How to Defeat an Autocrat: Lessons From Hungary

Starting early in the morning on the second Saturday of May, first hundreds and then thousands of people gathered in the square in front of Hungary’s majestic Parliament building to celebrate the start of a new political era. This was the square where tens of thousands gathered in 1956 and 1989 to demand an end to the Soviet occupation and in 2006 to protest a discredited government. It was the square on which Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s regime imposed a major redesign more than a decade ago — with traffic rerouted away, a large reflecting pool and raised beds installed, narrow pathways laid down — apparently to ensure that no such mass gathering could take place again. Today it was the square where Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist, would be sworn in, promising a rebirth of democracy and liberty after 16 years of autocratic control.

Squeezing into the available spaces and gradually filling up nearby cafes and streets, the crowd absorbed people of all ages: young people who didn’t remember a time before Orban and who had voted in unprecedented numbers; aging intellectuals who didn’t think they’d ever celebrate their country again; multigenerational families who had arrived by bus after seeing Magyar in their hometowns and villages. During his campaign, Magyar had traveled to an estimated 700 locations, turning many of them into “Tisza islands” — outposts of support for his party. By the end, Magyar was holding five or more rallies a day.

It had looked like an impossible quest. Orban and his cronies dominated the media, persecuted and smeared opposition politicians and changed election laws to benefit his party, Fidesz. Orban had seemed to achieve what the Hungarian sociologist and political theorist Balint Magyar (no relation) calls “autocratic breakthrough” — the point after which it’s impossible to unseat an autocrat using elections. Illiberal politicians from other countries made pilgrimages to Hungary to learn from Orban; CPAC, the gathering for American national conservatives, started staging an annual convention there; and Vice President JD Vance visited Budapest in advance of the election, in a show of support for Orban. And yet Hungarians handed Tisza not just a victory but a constitutional majority, enough power to reverse Orban’s changes to Hungarian laws and institutions. The triumph was stunning — unique in our era of democratic backsliding — and it holds clear lessons for the United States. [...]

In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.”

Magyar enumerated the ways in which Orban had damaged Hungary: a stalled economy in which a third of the population lives in poverty, inadequate health care, low-quality schools, child welfare institutions plagued by abuse, an atmosphere of hatred and fear. Orban’s regime had “stolen from the common good of the Hungarian nation — from the pockets of the Hungarian people, and from the tables of Hungarian children and the elderly,” Magyar said, “an estimated 20 trillion Hungarian forints,” or some $65 billion, over the last decade and a half.

Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words. [...]

For all his tireless work over the last two years, Magyar did not create his political machine from scratch. Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers. An existing news distribution service provided an initial skeleton of the organizing network. A panoply of grass-roots protest movements joined, too. On the day of Magyar’s inauguration, a parallel, smaller commemoration organized by the city of Budapest celebrated those organizations. One by one, people took the microphone to give a short speech about their cause and their part in the electoral victory: teachers who had organized against a unified state-dictated curriculum; a young man who spoke up against abuses in the child care system; a high school student persecuted for reciting an anti-Orban poem; organizers of Budapest’s L.G.B.T.Q. Pride celebration. The speakers stayed onstage, gradually forming a crowd of the kind — the many kinds — of ordinary Hungarians who had ended the Orban era.

That’s a fifth lesson: Grass-roots organizations that have little or no connection to electoral politics — in the United States, that might be the networks formed by the No Kings rallies, ICE-resistance groups and so on — can matter as much as or more than those already focused on winning votes.

Another lesson lies in the issues that motivated Magyar’s voters. Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me. [...]

Peter Magyar scheduled his inauguration for Europe Day — the 76th anniversary of the declaration that created the road map for a united continent. Before he was sworn in, the European flag was raised again. But the Szekely flag remained, signaling that Magyar seeks to represent all Hungarian citizens, including those who supported Orban. In some U.S. coverage, Magyar has been labeled centrist or right-of-center. What his politics actually are — and this is another lesson of his victory — is pluralist. [...]

Like many other autocrats and aspiring autocrats — Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump — Orban had been apparently desperate to maintain power because if he lost his office, he could face criminal charges. For this reason, even as Peter Magyar surged in the polls, and even on Election Day, as early returns pointed to Tisza’s overwhelming victory, many Hungarians assumed Orban would find a way to cling to power. Would he refuse to acknowledge election results? Would he declare martial law? But even after he authorized lump-sum payments of six months’ salary to members of the uniformed services, military personnel were said to overwhelmingly favor regime change. Orban must have known he could not count on them.

He stepped down from Parliament after the election, and on inauguration day he wasn’t in the building. Neither were several of the most prominent members of Fidesz, the party he still leads, which won roughly a fourth of the seats in the legislature. President Tamas Sulyok, an Orban loyalist, was there, however. Before Magyar took his oath of office, Sulyok delivered an anodyne speech about the importance of rule of law and constitutional order.

Magyar refused to play along. “It is ironic to hear him speak of the rule of law now, after two years of silence,” he said. “Mr. President, you remained silent when the failed prime minister called half the country” — those who opposed him — “‘insects to be exterminated.’ You expressed no concern when the secret services were sent after the largest opposition party. You failed to speak up when billions in public funds were used to spread war hatred among Hungarians, including among our children. After so much cowardice and turning a blind eye, how could you represent the unity of this nation? You cannot. It is time to leave with your head held high while you still have the chance.”

Hungarians think of themselves as a polite and reserved people. They arrive on time. They observe decorum. They refrain from confrontation. On election night, however, they had shocked themselves by dancing in the streets, chanting “It’s over!” And now their new prime minister was shocking them again. Inside Parliament there was silence, but the thousands of people watching the speech on the outdoor screens broke out in screams and applause. And when the camera cut to Sulyok, his face frozen in an uncomfortable half-smile, the crowd let out a round of boos that could probably be heard on the other side of the Danube. [...]

When Magyar emerged from the building to address the assembled crowd, he offered his own lesson of his impossible victory. “Against a machine of power,” he said, “we don’t need another machine of power, but real people who — going from mailbox to mailbox, house to house, in the cold, the frost and the rain — are capable of anything for their homeland, their neighbors, their relatives and their community.”

The next task was “to rediscover how to see ourselves as a community once again,” he said. “Therefore, I ask you to turn toward those compatriots who are disappointed today, who are afraid, or who experience this period as a loss. Do not try to defeat them; do not look down on them. Listen to them and talk to them. Tell them that this country belongs to them, too; that they are needed, just as everyone is needed; and that together, we will rebuild Hungary, because there is no left, there is no right — only Hungarians.”

One of the secrets of Peter Magyar’s success, Balint Magyar had told me, lay in reclaiming the symbols of the nation: the flag, the national anthem, the very idea of Hungarian-ness. Now Peter Magyar was watching over an elaborate national performance: the raising of the flag, soldiers goose-stepping, cavalry in ornate uniforms.

And then the pageantry was over, but Magyar was still separated from the crowd by large expanses of empty space, the distance that Orban’s government had so carefully engineered. Magyar started motioning to the crowd: Come closer, come closer — but people were already pressed up against the edge of the reflecting pool. After a few moments, the excitement and the desire to be fully a part of this historic moment became too much to resist. Some men hiked up their pants and ran across the reflecting pool — which, it turned out, was just a couple of inches deep. Almost immediately, hundreds more followed. They ran splashing through the water and onto the other side, filling the space from which they had so long been excluded. “This is your house now!” Magyar exclaimed.

by M. Gessen, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Máté Bartha

[ed. So happy for them. It must feel wonderful to have hope again when change seemed impossible.]

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The Taming of the Stooge

"I would characterize it sort of like a powerful interest group within a political party at this point. It used to be the entire political party."
—Iggy Pop explains his current relationship with his penis.

[ed. I forgot I'd posted this (like so many other things). I need to get back into the archives more. Peaches cracks me up: see also - here and here.]

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the edited transcript of an intewiew with Feynman made for the BBC television program Horizon in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode of Nova. Feynman had most of his I$ behind him by this time (3e died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the perspective not often attainable by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and very personal discussion on many topics close to Feynman's heart: why knowing merely the name of something is the same as not knowing anything at all about it; how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.

The Beauty of a Flower 

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says - “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understind how it subtracts. 

Avoiding Humanities 

I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

Tyrannosaurus in the Window 

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and so he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.” 

Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that - everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so (LAUGHS) I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude - I wasn’t frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don’t think, but I thought that it was very, very interesting, that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why. 

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill Mountains was the place where people went in the summer; and the fathers - there was a big group of people there but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back on the weekends. When my father came he would take me for walks in the woods and tell me various interesting things that were going on in the woods - which I’ll explain in a minute - but the other mothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks, and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere at first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me - we had a personal thing together - so it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend, and the next Monday when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is that?” And I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your father doesn’t tell you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at a bird he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a . . . in Italian a . . . ,” he says “in Chinese it’s a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ,” etcetera. “Now,” he says, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it - I remember this - it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon,” and I says, “why is that?” And he said, “That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding - he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t move back.” So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right - the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward. It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that] the wagon caught up with it. So that’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.

by Richard Feynman, Learning Media MIT.edu |  Read more: (pdf)
Image: uncredited

Hug of Death

Will Japan's content industries survive the government's efforts to promote them?

You can be loved or you can be feared.

In a January interview, the White House’s chief of staff declared that we live in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” signaling America’s choice to take the latter path.

Japan, on the other hand, seems dedicated to the former. In February, Japanese government officials announced a plan to expand the size of the nation’s content production industry, meaning its books, manga, anime, games, movies, and more, to $130 billion USD by 2033, with an eye towards making pop culture a pillar of the economy.

Is this a realistic goal? That’s another story, one I tackled last month. But let’s put the punditry aside and say they succeed – that the Japanese government manages to create the world’s first true fantasy-industrial complex, a government and private industry working together to harness content production and export as an economic engine. (What about Korea, you might ask? They are a pop-cultural powerhouse, but the nation’s fortunes still rest upon the physical products it produces — content currently only accounts for 2% of their economy.) The question then becomes: what are the broader implications of linking a nation’s economic well-being to its entertainment industry? In other words, what happens when a country doesn’t simply promote its pop culture but comes to depend on it?

I’ve written for years about how Japan’s network of cultural producers has won hearts and minds around the globe – how their efforts have contributed to Japan’s considerable soft power. But that was an organic development, entirely grass roots, the product of countless creators and consumers collaborating over many years to build one of the most vibrant environments for pop culture on the planet. The government is well aware of its nation’s reputation as a pop superpower, but it played little role in making it so.

What about the Cool Japan fund? Notoriously ineffective. Critics (who include the fund’s own CEO) frame this as a bad thing. But I think otherwise. The scandals, the questionable investments (Cars? Refrigerators!?), and general ineptitude are a blessing in disguise. I say this with no schadenfreude. The Cool Japan bureaucrats I’ve met all seem like good folks. I say it because a government getting involved in the production of fantasies has huge implications for societies. And to be frank, I don’t think any of the architects behind Japan’s big push have really thought them through. [...]

Freedom of expression is a good thing, most of us will agree. But free speech is where the problems will begin, and compound, for the Japanese government. If the authorities are really going to take an active stand in promoting everything, without interfering in those creative works, they’re going to find themselves associated with things that get, well, creative with social norms. More than that, things that anger and disgust.

The dark matter of Japan’s pop-cultural industry is huge amounts of edgy content. Some of it is quite disturbing. (Don’t worry, that isn’t a risky click: it’s a link to the time I got “lolicon” into The New Yorker.) I’m not a fan of this material, but I’ve always believed the freedom Japanese artists feel to go places that polite society doesn’t, is part of what gives the content industry such vitality here. I mean, even if you aren’t producing crazy stuff, the knowledge that nothing’s off limits has to unshackle imaginations. Or shackle them. I don’t judge.

Anyway, promoting the industry as a whole doesn’t equal endorsement of any given content, right? The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers, blah blah blah, right? Right. But also wrong. Because once you’ve made Content with a capital C the foundation of your nation’s economy, it becomes your official face to the world. That includes all of the skeevy stuff that freaks people out, in Japan and elsewhere. And the implications of that are downright existential, as in “can a nation really exist on pop culture alone?”

by Matt Alt, Pure Invention |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Kimono Chaos

Traditionally speaking, there are many rules to follow in the wearing of kimono. To learn them, one needs to be taught, either over time by their elders, or at kimono school, such as the one I went to for several years. Rules implies rigidity, but it’s not like there are fashion police out there. More simply, it’s a form of etiquette. Even in the modern era, when kimono culture is on the wane, knowing which kimono styles and patterns are most appropriate for a given situation is still seen as a social grace.

But there is one place in Japan where all the rules go out the window. Ironically, it’s also where you can see more people in kimono than almost anywhere else in public. It is Asakusa. I know this from personal experience, for dressing up in a kimono and going to this most traditional of Tokyo neighborhoods is one of my favorite pastimes.

Asakusa, and more specifically the Senso-ji temple area, is brimming with inbaundo, “inbounds,” as the government calls tourists here. And I have seen some really wild kimono styles there. This doesn’t bother me – far from it. While I prefer to follow traditional etiquette, it’s a free country, as Americans say. In fact I am starting to believe that inbound tourists are creating a totally new form of kimono culture without even realizing it. [...]

As I said, we have many customs when it comes to kimono. One of the most important is matching the season. Kimono have beautiful patterns, most of which have symbolic meanings. Some are obvious, like snow patterns for winter, or sakura cherries for spring. Others are pegged to more specific times: hina-doll patterns are worn in the days leading up to Girls Day on March 3. Rose patterns are only worn when roses bloom, which is May.

It is also customary to match the formality of the occasion. Events like weddings, funerals, or the annual coming-of-age day for the latest crop of twenty year olds all expect very specific types of kimono, traditionally speaking. And when you think about it this makes sense. You aren’t going to wear something bright and chipper to a funeral. Nor would you want something dour for a celebration.

There are further divisions within these events. It probably won’t surprise you to hear a bride wears a very specific form of kimono. What about guests? Well, are you a family member or an invitee? If you’re a close relative, you’re traditionally going to want to wear what is known as a kuro-tomesode. If you’re attending as a friend, a plain pattern is the safest choice. And how old are you? Should you be in your twenties, a colorful furisode would be a wonderful choice. Furisode feature long sleeves and bold, bright patterns, which really pop out and attract attention. They’re considered the privilege of young women. But if you are married – even as a twentysomething – they’re out. Then you’re (traditionally) obligated to wear a more formal kimono with short sleeves.

One of the most fundamental things that can throw outsiders for a loop is that, in the traditional kimono worldview, you aren’t wearing the kimono for yourself. Kimono are fashion, but we wear them to show respect for someone or something. This means you’d never wear anything that might shift the center of attention away from the occasion. Weddings? No-brainer. But it’s true for all events, really.

For instance, if you were attending a graduation ceremony, even as a parent, you wouldn’t want to overshadow those getting the spotlight by wearing something super flashy or opulent. And the center of attention isn’t necessarily a person. In spring, it is customary to avoid wearing kimono with cherry blossom patterns to hamami flower-viewing parties. Why? Because the center of attention for cherry blossom parties are the cherry blossoms themselves! Now, it isn’t like anyone is going to yell at you if you happen to wear a sakura pattern to a hanami. But to those in the know, you might seem like, well, a bumpkin.

So those are just a few examples. There are many others. As I often say, Japan is really flexible when it comes to spirituality, but it’s really rigid when it comes to society. You can roll with this or not. I chose to – that’s why I took kimono classes!

Which brings us back to Asakusa. I usually go alone, strolling the shopping arcades, paying my respects at the temples, and maybe stopping at a cafe to write and sip some coffee. These are considered casual occasions, kimono-wise. So I always pick a casual one: tsumugi, for example, which is considered the all-purpose wear of the kimono world, kind of like how the West sees jeans. I tend to go for more colorful patterns, and because Asakusa is such a culturally historic place, I often choose antique kimono for a retro feel. I like to go for a Taisho-era or early Showa vibe. Asakusa’s that kind of place.

It was in fact at a cafe that I started to notice more tourists in kimono. I opened the door and saw the room completely packed with Asian women, all dressed in ultramodern kimono. Really ultramodern, like something out of a Harajuku boutique, with laces and ruffles, the fabric beaded with faux pearls. This really shocked me. Were kimono making a comeback? It wasn’t until I was finally seated that I realized: everyone was speaking Chinese. Aha. These were tourists.

by Hiroko Yoda, Japan Happiness | Read more:
Images: uncredited

Velvet Underground
via:

Voice Hero: The Inventor of Karaoke Speaks

It’s one a.m. The bar is closing but the night isn’t over yet. While milling about on the sidewalk, a friend suggests, ‘Karaoke?’ And suddenly the night gets a lot brighter—and a little more embarrassing.

It’s safe to say that at no point in human history have there been as many people singing the songs of themselves, uncaring that their song was first sung by Gloria Gaynor, Frank Sinatra, or Bruce Springsteen. Karaoke has become inescapable, taking over bars from Manila to Manchester. Passions run high. In the Philippines, anger over off-key renditions of ‘My Way’ have left at least six dead. That statistic hides, however, the countless renditions of the Sinatra anthem that leave people smiling—or at least just wincing. The sing-along music machine terrifies the truly introverted, but it is a hero to countless closet extroverts, letting them reveal their private musical joy. Literally, karaoke is the combination of two Japanese words, ‘empty,’ and ‘orchestra’—but we might also lovingly translate it as ‘awkward delight.’

Yet for all karaoke’s fame, the name of its Dr. Frankenstein is less known, perhaps because he never took a patent out on the device and only copyrighted its name in the U.S. in 2009. His name is Daisuke Inoue, a Japanese businessman and inventor born in Osaka in 1940. In 2004 he was honored with an Ig Nobel Prize, given for unusual inventions or research.

In 2005, he shared the story of his life leading up to the Ig Nobel in an interview with Robert Scott Field for Topic Magazine. No longer in print, Topic was one of The Appendix’s inspirations (along with StoryCorps) for its celebration of the everyday and undersung heroes of our world. As a history of another sort of invention, Mr. Inoue’s interview was particularly memorable and deserves to be more widely available. With the permission of both Topic and Mr. Inoue, we are pleased to re-present his delightfully inspiring account of his life and work.

We hope you sing along.

***

Last year I received a fax from Harvard University. I don’t really speak English, but lucky for me, my wife does. She figured out the letter was about the Ig Nobel Prizes, awards that Harvard presents for inventions that make people laugh—and then make them think. I was nominated for an Ig Nobel Peace Prize as the inventor of karaoke, which teaches people to bear the awful singing of ordinary citizens, and enjoy it anyway. That is “genuine peace,” they told me.

Before I tell you about my hilarious adventures at the prize ceremony, though, you need to know how I came to invent the first karaoke machine. I was born in May 1940, in a small town called Juso, in Osaka, Japan. My father owned a small pool hall. When I was three and a half years old, I fell from the second floor and hit my head. I was unconscious for two weeks. The doctors told my parents that if I lived, I would probably have brain damage. A Buddhist priest visited me, blessed me and replaced my birth name, Yusuke, with a new name: Daisuke, which means, in the written characters of kanji, “Big Help.” I needed it. Later I learned that the same Buddhist priest had commented that the name would also lead me to help others.

by Daisuke Inoue and Robert Scott, The Appendix | Read more:
Image: courtesy Daisuke Inoue

[ed. I've been going through the archives lately, in this case 'Music'. Lots of great stuff there. Check it out.]

Around the World on a Dark Desert Highway

"Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore, West Virginia…” I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station."

—Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

***

Whenever I hear Neil Young sing about a “town in north Ontario” where there’s “memory to spare,” I’m transported back to a hillside in northern California in the early 1970s. I’m twelve and sitting with a friend the same age. We’re at summer camp and he’s teaching me the simple chord changes to “Helpless,” which is about to become the first song I can play on guitar.

Music does for me what biting into a madeleine did for that character in Proust’s novel: it sends me hurtling through time and space to a specific moment in the past. I’m sure this is true for many other people as well. And they, too, surely often end up in places far removed from the settings mentioned in the songs that set them in memory-fueled motion.

This is why, ever since reading Video Night in Kathmandu, with its wonderful evocation of mid-1980s Manila, where “music buzzed through the streets” from “dawn to midnight,” I’ve wanted to ask Pico Iyer a question: “When Don Henley begins crooning about a ‘dark desert highway’ in California, are you suddenly back in Manila and in your late twenties again?” (...)

What then of “Hotel California”? Whenever I hear Don Felder’s distinctive guitar opening now, I’m instantly in a New Delhi café in a supremely jet-lagged, disoriented state. I’d been in India less than 24 hours when that song from my teenage years in California became the first one I ever heard in India.

The mechanism of this musical memory must be somewhat different from the one that sends me to China whenever John Denver waxes nostalgic about the Shenandoah Valley. For while I had heard “Country Roads” plenty of times before going to Shanghai, I had never thought much about it, nor did I associate it with any special setting or moment. The Eagles, by contrast, were a group I listened to—and thought about—a lot while growing up in California, dreaming of a career as a singer-songwriter. And long before “Hotel California” began evoking an Indian café on my first visit to the country in 2010, it made me think of a very different time, place, and companion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whenever I heard “Hotel California,” I would be transported back to an afternoon in the 1970s in the west LA home of close family friends, soon after the album Hotel California was released. The house was one I hung out at a lot in those days. I was close to two of the three brothers in the family, Danny and David.

In this moment, David keeps picking the needle up off the turntable and restarting the song after first twenty and then thirty and then forty seconds of it have played. He is determined, in a way that fascinates me because it seems to border on the obsessive, to figure out how to replicate exactly the song’s bass line. The intensity of his focus strikes me as special, because I can never get myself to work as hard as David on mastering a lick. (It isn’t until later that I realize he is equally bemused as a teenager by how long I can spend worrying over and reworking a lyric I’ve written, which already seems to work fine in terms of meter and rhyme.)

It took the strangeness of hearing the song right after arriving in India to break the memory hold of that west LA living room, but by the time that happened, I had already spent years thinking about the song’s peculiar global ubiquity. Seeing it mentioned in Video Nights in Katmandu was one thing that got me thinking about this topic, but so did noticing how often, from the mid-1990s on, I would hear the strains of the song at least once during my periodic return visits to China. I also began to notice how often I would see the song mentioned on Beijing-based blogs, often disparagingly.

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Boom | Read more:
Image: Video via Boing Boing

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!’

Sean Costello

 

"The great book of heaven is open to all eyes." Astronomy for amateurs. 1904.

via:

via:

The Kills

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.

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.]

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.

by NDTV Profit News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Garland Jeffreys

 

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.”

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.

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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.]