Multi-cancer risk stratification from a single breath sample in countries like India is that problem, and this study shows that it can be done," Kulgod said.
Why It Matters
The rise of multi-cancer early detection tests and AI-powered imaging has created an acute need for effective first-tier screening, which breath-based testing is uniquely positioned to fulfil — particularly in low- and middle-income countries where expensive imaging infrastructure remains out of reach for the majority of patients.
At $2 per test, Dognosis's system costs a fraction of existing screening tools, many of which also fail to detect cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages.
by NDTV Profit News | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Tuesday Night Mix
[ed. I used to have a Saturday Night Mix but eventually gave it up. Got too hard to find good new music every week.]
Amazon’s Alexa+ Now Produces AI-Generated ‘Podcasts’ Featuring Chats Between Two Robot ‘Co-Hosts’
The podcast sector suddenly may have a big new player: Amazon‘s Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant.
Alexa has been answering billions of users’ queries since it was first released in 2014. Now Amazon is positioning Alexa+’s extended answers on any number of different topics as “podcasts,” completely compiled using AI, the company announced Monday.
Seemingly to dispel the notion that these “podcasts” will be AI audio slop, Amazon emphasized that it has deals with major news organizations to ensure “accurate, real-time news and information.” Those include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico and USA Today; publications from Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox Media; and more than 200 local newspapers across the U.S.
In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss “the latest music releases.” A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. “The monoculture is just gone,” a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been “stoner metal,” indie pop and experimental hip-hop music “all dropping on the same Friday,” and adds, “That’s not chaos — that’s the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.” [...]
It’s not the first AI-generated podcast system out there: Google’s NotebookLM AI tool last year added the ability to autogenerate a podcast of sorts based on a collection of notes and information using a synthetic voice. That prompted a lawsuit from former NPR “Morning Edition” host David Greene, who alleged that Google copied his voice without permission.
To use Alexa Podcasts, users can simply tell Alexa what topic they’re curious about and “it does the rest in minutes.” Alexa+ will provide an overview of what it plans to cover, and let you adjust the length and direction before it generates the podcast. When your episode is ready, you’ll get a notification on your Echo Show device and the Alexa app.
Alexa Podcasts is available to Alexa+ customers in the U.S. Amazon said it is also “thinking about how you’ll be able to create different types of custom audio on demand, from personalized news briefings to content based on the information and documents you want to share. This is just the beginning of a whole new way to learn, stay informed, and consume content that fits into your life.”
Alexa has been answering billions of users’ queries since it was first released in 2014. Now Amazon is positioning Alexa+’s extended answers on any number of different topics as “podcasts,” completely compiled using AI, the company announced Monday.
In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss “the latest music releases.” A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. “The monoculture is just gone,” a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been “stoner metal,” indie pop and experimental hip-hop music “all dropping on the same Friday,” and adds, “That’s not chaos — that’s the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.” [...]
It’s not the first AI-generated podcast system out there: Google’s NotebookLM AI tool last year added the ability to autogenerate a podcast of sorts based on a collection of notes and information using a synthetic voice. That prompted a lawsuit from former NPR “Morning Edition” host David Greene, who alleged that Google copied his voice without permission.
To use Alexa Podcasts, users can simply tell Alexa what topic they’re curious about and “it does the rest in minutes.” Alexa+ will provide an overview of what it plans to cover, and let you adjust the length and direction before it generates the podcast. When your episode is ready, you’ll get a notification on your Echo Show device and the Alexa app.
Alexa Podcasts is available to Alexa+ customers in the U.S. Amazon said it is also “thinking about how you’ll be able to create different types of custom audio on demand, from personalized news briefings to content based on the information and documents you want to share. This is just the beginning of a whole new way to learn, stay informed, and consume content that fits into your life.”
by Todd Spangler, Variety | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Thank god. I can only imagine the world's been crying out for more podcasters; especially AI fake ones. This'll probably be a continuing trend: a new story every month with some new profession being threatened or replaced. Slow boiling for frogs.]
An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers
Today feels like the end of an era for jazz fans. Something has changed—that’s the pervasive mood right now. And things will never be like they were before.
Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.
I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.
Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month (and less if you sign up for a full year).
Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.
The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.
That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.
In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.
Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans
We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.
But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.
When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.
You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.
I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.
If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.
Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.
Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences. [...]
First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.
And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.
Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.
I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.
Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month (and less if you sign up for a full year).
Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.
The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.
That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.
In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.
Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans
We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.
But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.
When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.
You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.
I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.
If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.
Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.
Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences. [...]
First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.
And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Images: YouTube
[ed. The beat goes on. Sonny famously used to practice nearly every day at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, in NY. I read they're now thinking of renaming it the Sonny Rollins Bridge. Sounds good to me.]
Why Japanese Companies Do So Many Different Things
Consider Toto.
If you spend much time in American public bathrooms, or rather if you’re simply a particularly attentive patron of American public bathrooms, you’ll probably have noticed Toto’s toilets at some point or another: they’re distinguished by a quite memorable serif-font “TOTO” logo. Toto toilets aren’t quite dominant in American bathrooms, since they have healthy competition from our homegrown toilet champions American Standard and Kohler—though Toto is doing better and better as Americans start to fall in love with the bidet-toilet—but globally Toto is the world’s largest manufacturer of toilets and bidets. And in its home country of Japan, Toto is simply everywhere: 80 percent of Japanese homes contain a Toto bidet-toilet.
And if you’re a longtime Toto shareholder—maybe an investor with a particular interest in bathroom fixtures—this has been a wonderfully lucrative year for you. Toto’s stock is up 60 percent year to date; in just the last few weeks, it’s risen by 30 percent. Toto is doing better than ever: its net profit, in the first quarter of 2026, was up 230 percent year over year.
But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.
Since 1988, in a once-obscure corner of the company called the “advanced ceramics division,” Toto has been producing a very particular component called the electrostatic chuck, or the “e-chuck.” The e-chuck is a sort of high-precision ceramic plate, about the size of a steering wheel, that uses electrostatic force to hold a silicon wafer perfectly flat and thermally stable while memory chips are etched into it with bombardments of plasma. Making these components is extraordinarily difficult, since the ceramic body needs to have near-zero particle generation and be polished to submicron flatness: and this means that there are only a few companies in the world that are capable of manufacturing e-chucks reliably. Almost all of them—Shinko Electric, NGK, Toto, Kyocera, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Niterra—are based in Japan.
For most of its history, the advanced ceramics division was a rounding error on Toto’s balance sheet: the money maker, as it had been since the 1910s, was the toilet and bidet business. But we’re in a new era. Demand for AI is exploding, meaning that demand for the high-bandwidth memory that AI data centers require is exploding, meaning that demand for memory chips is exploding, meaning that demand for e-chucks is exploding. And so Toto’s advanced ceramics division is suddenly the company’s largest business, generating the majority of its operating profit. Toto’s leadership, suddenly awash in AI-driven revenue, announced that they would double down by investing hundreds of millions in expanded electrostatic chuck production: the toilet company had become, quite unexpectedly, a supplier to the semiconductor supply chain.
The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.
Consider, for example, Kyocera, another one of the e-chuck makers. Kyocera was founded in 1959 as a producer of ceramic insulators for cathode-ray tubes; today it manufactures not only industrial ceramics but also printers, smartphones, ballpoint pens, kitchen knives, solar PV modules, lens components, industrial cutting tools, automotive camera modules, electronics components, semiconductor packaging, biocompatible tooth and joint replacements, UV-LED curing systems, LCD systems, medical products, and lab-grown gemstones. Or another e-chuck maker. Sumitomo Osaka Cement, as you might have been able to deduce from the name, produces cement and ready-mixed concrete; but it also produces optical components, measuring instruments, industrial ceramics, artificial marine reefs, cosmetics and nanoparticle materials.
And this degree of diversification extends to many of Japan’s most famous companies. Yamaha, for example, manufactures pianos, motorcycles, guitars, drums, boats, snowmobiles, ATVs, audio equipment, golf clubs, tennis rackets, home appliances, specialty metals, molding and bonding equipment for semiconductors, and industrial robots. Hitachi makes nuclear reactors, power grids, railway systems, elevators, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical imaging devices, data storage, IT consulting, and industrial machinery. Even a company as simple as Oji, Japan’s largest paper company, has been drawn into the production of disposable diapers, functional films, adhesives, cellulose nanofibers, and wood-based EUV photoresists; and it also operates a hotel, an airport catering business, a concert hall, and an insurance agency.
All of which is to say: Japanese companies do a lot of things.
There are, of course, other countries with companies that “do lots of things”: much of Indian economic life, for example, is defined by the sprawling activities of a few large business clans—the Adanis, the Ambanis, the Tatas, the Birlas. But India is a relatively poor country with a low level of economic specialization, and the sprawling conglomerates that dominate its economy focus on relatively simple things like cement, steel, ports, and telecommunications. Japan, by contrast, is a wealthy, developed society—by one measure, the most economically complex country in the world. What’s striking about Japanese companies is not that they do lots of different things but rather that they do them very well. There are all sorts of high-precision inputs—the e-chuck being just one example—that are produced virtually only by Japanese firms.
This is very different from how most wealthy countries operate. American firms, for example, tend to prioritize focus above all else: it would be bizarre for an American paper mill to also operate a concert hall and an airport catering business, or for American Standard or Kohler to somehow have something to do with semiconductors. Even a country like Germany, which matches Japan in its depth of high-precision firms, has nothing like Japan’s corporate diversification. Only a few large conglomerates, like Siemens, have anything approaching the lateral breadth of the Japanese firm. South Korea—whose economic system was not coincidentally modeled off the Japanese one—does have a few chaebol conglomerates, like Samsung and SK, that truly do as many things as Japanese companies. But these are economy-dominating, state-entangled megafirms, cultivated as national champions by Korean industrial policy. They look nothing like, say, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, which is hugely diversified despite being relatively small. (“Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!”)
So why are Japanese companies like this? Why do they do so many different things? And how do they manage to do so all those different things so well?
Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured. The form of the corporation that we know and love in the United States—specialized, market-oriented, governed by shareholders—is just one form that the corporation can take; but it’s not the only way to coordinate capital and labor in a successful and profitable way. The protean corporations of Japan are best understood as a different species of thing altogether: better at some things, worse at others, but still highly adapted to their particular environment. And the things that they’re very good at turn out to be extraordinarily helpful for all sorts of things in which American companies tend to struggle.
If you spend much time in American public bathrooms, or rather if you’re simply a particularly attentive patron of American public bathrooms, you’ll probably have noticed Toto’s toilets at some point or another: they’re distinguished by a quite memorable serif-font “TOTO” logo. Toto toilets aren’t quite dominant in American bathrooms, since they have healthy competition from our homegrown toilet champions American Standard and Kohler—though Toto is doing better and better as Americans start to fall in love with the bidet-toilet—but globally Toto is the world’s largest manufacturer of toilets and bidets. And in its home country of Japan, Toto is simply everywhere: 80 percent of Japanese homes contain a Toto bidet-toilet.
But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.
Since 1988, in a once-obscure corner of the company called the “advanced ceramics division,” Toto has been producing a very particular component called the electrostatic chuck, or the “e-chuck.” The e-chuck is a sort of high-precision ceramic plate, about the size of a steering wheel, that uses electrostatic force to hold a silicon wafer perfectly flat and thermally stable while memory chips are etched into it with bombardments of plasma. Making these components is extraordinarily difficult, since the ceramic body needs to have near-zero particle generation and be polished to submicron flatness: and this means that there are only a few companies in the world that are capable of manufacturing e-chucks reliably. Almost all of them—Shinko Electric, NGK, Toto, Kyocera, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Niterra—are based in Japan.
For most of its history, the advanced ceramics division was a rounding error on Toto’s balance sheet: the money maker, as it had been since the 1910s, was the toilet and bidet business. But we’re in a new era. Demand for AI is exploding, meaning that demand for the high-bandwidth memory that AI data centers require is exploding, meaning that demand for memory chips is exploding, meaning that demand for e-chucks is exploding. And so Toto’s advanced ceramics division is suddenly the company’s largest business, generating the majority of its operating profit. Toto’s leadership, suddenly awash in AI-driven revenue, announced that they would double down by investing hundreds of millions in expanded electrostatic chuck production: the toilet company had become, quite unexpectedly, a supplier to the semiconductor supply chain.
The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.
Consider, for example, Kyocera, another one of the e-chuck makers. Kyocera was founded in 1959 as a producer of ceramic insulators for cathode-ray tubes; today it manufactures not only industrial ceramics but also printers, smartphones, ballpoint pens, kitchen knives, solar PV modules, lens components, industrial cutting tools, automotive camera modules, electronics components, semiconductor packaging, biocompatible tooth and joint replacements, UV-LED curing systems, LCD systems, medical products, and lab-grown gemstones. Or another e-chuck maker. Sumitomo Osaka Cement, as you might have been able to deduce from the name, produces cement and ready-mixed concrete; but it also produces optical components, measuring instruments, industrial ceramics, artificial marine reefs, cosmetics and nanoparticle materials.
And this degree of diversification extends to many of Japan’s most famous companies. Yamaha, for example, manufactures pianos, motorcycles, guitars, drums, boats, snowmobiles, ATVs, audio equipment, golf clubs, tennis rackets, home appliances, specialty metals, molding and bonding equipment for semiconductors, and industrial robots. Hitachi makes nuclear reactors, power grids, railway systems, elevators, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical imaging devices, data storage, IT consulting, and industrial machinery. Even a company as simple as Oji, Japan’s largest paper company, has been drawn into the production of disposable diapers, functional films, adhesives, cellulose nanofibers, and wood-based EUV photoresists; and it also operates a hotel, an airport catering business, a concert hall, and an insurance agency.
All of which is to say: Japanese companies do a lot of things.
There are, of course, other countries with companies that “do lots of things”: much of Indian economic life, for example, is defined by the sprawling activities of a few large business clans—the Adanis, the Ambanis, the Tatas, the Birlas. But India is a relatively poor country with a low level of economic specialization, and the sprawling conglomerates that dominate its economy focus on relatively simple things like cement, steel, ports, and telecommunications. Japan, by contrast, is a wealthy, developed society—by one measure, the most economically complex country in the world. What’s striking about Japanese companies is not that they do lots of different things but rather that they do them very well. There are all sorts of high-precision inputs—the e-chuck being just one example—that are produced virtually only by Japanese firms.
This is very different from how most wealthy countries operate. American firms, for example, tend to prioritize focus above all else: it would be bizarre for an American paper mill to also operate a concert hall and an airport catering business, or for American Standard or Kohler to somehow have something to do with semiconductors. Even a country like Germany, which matches Japan in its depth of high-precision firms, has nothing like Japan’s corporate diversification. Only a few large conglomerates, like Siemens, have anything approaching the lateral breadth of the Japanese firm. South Korea—whose economic system was not coincidentally modeled off the Japanese one—does have a few chaebol conglomerates, like Samsung and SK, that truly do as many things as Japanese companies. But these are economy-dominating, state-entangled megafirms, cultivated as national champions by Korean industrial policy. They look nothing like, say, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, which is hugely diversified despite being relatively small. (“Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!”)
So why are Japanese companies like this? Why do they do so many different things? And how do they manage to do so all those different things so well?
Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured. The form of the corporation that we know and love in the United States—specialized, market-oriented, governed by shareholders—is just one form that the corporation can take; but it’s not the only way to coordinate capital and labor in a successful and profitable way. The protean corporations of Japan are best understood as a different species of thing altogether: better at some things, worse at others, but still highly adapted to their particular environment. And the things that they’re very good at turn out to be extraordinarily helpful for all sorts of things in which American companies tend to struggle.
by David Oks, Website | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Guardrails (What Guardrails?)
It is the most overused metaphor of Trump 2.0 (along, perhaps, with “Trump 2.0”). If you are worried that this administration has careened out of control — gutting the federal work force, threatening allies, starting wars, militarizing American cities, emasculating NATO, knocking down chunks of the White House, proposing that taxpayers foot the bill for a $1.8 billion political slush fund — then the failure of “guardrails” is your constant lament.
“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Kamala Harris warned late in her failed 2024 campaign. The guardrails are “made of Jell-O,” a host for MSNOW complained as he considered Trump’s first year back in office. And Democrats pitch all manner of legislation as essential “guardrails” around the powers and the personality of the 47th president.
What “norms” were to Trump’s first term, “guardrails” are to his second. We’ve gone from “Can he do that?” to “What can stop him?”
The problem is that guardrails — their presence or absence, their strength or deterioration — are a limiting way to imagine restraints on executive power. Even as they supposedly protect us from the overreach of our leaders, guardrails risk reducing the rest of us to spectators. A guardrail suggests that some trustworthy sage of long ago (James Madison is a favorite) has inspected the road and erected sensible boundaries. No need to worry; there’s a guardrail.
Except sometimes there isn’t; or sometimes it’s weak. Or sometimes the only way to make a guardrail go from metaphor to reality is to become one yourself. [...]
The ultimate paper guardrail in the United States is the Constitution, our owner’s manual. This one really is paper; you can visit the National Archives in Washington and see those four brittle and handwritten pages in a hermetically sealed case pumped with argon gas. (Yes, it’s a guardrail with its own guardrails.)
We know the main constitutional guardrails: powers split among the three branches of the federal government; the guardrails of federalism, that is, of powers shared between the states and the national government; and the Bill of Rights, which basically became a condition for skeptical state conventions to ratify the whole thing.
The verbs of the Constitution’s preamble burst with self-assurance — establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, secure the blessings of liberty — but different passages cut in unexpected directions. For example, the stipulation in Article I, Section IV, that the “times, places and manner” of elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof” is a vital democratic guardrail when, say, an American president who has just lost re-election pressures state officials to “find” more votes in his favor. But how protective of democracy is this guardrail when those state legislatures gleefully redraw congressional districts so that politicians choose their voters and not the other way around?
Even the Constitution’s principal author was not sure that the document was adequate to the task before it. In Federalist 48, Madison wondered whether these mere “parchment barriers” were strong enough to sustain the Republic in the face of “the encroaching spirit of power.”
This singular piece of parchment has endured for more than two centuries and has come to be regarded as the sacred text of our civic religion. Tom Paine even referred to the Constitution as America’s “political bible,” and its most famous passages are often recited aloud, with devotional reverence. [...]
“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Kamala Harris warned late in her failed 2024 campaign. The guardrails are “made of Jell-O,” a host for MSNOW complained as he considered Trump’s first year back in office. And Democrats pitch all manner of legislation as essential “guardrails” around the powers and the personality of the 47th president.
The problem is that guardrails — their presence or absence, their strength or deterioration — are a limiting way to imagine restraints on executive power. Even as they supposedly protect us from the overreach of our leaders, guardrails risk reducing the rest of us to spectators. A guardrail suggests that some trustworthy sage of long ago (James Madison is a favorite) has inspected the road and erected sensible boundaries. No need to worry; there’s a guardrail.
Except sometimes there isn’t; or sometimes it’s weak. Or sometimes the only way to make a guardrail go from metaphor to reality is to become one yourself. [...]
The ultimate paper guardrail in the United States is the Constitution, our owner’s manual. This one really is paper; you can visit the National Archives in Washington and see those four brittle and handwritten pages in a hermetically sealed case pumped with argon gas. (Yes, it’s a guardrail with its own guardrails.)
We know the main constitutional guardrails: powers split among the three branches of the federal government; the guardrails of federalism, that is, of powers shared between the states and the national government; and the Bill of Rights, which basically became a condition for skeptical state conventions to ratify the whole thing.
The verbs of the Constitution’s preamble burst with self-assurance — establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, secure the blessings of liberty — but different passages cut in unexpected directions. For example, the stipulation in Article I, Section IV, that the “times, places and manner” of elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof” is a vital democratic guardrail when, say, an American president who has just lost re-election pressures state officials to “find” more votes in his favor. But how protective of democracy is this guardrail when those state legislatures gleefully redraw congressional districts so that politicians choose their voters and not the other way around?
Even the Constitution’s principal author was not sure that the document was adequate to the task before it. In Federalist 48, Madison wondered whether these mere “parchment barriers” were strong enough to sustain the Republic in the face of “the encroaching spirit of power.”
This singular piece of parchment has endured for more than two centuries and has come to be regarded as the sacred text of our civic religion. Tom Paine even referred to the Constitution as America’s “political bible,” and its most famous passages are often recited aloud, with devotional reverence. [...]
There has been a standoff in recent decades over proper constitutional interpretation. On one side stands originalism (and its ne’er-do-well cousin, textualism); on the other is an evolving, so-called living Constitution. I’m partial neither to an originalist interpretation, with its overtly ideological intentions, nor to a living Constitution, with its almost vibes-based jurisprudence. More attractive is the notion of a “working” Constitution, as Jack Rakove put it in “Original Meanings,” his 1996 history of the Constitution’s beginnings.
Rakove wrote that “Americans have always possessed two Constitutions, not one: the formal document adopted in 1787-88, with its amendments; and the working Constitution comprising the body of precedents, habits, understandings and attitudes that shape how the federal system operates at any historical moment.”
This does not necessarily mean that the Constitution is becoming a wiser version of itself every day, but simply that the document becomes real when it encounters the world it means to govern. In Federalist 37, Madison seems to agree: “All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”
The law is obscure and equivocal until it is put in action, which means that our paper guardrails aren’t real until they are tested. You don’t really know how strong the railing is until something smashes against it.
In their 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize two political ideas — two guardrails — that are crucial to sustaining democracy: institutional forbearance and mutual toleration.
Politicians display institutional forbearance when they exercise restraint in the use of even their legitimate powers, not deploying them in full for temporary advantage, if only because someday a rival will come into power and do likewise. And mutual toleration means that politicians consider their opponents legitimate participants in the public arena, not existential enemies who must be vanquished at all costs.
When Levitsky and Ziblatt published the book, both guardrails were already under stress in American politics. Today, they’ve been overrun.
Mutual toleration has nearly vanished — politicians and supporters from one side see their opponents on the other as evil, as destroyers of all they hold dear. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021, while Democrats invariably describe Trump as an “existential threat” to American democracy. Absent mutual toleration, the stakes are always at the highest pitch: National survival requires partisan victory.
Institutional forbearance has also deteriorated beyond recognition. The Department of Justice investigates and indicts a president’s political enemies and insulates the president and his family and businesses from tax inquiries. Immigration enforcement agents descend upon neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, detaining, raiding and even killing in the name of mass deportation. A self-styled Department of Government Efficiency takes a chain saw to the federal work force, eviscerating U.S. foreign assistance along the way. And a president is granted, via a generous Supreme Court, presumptive immunity for whatever “official acts” he commits on the job.
After all, why exercise forbearance when you finally wield the power to do what you’ve always wanted to do? When they get in the way of pet projects and partisan interests, high-minded ideas are easily disregarded by those in power. Consider Vice President JD Vance’s dismissiveness toward the American creed — he argues that people will fight for a place and a home, not for mere “abstractions” — even though the oath of office he swore was to defend the Constitution itself, that piece of paper so packed with abstractions.
The individuals who serve as democratic guardrails are those who uphold oaths, who challenge us to live up to our parchment barriers, who give all those other guardrails flesh.
One such flesh-and-blood American guardrail died recently, a man whose lengthy record in public life was unfairly downgraded during his final years. His name was Robert Swan Mueller III, and his case is illustrative of how we’ve come to regard constraints on presidential behavior, and on those tasked with investigating it.
Rakove wrote that “Americans have always possessed two Constitutions, not one: the formal document adopted in 1787-88, with its amendments; and the working Constitution comprising the body of precedents, habits, understandings and attitudes that shape how the federal system operates at any historical moment.”
This does not necessarily mean that the Constitution is becoming a wiser version of itself every day, but simply that the document becomes real when it encounters the world it means to govern. In Federalist 37, Madison seems to agree: “All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”
The law is obscure and equivocal until it is put in action, which means that our paper guardrails aren’t real until they are tested. You don’t really know how strong the railing is until something smashes against it.
In their 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize two political ideas — two guardrails — that are crucial to sustaining democracy: institutional forbearance and mutual toleration.
Politicians display institutional forbearance when they exercise restraint in the use of even their legitimate powers, not deploying them in full for temporary advantage, if only because someday a rival will come into power and do likewise. And mutual toleration means that politicians consider their opponents legitimate participants in the public arena, not existential enemies who must be vanquished at all costs.
When Levitsky and Ziblatt published the book, both guardrails were already under stress in American politics. Today, they’ve been overrun.
Mutual toleration has nearly vanished — politicians and supporters from one side see their opponents on the other as evil, as destroyers of all they hold dear. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021, while Democrats invariably describe Trump as an “existential threat” to American democracy. Absent mutual toleration, the stakes are always at the highest pitch: National survival requires partisan victory.
Institutional forbearance has also deteriorated beyond recognition. The Department of Justice investigates and indicts a president’s political enemies and insulates the president and his family and businesses from tax inquiries. Immigration enforcement agents descend upon neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, detaining, raiding and even killing in the name of mass deportation. A self-styled Department of Government Efficiency takes a chain saw to the federal work force, eviscerating U.S. foreign assistance along the way. And a president is granted, via a generous Supreme Court, presumptive immunity for whatever “official acts” he commits on the job.
After all, why exercise forbearance when you finally wield the power to do what you’ve always wanted to do? When they get in the way of pet projects and partisan interests, high-minded ideas are easily disregarded by those in power. Consider Vice President JD Vance’s dismissiveness toward the American creed — he argues that people will fight for a place and a home, not for mere “abstractions” — even though the oath of office he swore was to defend the Constitution itself, that piece of paper so packed with abstractions.
The individuals who serve as democratic guardrails are those who uphold oaths, who challenge us to live up to our parchment barriers, who give all those other guardrails flesh.
One such flesh-and-blood American guardrail died recently, a man whose lengthy record in public life was unfairly downgraded during his final years. His name was Robert Swan Mueller III, and his case is illustrative of how we’ve come to regard constraints on presidential behavior, and on those tasked with investigating it.
Monday, May 25, 2026
Is TikTok Art?
Short-form content gets a bad rap these days. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts — all of it nothing but brainrot and digital dopamine, a modern “hypodermic needle,” in the words of Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke.
This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.
But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.
Kids don’t just spend time on social media because they are screen junkies who can’t read. That would be too easy. They spend time on social media, in large part, because social media has become brilliantly, absurdly, unprecedentedly, entertaining.
Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.
So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.
1) The vocation vlogger
Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”
Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”
Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.
This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.
As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.
What is art?
New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”
In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.
Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.
But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.
Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film. TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.
The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.
The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.
by Maibritt Henkel, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Lots of links. If you want something a little longer with a lovely Chinese woman and beautiful scenery (and crazy skills), see Liziqui (YouTube). Channel here.]
This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.
But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.
Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.
So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.
1) The vocation vlogger
Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”
Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”
Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.
This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.
As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.
2) The craftsman
A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.
Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.
The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.
Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.
Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.
And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.
The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.
A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.
Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.
The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.
Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.
Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.
And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.
The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.
3) The comedian
A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.
Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.
How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.
The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.
As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.
It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.
Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.
I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.
A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.
Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.
How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.
The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.
As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.
It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.
Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.
I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.
4) The aestheticist
Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.
But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.
Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.
The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.
Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.
But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.
Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.
The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.
What is art?
New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”
In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.
Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.
But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.
Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film. TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.
The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.
The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.
by Maibritt Henkel, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Lots of links. If you want something a little longer with a lovely Chinese woman and beautiful scenery (and crazy skills), see Liziqui (YouTube). Channel here.]
Shane Mauss | Trips: Second Dose
Psychedelic experiences are famously hard to describe. So comedian Shane Mauss didn’t just describe them—he built a way to show them.
In TRIPS: Second Dose, Shane dives into ayahuasca, DMT, and ketamine, translating hyperspace, out-of-body experiences, and cosmic rodeos into big laughs and bigger perspective. Filmed inside the 360° immersive madness of Meow Wolf Denver, the visuals are mixed and synced live by Michael Strauss, fusing 25 years of concert/festival visuals with work from 20+ visionary artists curated by Shane.
[ed. Pretty funny and great graphics. I've always wondered why more comedians haven't followed the Cheech and Chong formula from decades ago.]
Doctors, This Is Why Our Patients Are Using ChatGPT
Several months ago, I got the results back from some routine blood tests, and let’s just say several numbers were a tad too high. My doctor advised “continued diet and exercise” and signed off on the results.
For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.
So, I did what everyone does in this day and age: I turned to artificial intelligence. With low expectations, I typed my lab results into ChatGPT.
As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would.
I had always assumed the “human side” of medicine was the part A.I. couldn’t touch. Sure, I know doctors are turning to A.I. to help them break bad news, since patients seem to find messages crafted by bots more empathetic than those written by doctors. But, in practice, what I thought really mattered was that a person was delivering that care.
The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow. [...]
As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.
I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.
It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.
Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.
The reality is, many patients are already consulting A.I. Doctors can keep fearing or condemning those interactions, or they can figure out how to support people using A.I. tools for their health care — cautiously, with clear guardrails. I would never tell patients to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a diagnosis, but perhaps I would suggest they use it to make sense of a new condition or keep up with routine screenings — or translate “diet and exercise” into steps that actually fit into their lives, as I did. At the same time, we need safeguards built into these systems to protect people from real harm from dangerous advice.
My experience with the chatbot has already shifted how I interact with patients in the E.R., with only minutes to piece together fragments of their circumstances. When a patient asks the same question repeatedly, I try to listen for what’s behind it. Maybe she’s not after more medical facts.
by Dr. Helen Ouyang, NY Times | Read more:
Image: María Medem
[ed. I had this exact experience a month or so ago. Asked for a full blood workup to see if there were any problems. Called back two weeks later for results. No answer. Waited another week and went to the clinic in person to make sure my first request hadn't somehow gotten lost in the bureaucracy (which happens, frequently). Except, this time I was smart enough to ask for a print-out of my lab results. Again, after receiving no response from my doctor, I took a picture of the results, uploaded them to Anthropic's Claude and asked it to interpret them. At first I got the standard disclaimer that it doesn't do diagnoses, but then I asked it to just interpret the results so I'd know what all the coding meant, the various ranges of acceptability etc., and it gave me a detailed response. Much better than I'd ever gotten from doctors before who'd mostly just say (if they responded at all) "oh yeah, everything looks ok, some things look a bit high, but others ok". And that's it. No explanation or guidance on anything, like follow-ups were a burden (that couldn't be billed for an office visit). I'll always use AI from now on to evaluate my results. Doctors (and hospitals) have brought this upon themselves.]
For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.
As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would.
I had always assumed the “human side” of medicine was the part A.I. couldn’t touch. Sure, I know doctors are turning to A.I. to help them break bad news, since patients seem to find messages crafted by bots more empathetic than those written by doctors. But, in practice, what I thought really mattered was that a person was delivering that care.
The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow. [...]
As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.
I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.
It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.
Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.
The reality is, many patients are already consulting A.I. Doctors can keep fearing or condemning those interactions, or they can figure out how to support people using A.I. tools for their health care — cautiously, with clear guardrails. I would never tell patients to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a diagnosis, but perhaps I would suggest they use it to make sense of a new condition or keep up with routine screenings — or translate “diet and exercise” into steps that actually fit into their lives, as I did. At the same time, we need safeguards built into these systems to protect people from real harm from dangerous advice.
My experience with the chatbot has already shifted how I interact with patients in the E.R., with only minutes to piece together fragments of their circumstances. When a patient asks the same question repeatedly, I try to listen for what’s behind it. Maybe she’s not after more medical facts.
by Dr. Helen Ouyang, NY Times | Read more:
Image: María Medem
[ed. I had this exact experience a month or so ago. Asked for a full blood workup to see if there were any problems. Called back two weeks later for results. No answer. Waited another week and went to the clinic in person to make sure my first request hadn't somehow gotten lost in the bureaucracy (which happens, frequently). Except, this time I was smart enough to ask for a print-out of my lab results. Again, after receiving no response from my doctor, I took a picture of the results, uploaded them to Anthropic's Claude and asked it to interpret them. At first I got the standard disclaimer that it doesn't do diagnoses, but then I asked it to just interpret the results so I'd know what all the coding meant, the various ranges of acceptability etc., and it gave me a detailed response. Much better than I'd ever gotten from doctors before who'd mostly just say (if they responded at all) "oh yeah, everything looks ok, some things look a bit high, but others ok". And that's it. No explanation or guidance on anything, like follow-ups were a burden (that couldn't be billed for an office visit). I'll always use AI from now on to evaluate my results. Doctors (and hospitals) have brought this upon themselves.]
Price's Law
Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists. That’s insane.
Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem.
This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for
What Is Price’s Law?
In 1963, a physicist named Derek J. de Solla Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention.
He noticed something strange: the distribution of productivity wasn’t a bell curve as you’d expect… it wasn’t even close.
It followed a completely different mathematical pattern.
Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.
Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
In corporate America, Price’s Law shows up with eerie precision. Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.
Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.
In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity. Most stars are dim, unremarkable red dwarfs.
A handful of blue giants blaze so bright they illuminate entire stellar neighborhoods. (Scientifically known as a Power Law distribution)
In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.
The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.
And this is not a coincidence or rigged systems or unfair advantages (though those exist too).
This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.
And if you’re building a personal brand or a one-person business, understanding this law might literally save you.
by Kaguura Gichuru, The Write Path | Read more:
Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem.
This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for
What Is Price’s Law?
In 1963, a physicist named Derek J. de Solla Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention.
It followed a completely different mathematical pattern.
Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output
- In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research
- On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation
The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.
Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
In corporate America, Price’s Law shows up with eerie precision. Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.
Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.
In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity. Most stars are dim, unremarkable red dwarfs.
A handful of blue giants blaze so bright they illuminate entire stellar neighborhoods. (Scientifically known as a Power Law distribution)
In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.
The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.
And this is not a coincidence or rigged systems or unfair advantages (though those exist too).
This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.
And if you’re building a personal brand or a one-person business, understanding this law might literally save you.
by Kaguura Gichuru, The Write Path | Read more:
Image: via
Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids
I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.
I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.
People Don’t Let Kids Do Things
As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:
When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.
Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.
“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”
Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”
There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.
Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]
And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):
I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.
People Don’t Let Kids Do Things
As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:
1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.
2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:
- 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store
- 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents
- 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them
- 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
- 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)
- 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)
- 71% have not used a sharp knife
When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.
Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.
“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”
Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”
There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.
Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]
Let Your Children Play
Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.
We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.
And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.
Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.
We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.
Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.Don’t Fear The CPS
Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus
shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)
is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.
The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.
And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.
And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):
MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.
Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.
This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.
Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.
It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.
… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!
Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.
Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.
do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.
you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.
you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?
yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.
Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents
One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.
One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.
This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.
Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.
having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase | Read more:
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