Tilly Norwood

Tilly Norwood: how scared should we be of the viral AI ‘actor’? 

It takes a lot to be the most controversial figure in Hollywood, especially when Mel Gibson still exists. And yet somehow, in a career yet to even begin, Tilly Norwood has been inundated with scorn.

This is for the simple fact that Tilly Norwood does not exist. Despite looking like an uncanny fusion of Gal Gadot, Ana de Armas and High School Musical-era Vanessa Hudgens, Norwood is the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) talent studio called Xicoia. And if Xicoia is to be believed, then Norwood represents the dazzling future of the film industry.

Unveiled this weekend at the Zurich film festival, Norwood has been touted as the next Scarlett Johansson, with studios apparently clamouring to work with her and a talent agency lined up to represent her. Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Well, this sucks.]

The Aloha Spirit Has Its Limits

When hate speech is too much.

In October 1964, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the group called American Nazi Party, came to speak to the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa. Rockwell was invited by the Associated Students of the University of Hawaiʻi as part of a program to hear from political leaders representing diverse perspectives.

This is what Rockwell did. He went to college campuses, spouted off about his political views, and got a lot of attention for being provocative. He also liked media stunts, as when he tried to organize a “white power” march to counter Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington, but that didn’t amount to much. He told the UH crowd that no one paid any attention to him until he started wearing a swastika.

 
“Now, people turn out because they want to see that Nazi. When I was a nice guy, that didn’t happen,” he said.

At the Mānoa campus, he spoke at Kennedy Theatre in the morning, Andrews Amphitheatre at noon, and took questions later in the day at Hemenway Hall. He visited the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo later that week, where he was met by large crowds and protest signs that read, “No Room For Fascism in America.” A grainy old newspaper picture shows him wearing lei he received and his signature corncob pipe jutting from his teeth.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin sounded smirky in its coverage of Rockwell’s Mānoa visit:

“George Lincoln Rockwell, American Nazi leader, found it difficult to sell his political ideology yesterday to some 5,000 University students who heard his three talks …The students listened attentively, enjoying Rockwell’s flamboyant and outspoken remarks. But it was clear from their frequent laughter that they didn’t take the Nazi commander seriously.

“The cordial reception and natives in the crowd also seemed to fluster the 47-year-old leader of 700 American Nazis. It was obviously disconcerting to insist before an audience representing Hawaii’s diverse racial community, that ‘racial mixing is a sin against nature.’”

One student asked Rockwell how he can justify his racial bigotry.

“A bigot,” Rockwell replied, “is a vile person. The only thing I’m against is someone who is against me… the Jews who seize communications and suppress information, and the Negroes who are trying to push me out of American civilization … Bigotry is stupid, and I am not stupid.”

Rockwell’s speech apparently hopped from one thought to another “like a flea on a hot griddle,” as one person described it. He yelled about the ills of American government, which he said was fast headed left toward anarchy, rioting and terrorism.

Rockwell understood, though, that he was speaking to a decidedly different audience.

“From what I’ve seen from you folks — you Japanese, Hawaiians and Chinese — you are the most courteous I’ve ever seen … I have nothing in my heart for you but love … You here in Hawaii have proved to me you fit together and live peacefully, if you go to the Mainland you see one group, the Negroes, that doesn’t fit,” Rockwell told the Mānoa audience.

The tone of the event was not one of outrage, though. Neither was it of acceptance. It was as if what he was saying was so outrageous and horrible that the students took it as theater of the absurd. (...)

This plays into the idea we still cling to about the aloha spirit being the antidote to hate. Perhaps we still believe because it’s true. Perhaps it’s a power that we don’t always know how to summon. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking.

The Star-Bulletin coverage of Rockwell’s Mānoa speeches said that the loudest reaction from the audience came when Rockwell said, “This is the nicest place I’ve ever been. I think I’ll move here.”

The crowd groaned in unison. You can visit but don’t bring that stuff here to stay. The aloha spirit has its limits.

Rockwell, who had served in the Navy and had been stationed in Hawaiʻi for a short time, never did move to Hawaiʻi. Three years after his visit, Rockwell was shot and killed by John Patler, a former member of his American Nazi Party, which he had renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party. Patler had been a devotee of Rockwell, but the relationship had unraveled in the year prior to the shooting.

by Lee Cataluna, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Scientists Unlock Secret to Venus Flytrap’s Hair-Trigger Response

To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported, the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016, Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

And in 2023, scientists developed a bioelectronic device to better understand the Venus flytrap's complex signaling mechanism by mapping how those signals propagate. They confirmed that the electrical signal starts in the plant's sensory hairs and then spreads radially outward with no clear preferred direction. And sometimes the signals were spontaneous, originating in sensory hairs that had not been stimulated.

Glowing green

This latest research is an outgrowth of a 2020 paper detailing how the Japanese authors genetically altered a Venus flytrap to gain important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works. They introduced a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle. They concluded that the waxing and waning of calcium concentrations in the leaf cells seem to serve as a kind of short-term memory for the Venus flytrap, though precisely how calcium concentrations work with the plant's electrical network remained unclear.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Naturfoto Honal|Getty

Jeremy Miranda (American b.1980), Cooking, 2024

via:

The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers

An oral history

The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies, the ramifications of building a master database to track and surveil immigrants are just beginning to be felt, and its cadre of Musk protégés and tech entrepreneurs remain embedded in agencies throughout the executive branch. The possibilities this opens up—of private takeovers of government operations, of the government embracing Silicon Valley’s ethos of moving fast and breaking things—remain open.

WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers across dozens of agencies to gather the most comprehensive picture yet of how the American government got to this point, and where it may go from here. Many sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation. They told WIRED not just what has been going on inside the federal government at a time of unprecedented change—but what it’s been like to experience those changes firsthand.

The following is the story, in their words, of what happened when the world’s most powerful man unleashed the world’s richest one on the world’s most complex institution.

by Zoë Schiffer, Leah Feiger, Vittoria Elliott, Makena Kelly, Kate Knibbs, David Gilbert, Molly Taft, Aarian Marshall, Paresh Dave, and Jake Lahut, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Yonk

Emmylou Harris

[ed. Love this old Chuck Berry classic (especially this version by Emmylou and Albert Lee). See also: this excellent cover by Elle and Toni.]

You Never Can Tell (C'est La Vie)

It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They furnished off an apartment with a 2-room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale,
But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
700 little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz
But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They bought a souped-up jitney, was a cherry red '53
And drove it down to Orleans to celebrate their anniversary
It was there where Pierre was wedded to the lovely mademoiselle
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They had a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

via:

I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me.

“Please hold,” the caller said, “while I transfer you to my supervisor.”

It was a Wednesday in August, a little before lunch. The call came from a 212 number, which for a New Yorker could be almost anything — the school, the pharmacy, the roof guy — so I answered.

The caller asked for me by name and stated in measured tones that he was from Chase Bank and he wanted to verify transfers being made from my account to someone in Texas.

Wrong number, I said. I don’t have a Chase account.

But one was recently opened in your name, he replied, with two Zelle transfers. And minutes ago, someone tried to transfer those funds, $2,100, to San Antonio.

Now, this carried the whiff of plausibility. I’m one of some 150 million people who have access to Zelle, the payments platform that lets you send and receive money from your phone. But my scam radar was also fully operational and pinging.

“How do I know this isn’t a scam?” I asked, sounding like that guy in every movie who asks an undercover cop if he’s a cop.

He had a quick answer. Look at the number showing on your phone and Google it, he replied. “Now look up the Chase branch at 3 Times Square,” he instructed. “See the office phone number?” I did, and it matched the one on my phone’s screen.

Then he added, “Here at Chase, we’ll never ask for your personal information or passwords.” On the contrary, he gave me more information — two “cancellation codes” and a long case number with four letters and 10 digits.

That’s when he offered to transfer me to his supervisor. That simple phrase, familiar from countless customer-service calls, draped a cloak of corporate competence over this unfolding drama. His supervisor. I mean, would a scammer have a supervisor?

The line went mute for a few seconds, and a second man greeted me with a voice of authority. “My name is Mike Wallace,” he said, and asked for my case number from the first guy. I dutifully read it back to him.

“Yes, yes, I see,” the man said, as if looking at a screen. He explained the situation — new account, Zelle transfers, Texas — and suggested we reverse the attempted withdrawal.

I’m not proud to report that by now, he had my full attention, and I was ready to proceed with whatever plan he had in mind. 

Internet fraud has grown steadily, with 2024 setting new record-high losses — “a staggering $16.6 billion,” the F.B.I.’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center wrote in a recent report. These crimes include elaborate cryptocurrency schemes and ransomware attacks on entire cities, but phishing and spoofing — the cloning of an actual phone number — still lead the list of some 860,000 complaints last year.

Are these scams entering some sort of improved, 2.0 version of the old-school Nigerian-prince-type setup?

“I wouldn’t call it an improvement,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York offices of the F.B.I. “It’s an adaptation. As the public becomes more aware of schemes, they need to adjust.”

The man claiming to be a Chase supervisor asked me to open Zelle. Where it says, “Enter an amount,” he instructed me to type $2,100, the amount of the withdrawals he was going to help me reverse.

Then, in the “Enter phone number or email” window — where the other party in a Zelle transaction goes — he instructed me to type the case number the first caller had given me, but to leave out the four letters. Numbers only. I dutifully entered the 10 digits, but my skepticism was finally showing up.

“Mr. Wallace,” I said, somewhat apologetically. “This case number sure looks like a phone number, and I’m about to send that number $2,100.”

No, he replied, because of this important next step. In the window that says “What’s this for? ” where you might add “babysitter” or “block party donation,” he told me to enter a unique code that would alert his team that this transaction should be reversed.

It was incredibly long, and he read it out slowly — “S, T, P, P, six, seven, one, two …” — and I typed along. Now and then he even threw in some military-style lingo: “… zero, zero, Charlie, X-ray, nine, eight …”

Once we were done, he had me read the whole 19-character code back to him.

Now, he said, press “Send.”

But one word above the “What’s this for?” box containing our special code with the X-ray and the Charlie kept bothering me: “Optional.”

Then I had an idea, and asked the supervisor if he was calling from 3 Times Square. Yes, he said.

I’ll come to you, I said, and we’ll fix this together.

By then it will probably be too late, he said.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and he said that would be fine, and I hung up.

I called my bank and confirmed what I’d come to suspect. There had been no recent Zelle activity.

My jaw dropped when I went back and looked at my call history. Sixteen minutes — that’s how long they had me on the line.

In decades as a crime reporter, I’ve covered many, many scams — psychic scams, sweetheart swindles, real-estate scams, even the obscure “nanny scam,” where a fake mother reaches out to a young caregiver to try to rip her off.

I should be able to spot a scam in under 16 seconds, I thought — but 16 minutes?

I wanted to know why this scam seemed to work so much better than others.

by Michael Wilson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jordan Speer/Chase

Crossing the Line

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — The backstroke was aborted as a “F*** YOU RORY” arose from the right side of the fourth green. Shane Lowry came over to comfort Rory McIlroy, who had walked away from his ball after the shout, shaking his head in dazed resignation that the Ryder Cup had come to this. Lowry whispered some encouragement while McIlroy composed himself and returned to his eagle attempt, but the jeers resumed before his ball had even begun its journey toward the cup. When the putt missed, the hostile shouts transformed into mocking cheers. McIlroy continued shaking his head, every gesture suggesting a man who desperately wanted to be anywhere else. 

Moments later, Lowry sank his own eagle putt from distance, pointing toward a pocket of European supporters while appearing to direct choice words back at the American hecklers. McIlroy sought out the match referee and a marshal, frustrated by their apparent indifference to the abuse being hurled his direction. What made the scene shocking was not its divergence from what golf is, but that it had become the status quo for what McIlroy suffered throughout Saturday afternoon. (...)

At the first fairway, McIlroy stood over his approach shot as a wall of boos cascaded from the grandstands during his practice swings. American assistant captain Webb Simpson frantically gestured for silence, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. McIlroy's pitch had barely left the clubface before the verbal assault resumed with renewed venom. He walked toward the green to mark his ball, taunts erupted from spectators lining Round Swamp Road. "Choker!" they screamed in unison. "Remember Pinehurst!" The grandstands flanking the green transformed into a countdown timer, fans bellowing numbers as McIlroy deliberated over his birdie putt. "You're taking too damn long!" one roared, attempting to weaponize their own impatience. When McIlroy's attempt slid past the cup, the cheers exploded into slurs: "Leprechaun!" "Overrated!" “Take out the Irish trash!”

The fourth hole has been a break in the crowds all week, with fans typically gravitating toward the clubhouse and closing holes instead. But Saturday afternoon brought exploration, and with it, more hostility. McIlroy crushed his drive down the fairway only to receive a "F*** you, little man!" in return off the tee. The mathematics were something: By this reporter's count, 30-something f-bombs had been hurled at McIlroy in the first four holes alone. The tallies for "You suck" and "Pinehurst" references became impossible to track. (...)

These scenes shouldn't have surprised anyone. New York golf tournaments have long been breeding grounds for fan disturbances, and Bethpage carries its own notorious reputation. The European team had arrived prepared, boasting about VR headset training sessions designed to simulate crowd hostility. They claimed to be ready for the worst. But no simulation could replicate the toxic alchemy at work here: alcohol mixed with entitlement, rudeness fused with xenophobia.

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Vaughn Ridley
[ed. Pride and support are one thing, but crudeness and jingoism are everywhere these days, and not just in sports. Shows how classless a lot of this country has become. Update: USA loses 15 - 13: US fan ugliness at the Ryder Cup was merely a reflection of Trump’s all-caps America (Guardian):]

***

By the time Europe finished the job, finally, on Sunday, the golf had the last word. But, until the thrilling denouement, the lasting memory of this Ryder Cup threatened not to be a single swing of the club so much as the ugly backdrop: galleries that drifted from partisan into venomous and the organizers who let the line slide until it snapped. (...)

There’s a difference between atmosphere and interference, and Bethpage spent too much of the weekend blurring the two. Boos during practice swings and the sing-song “YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY!” after a European miss were tiresome, but survivable. What crept in on Saturday was different: insults aimed at players’ wives, homophobic slurs, cheap shots at McIlroy’s nationality dripping with tiresome stereotypes, gleeful reminders of Pinehurst the moment McIlroy crouched over anything inside five feet.

Europe answered with performance. So much for home advantage: for two years the Bethpage sales pitch was the snarling, uniquely American cauldron that would rattle Europe. Message received, but the idiots took it literally. Add the optics of Donald Trump’s fly-in on Friday – fist bumps, photo-ops, galleries dotted with Maga hats and a certain politics of humiliation playing to its base – and the swagger slid easily into license. That doesn’t make the Ryder Cup a referendum. It does explain how quickly the rope line starts to feel like a boundary you’re invited to test. (...)

But treating Bethpage as a one-off misses the larger point. What happened here didn’t invent the tone of American life so much as reflect what’s been an incremental breakdown in public behavior. The country now lives in all-caps, from school-board meetings that sound like street rallies and comment sections that have spilled into the street. The algorithm bankrolls outrage, the put-down is political vernacular and the culture applauds “saying the quiet part out loud”. In 2025 you can say almost anything in public and be cheered for it (unless you’re Jimmy Kimmel). Put a rope line and a microphone in front of that mix and you get exactly what you got at the Ryder Cup: people testing boundaries not because the moment needs them to, but because they’ve been told volume is virtue. Some might argue golf, in the US particularly, has always been a sport for white conservatives, but it’s hard to remember galleries calling opposing players “faggots” and openly deriding their wives until recently. What could have changed?

***

and this: Rory McIlroy endured hell at Bethpage—and came out the other side a deserving winner

No player in modern Ryder Cup history endured the relentless, systematic dehumanization McIlroy faced on Saturday. It was one of the most shameful spectacles this event has seen—a sustained campaign of cruelty that should embarrass every golf fan and American. For five hours, they questioned his manhood, recited the lowest moments of his career, screamed personal rumors as truth. Every five minutes brought fresh torrents of F-bombs hurled like grenades. They bellowed and booed as he lined up shots, sometimes even mid-swing, violating the gallery code. Every Ryder Cup spawns its share of knuckle-dragging behavior, but never has the abuse been this thunderous, this universal, this unrelenting.

And the fans weren't even acting alone. A first-tee emcee weaponized the crowd, imploring them to chant "**** YOU RORY!" like some deranged cult leader. Volunteers and rules officials stood by with indifference, deaf to McIlroy's pleas for decency, allowing the circus to spiral. For a guy who has always treated the Ryder Cup as sacred, he spent Saturday afternoon looking like a prisoner of war—bewildered by how the event he cherished had morphed into public execution, devastated that a country where he’s lived would savage him so completely.

There's Just Too Many Damn Elites

In a recent piece on James Burnham we discussed the rise of managerialism, or the idea that society is dominated neither by capitalists/owners or workers/proletariat.

Instead they are run by a middle layer of managers who have entirely different incentives from the owners or the shareholders. (...)

While Burnham introduced the concept of managerialism, Barbara Ehrenreich coined the term “Professional Managerial Class” in her similarly-titled 1977 essay. Since her piece, the PMC has only grown in power: eating up most of the money in our society while acting rebellious and aggrieved while doing it.

Marc Andreessen called the PMC the ‘laptop class’:

Laptop Class (noun): Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs.

The professional–managerial class tends to have incomes above the average for their country, with major exceptions being academia and print journalism." [Who are compensated with power instead.]

The PMC exists somewhere between what we think of as the traditional working class and the ruling class. While they aren’t capitalists and don't own the means of production, they do play a big role in upholding and extending capitalism’s reign.

In other words, managers are a specific type of employee that are materially on the side of labor—but symbolically on the side of capital.

What Ehrenreich noted was a bifurcation: On the higher end more commercial PMCs were peeling off to join the elite tier of wealthy CEOs and managers, while on the lower end the PMCs were suffering from a collapse of many of their preexisting professions (e.g. academics, journalists, etc).

And so the academics and journalists had to make a choice: they could either join the traditional working class to fight against the capitalists or they could join the capitalists against the working class in the hope of getting rich in the process.

Post 2008, we saw the PMC join the working class to fight the capitalists in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The majority of Occupy’s participants were college grads who had experienced massive student debt, unemployment, and downward mobility during the economic downturn. The language of “We are the 99%” reflected the fact that the movement’s participants saw themselves as part of the exploited masses.

But the Occupy movement quickly came and went. Corporations obviously didn’t support it because unlike more recent social movements, Occupy required real sacrifice on the part of the corporation. Bernie Sanders ended up losing to Hillary and that was that.

In an attempt to create these new social conflicts (anti-racism, anti-fascism, the gender wars), the PMC altogether ignored and suppressed class wars. When Nike says they’re committed to fighting anti-racism or anti-semitism, it buys them social capital that allows them to deflect against inquiries into how they treat their workers.

Over the next decade that PMC would eventually switch from working class to social justice rhetoric. After all, Wall Street couldn’t support Occupy Wall Street or broader unionization efforts while remaining in business, but they could fund activist efforts with billions of dollars while signaling to the type of elites they’d like to hire and do business with.

To further distinguish the PMC from the working class, colleges initiated the PMC into this esoteric language which made non-college goers feel left out and left behind. A great deal of what constitutes activism is an elaborate set of rules about what you can and can’t say about this or that group. The complexity of the rules is itself strategic — it’s a way of doling out power to the college grads who learned all the rules while taking away power from the non-elites who didn’t.

Activism became not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker. As David Brooks once put it, “You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx”. More specifically, you have to go to college to learn those words, which excludes two-thirds of the country.

Activism also became a strategy for professional advancement beyond college. By calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them in the corporate pecking order, young elites became able to intimidate Boomer administrators and usurp power from them.

This isn’t all just ideological posturing, it’s also a practical necessity. The truth is that we have too many college educated people without technical skills who expect high-status and high-paying jobs and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them.

by Erik Torenberg |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The End of Thinking

As writing skills have declined, reading has declined even more. “Most of our students are functionally illiterate,” a pseudonymous college professor using the name Hilarius Bookbinder wrote in a March Substack essay on the state of college campuses. “This is not a joke.” Nor is it hyperbole. Achievement scores in literacy and numeracy are declining across the West for the first time in decades, leading the Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch to wonder if humans have “passed peak brain power” at the very moment that we are building machines to think for us.

In the U.S., the so-called National Report Card published by the NAEP recently found that average reading scores hit a 32-year low — which is troubling, as the data series only goes back 32 years.

Americans are reading words all the time: email, texts, social media newsfeeds, subtitles on Netflix shows. But these words live in fragments that hardly require any kind of sustained focus; and, indeed, Americans in the digital age don’t seem interested in, or capable of, sitting with anything linguistically weightier than a tweet. The share of Americans overall who say they read books for leisure has declined by nearly 50 percent since the 2000s. (...)

In a viral essay entitled “The dawn of the post-literate society and the end of civilization,” the author James Marriott writes about the decline of thinking in mythic terms that would impress Edward Gibbon. As writing and reading decline in the age of machines, Marriott forecasts that the faculties that allowed us to make sense of the world will disappear, and a pre-literate world order will emerge from the thawed permafrost of history, bringing forth such demons as “the implosion of creativity” and “the death of democracy.” “Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print,” Marriott writes, “many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants, moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking.”

Maybe he’s right. But I think the more likely scenario will be nothing so grand as the end of civilization. We will not become barbarous, violent, or remotely exciting to each other or ourselves. No Gibbon will document the decline and fall of the mind, because there will be no outward event to observe. Leisure time will rise, home life will take up more of our leisure, screen time will take up more of our home life, and AI content will take up more of our screen time. “If you want a picture of the future,” as Orwell almost wrote, “imagine a screen glowing on a human face, forever.” For most people, the tragedy won't even feel like a tragedy. We’ll have lost the wisdom to feel nostalgia for what was lost.

Time Under Tension

… or, you know, maybe not!

Culture is backlash, and there is plenty of time for us to resist the undertow of thinking machines and the quiet apocalypse of lazy consumption. I hear the groundswell of this revolution all the time. The most common question I get from parents anxious about the future of their children is: What should my kid study in an age of AI? I don’t know what field any particular student should major in, I say. But I do feel strongly about what skill they should value. It’s the very same skill that I see in decline. It’s the skill of deep thinking.

In fitness, there is a concept called “time under tension.” Take a simple squat, where you hold a weight and lower your hips from a standing position. With the same weight, a person can do a squat in two seconds or ten seconds. The latter is harder but it also builds more muscle. More time is more tension; more pain is more gain.

Thinking benefits from a similar principle of “time under tension.” It is the ability to sit patiently with a group of barely connected or disconnected ideas that allows a thinker to braid them together into something that is combinatorially new. It’s very difficult to defend this idea by describing other people’s thought processes, so I’ll describe my own. Two weeks ago, the online magazine The Argument recently asked me to write an essay evaluating the claim that AI would take all of our jobs in 18 months. My initial reaction was that the prediction was stupendously aggressive and almost certainly wrong, so perhaps there was nothing to say on the subject other than “nope.” But as I sat with the prompt, several pieces of a puzzle began to slide together: a Financial Times essay I’d read, an Atlantic article I liked, an NAEP study I’d saved in a tab, an interview with Cal Newport I’d recorded, a Walter Ong book I was encouraged to read, a stray thought I’d had in the gym recently while trying out eccentric pull ups for the first time and thinking about how time multiplies both pain and gain in fitness settings. The contours of a framework came into view. I decided that the article I would write wouldn’t be about technology taking jobs from capable humans. It would be about how humans take away their own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will out-skill us that we miss the many ways that technology can de-skill us.

by Derek Thompson |  Read more:

Image: Sanika V on Unsplash

Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010) By the Li River, 1976.

via:

Zayasaikhan Sambuu (Mongolian, born 1975) The Kingdom Of The Dragon, 2012
via:

Roblox

The world’s most beloved video-game app is also a brain-rotting, hypercommercial dystopia.

I’ve arrived in the middle of a vast expanse of what looks like green LEGO plastic subdivided into fenced lots. Mozart’s “Turkish March” plays sourcelessly over a chorus of meowing cats and squeaking mice. A signpost with my name on it indicates that one of these lots of Gumby-colored virtual earth is mine, and it is embarrassingly barren. In contrast, the neighboring garden, belonging to a stranger going by Level12Arsonist, resembles a neon Eden, bulging with glowing vines, buzzing bugs, monkeys, and exotic fruits. I plant a carrot seed and wait for it to sprout. I’m informed I can buy a “bug egg” with funds drawn directly from my in-game checking account, though I have no idea exactly how much this costs or what it might do. Level12Arsonist, in a gesture of goodwill or perhaps pity, sends me a friend request. I am currently playing one of the most popular online video games on the planet.

Grow a Garden, available on the app Roblox, is an exercise in patience. As the name suggests, the premise is almost Zen-like, requiring nothing more of players than planting seeds and waiting — and waiting some more — for them to mature. Then they harvest their crops, sell them for “Sheckles,” an in-game currency, and gradually reinvest their profits in more seeds and more waiting. Or they can simply spend real money on Robux, Roblox’s universal virtual currency, to skip the waiting altogether and transform their plot of land into a verdant oasis.

Roblox features millions of such games, many of them generated by the very children who play them. Grow a Garden — essentially a remake of the legendary time-waster FarmVille — recently smashed Fortnite’s all-time popularity record for concurrent users; at one point this summer, roughly 22 million people were playing at the same time. Grow a Garden is outpacing prestige games with development budgets approaching those of Hollywood blockbusters, put to shame by Roblox’s blocky graphics, a blurry mix of Minecraft and South Park. Grow a Garden was created by an anonymous teenager.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its primitivism, tens of millions of people around the planet love Roblox deeply, sincerely, and with more zeal than anyone loves just about anything else on the internet, their obsession spilling over into YouTube fan accounts, conferences, meetups, and a thriving industry of third-party coding studios. The platform’s popularity is staggering. In 2020, as Facebook continued to watch its share of the global adolescent attention span slide, Roblox told Bloomberg that “two-thirds of all U.S. kids between 9 and 12 years old use Roblox, and it’s played by a third of all Americans under the age of 16.” This year, Roblox reported 111.8 million average daily active users. Like many budding tech companies, it has yet to turn a profit, but it estimates it will end 2025 with around $4.5 billion in revenue and has a market capitalization of nearly $90 billion.

Where Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to create a “metaverse” failed so profoundly his company pretends it never tried in the first place, Roblox presses onward with a living and breathing metaverse that has developed organically over time and with much less Wall Street fanfare. Co-founder David Baszucki describes the company’s mission with a phrase that has the ring of early Facebook idealism: “Connecting a billion people every day with optimism and civility.”

The reality of Roblox is less benevolent. It’s difficult to define this world, which is sprawling and diverse, with any precision. Brookhaven, which has been played more than 71 billion times and typically hosts 500,000 simultaneous players, offers gamers a virtual cityscape where they can act out fantasy lives as baristas, ICE officials, or simply pedestrians. Some games are hardly games at all; I spent longer than I will ever admit in a Roblox world consisting of nothing more than users waiting on a digital line for their turn to be cradled in the arms of an unlicensed Shrek sitting on a giant outhouse toilet. (Shrek Line, at the time I write this, has been played more than 25 million times.) Many popular Roblox games lean heavily into the “brain rot” cultural genre popular among internet-addled children with gameplay mechanics seemingly designed to be as incoherent or absurd as possible. Steal a Brainrot, for example, has gamers watch a procession of 3-D models based on Italian AI-slop memes that they can then buy and steal from one another as they avoid getting hit with baseball bats or slapped by giant hands. This game has been played more than 19 billion times, according to company metrics.

Like any platform synonymous with children, Roblox has become associated with their predation. According to data compiled by Bloomberg Businessweek, between 2018 and 2024, more than two dozen adults have been arrested on suspicions of abducting or abusing victims they met or groomed using Roblox. In one notorious case, a New Jersey man was sentenced to 15 years in prison after Ubering a 15-year-old girl he’d met on Roblox to his home, where he repeatedly sexually abused her. In recent months, Roblox’s stock has been buffeted by reports that it will soon face hundreds of lawsuits alleging that it has facilitated the sexual exploitation of minors, even as it touts a raft of new safety features to protect children. Furthermore, because many of its games are created by children who often see little or no remuneration, Roblox has been accused of being a largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar child-labor operation.

These are serious problems. The bad headlines, however, can obscure other issues that may not be as sensational but are nonetheless widespread, affecting the teeming millions of children who hang out unsupervised in this vast playground. Despite heightened awareness of the dangers the screen life poses to children, parents seem largely unaware that Roblox is a wholly different animal from the usual smart-phone addiction. It’s a place where some of the most insidious trends of the contemporary internet — gambling, compulsive distraction, mindless consumption, and overall enshittification — have hardened into governing realities.

Company executives say it’s a site for unparalleled creative expression. “At the very highest level, one of the things we believe about Roblox is it should be really easy to create,” VP of engineering Nick Tornow told me in an interview. “We believe in the creation of anything, anywhere, by anyone.” But what executives are less willing to acknowledge, at least among those who aren’t the company’s shareholders, is the degree to which this great unruly world created by children has since been engineered to hook them on gamified consumption. What Roblox most resembles is a mall — if a mall could be limitless, free of the confines of brick and mortar. The kids in this mall are ostensibly doing normal mall things, the stuff you may remember doing when you were that age: gossiping, listening to music, goofing around, shopping, trying on outfits — and being asked at every turn to pay for, say, plants for their garden. Roblox presents players with a lopsided choice: the thrill of watching a tomato plant grow, free of charge, or the instant gratification of a lush, instantly generated garden at a price.

And there’s so much more: a virtual universe besieged by corporations and advertisers looking not only to make money but to embed themselves deep in children’s psyches. Even a few hours spent in the game’s various and ever-multiplying worlds is enough to make the shopping malls of old look like a Quaker youth retreat. The Robloxverse is a vision of hallucinatory hypercapitalism that dazzles and entertains as it extracts money from the young and inexperienced and impatient, immersing them in a degraded iteration of the internet where slop and the market and social media are totally integrated. Roblox’s legions of devoted fans see no such thing — only a chance to play, chat, and explore. It’s unclear whether Roblox executives, or the children’s parents, even care that this might be an illusion.

by Sam Biddle, Intelligencer |  Read more:
Image: Roblox

Subscription Prices Gone Wild

Most platform subscription price are going up, not down—and many are skyrocketing.

Music streaming is one more example. Spotify’s Chief Business Officer recently offered the bland observation that price hikes are “part of our toolbox now”—and added “we’ll do it when it makes sense.”

What does that really mean?

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, Spotify subscribers should expect regular prices increases from Spotify in the future—with a boost coming every 12-24 months.

Spotify even bragged to the investment community that it’s always planning a price boost somewhere. Here again is the Chief Business Officer laying it out for us:

I want to also remind you that we take a portfolio approach. So in a sense, you could say that we raise all the time. For instance, in the last quarter we raised in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And I can report to you that on churn, we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary for Spotify.

Years ago, I claimed that streaming economics were broken, and price increases were inevitable. But I never anticipated the rapacious response of the suits in the C-suite.

The short explanation is that they do it because they can. Sure, some people cancel their subscriptions, but not enough to make a difference. Most subscribers simply put up with it.

That’s why the streamers keep boosting prices again and again. They will continue doing it until they encounter serious resistance—and they haven’t hit it yet. So I expect more of the same.

But there’s a danger to this business strategy. Look at Las Vegas, where tourism is collapsing because the casinos went too far. For a long time, the public didn’t flinch in the face of price hikes, but then it got ridiculous:

• $95 ATM fees

• $14 coffee

• $50 early check-in fees

• $30 cocktails

The casinos have now earned a reputation as exploitative price-gougers. Tourism is now down sharply—hotel occupancy has dropped 15%. The city feels “eerily empty.”

This isn’t easy to fix. Once you destroy your reputation and lose the customer’s trust, it’s almost impossible to get it back. That happened in an earlier day to Sears and K-Mart, and they never recovered.

Something similar may already be happening at Disney’s theme parks. Some visitors report that Disney World is empty—looking like a ghost town even during Labor Day weekend.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Parris, Stat Significant

[ed. May have to go back to cable (horrors). Just canceled my Amazon Prime account. See also: Is TV's Golden Age (Officially) Over? A Statistical Analysis.]

via:

Notes on The Greatest Night In Pop

A Study In Leadership, Teamwork, and Love

The Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, tells the story of the making of We Are The World, the 1985 charity single featuring (almost) everyone in American pop at the time: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick…the list goes on and on.

The documentary is based on hours of footage from the night they recorded the single, only a few minutes of which was used for the original music video. The Greatest Night In Pop (TGNIP) came out eighteen months ago, and while millions of people have viewed it, I’m constantly surprised to learn that many have not. Everyone should.

If I had to recommend a documentary or just ‘something to watch on TV’ for absolutely anyone - man or woman, old or young, liberal or conservative, highbrow or lowbrow - I’d recommend The Greatest Night In Pop. It may not be the deepest, most profound ninety minutes of TV, but it is irresistibly enjoyable. And actually, like the best pop, it is deep; it just doesn’t pretend to be.

To us Brits, We Are The World was a mere footnote to Do They Know It’s Christmas? That record was instigated by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and recorded by a supergroup of British and Irish musicians under the name Band Aid (an underrated pun). The proceeds went to famine victims in Ethiopia. We Are The World was made for the same cause.

I knew that, but what I learnt from TGNIP is that there was an element of racial pride in the American response, which arose spontaneously from a conversation between Harry Belafonte and Lionel Richie’s manager. Belafonte said, “We have white folks saving Black folks—we don’t have Black folks saving Black folks”. Lionel agreed, and the wheels started to turn.

Ah, Lionel. The man who makes everything happen. It is perhaps not coincidental that he should emerge as the star of this documentary, given that he co-produced it. The same might be said of Paul McCartney, who emerged as the hero of Get Back. But in neither case do I sense corruption of historical truth. Richie is extraordinary, both as a talking head and in his 1985 incarnation. As chief interviewee - host might be a better word - he sparkles: mischievous, funny, a supreme storyteller. As the prime mover behind the recording of We Are The World, he is simply awesome.

After Belafonte’s prompt, Lionel calls Quincy Jones - the maestro, the master, the producer of the best-selling album of all time. Jones immediately says yes, and they call Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. Both agree, Stevie only belatedly because nobody can get hold of him (a theme of the doc is that Stevie Wonder is both delightful and utterly ungovernable). With these stars on board, they know that pretty much everyone else will want to be involved, and so it proves. They decide to recruit white stars as well as black, and get Springsteen and Joel and Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson and others.

The first thing the principals need to do is come up with a song. Lionel goes to Michael’s house, and the pair spend several days hacking away at the piano (Stevie was invited but is AWOL). With a couple of days to go, they crack it (that is, Quincy likes it). The song is, well, fine: not a work of genius but a pleasant, gospel-inflected anthem, easy enough to sing without much preparation, catchy enough to be a hit. It does the job.

When he took up this baton, Richie was on a career high. He’d left The Commodores and broken out as a solo star. He was about to host the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, the biggest primetime music show, for which he himself was nominated for eight awards (he won six). It soon becomes apparent to all concerned that the best and perhaps only way to get all the talent in the same place to record a single would be to do it on the night of the awards, when so many of them are in town anyway. That would mean doing an all-night session, and for Lionel, it would mean first hosting a live awards show watched by millions - demanding, stressful, exhausting - then helping to run this second, private show right afterwards. No problem!

So it is that after the AMAs we see limousines dropping stars off at an LA recording studio. From a narrative point of view, a delicious premise emerges: a bunch of very famous, egotistical, impatient, nervous pop stars, most of whom don’t know each other (“It was like the first day of kindergarten”, recalls Richie) are brought together in a room to make a record of a song they barely know (they’ve heard a demo). It absolutely has to be a huge hit. They have about eight hours; there’s no coming back tomorrow.

It could have gone badly wrong. That it didn’t is testament to all involved but to Richie and Jones in particular. The two of them corral this unwieldy gaggle into making a sleek and successful product.1 The first time I watched TGNIP I enjoyed it unreflectively. When I watched it for a second time, I began to see it as a study in leadership, collaboration and teamwork.

I’ve written before about how diversity needs to be interpreted beyond demographic attributes like race and gender to temperament and personality. The British management researcher Meredith Belbin constructed a famous inventory of behavioural types which together make up a successful team: the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Catalyst, and so on.

TGNIP prompted me to come up with an inventory of my own: the Decider, the Connector, the Conscience, the Old Buck, the Disrupter, the Weirdo, and the Lover.

THE DECIDER

Quincy Jones taped up a handwritten sign at the entrance to the studio: LEAVE YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR. He was possibly the only person in America who would have dared to write such a sign for such a crowd and certainly the only one who would have been listened to.

To lead a team of 40 superstars was a tough task but it certainly helped to be Quincy Jones. Aged 51, he been an arranger for Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra; produced Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin; won multiple Grammys; turned Michael Jackson into the biggest artist in the world.

In TGNIP he is somewhat marginal to the action just because he is in the control room, while the camera roves the studio floor. We hear his voice over the intercom and see him when he comes onto the floor to coach someone through a difficult vocal part. (He wasn’t interviewed for the doc but we hear him speaking about the night from an earlier interview).

There’s no question he is in charge, though. His interventions are economical and precise; he doesn’t waste words. He is stern when he needs be, jocular in a restrained way; cool. Everyone in the room looks up to him, literally and metaphorically. He is friendly but not your best friend. He is here to make sure the job gets done, and done well. He is The Decider.

THE CONNECTOR

By contrast, Lionel Richie is very much your best friend. He is everywhere, talking to everyone: greeting, thanking, hugging; answering a thousand queries; soothing egos; telling stories and making jokes; giving pep talks; smoothing over potential conflicts; solving musical problems; hyping and cheerleading; raising the energy level when it flags; consoling the weary. Somebody else says of him, “He’s making the water flow.” That’s it.

Richie has a special knack for wrangling very talented, slightly nuts individuals. Cyndi Lauper, who was a massive star at that time, bigger than Madonna, decided on the evening of the recording that she wasn’t going to do it after all. The reason she gave is that her boyfriend didn’t like the demo of the song that Richie and Jackson had made. He’d told her it would never be a hit.

Lionel has to take a minute backstage at the awards ceremony which he is presenting to find Lauper, put any hurt feelings he might have aside, and cajole her into returning to the team. Later on, he’s the one negotiating with Prince over his possible participation over the phone. He also has to hide wine bottles from Al Jarreau so that he doesn’t get too drunk before recording his solo part. Details.

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

[ed. Highly recommended.]

Gone in 2.5 Pitches: The Fleeting Life of a Baseball in Modern MLB

For pitchers, it was once like a $100 bill floating from the sky and landing in the palm of their hand. They would get a ball from the catcher, look it over, and there it was: a scuff mark. They didn’t put it there, but they sure knew what to do with it. It was found money, a supercharged sinker.

“We were watching the Ryne Sandberg game the other day,” said Kansas City Royals pitcher Seth Lugo, referring to a replay of a 1984 broadcast from Wrigley Field. “Sinkers in the dirt, foul balls, the umpire gives ’em to the catcher and they’re throwing ’em back to the pitcher. It wasn’t that long ago. No wonder they all had great sinkers — all the balls were scuffed!”

If Lugo gets a ball with a mark on it, he said, he’ll try to use it as long as he can. But the baseball gods almost never bestow such a gift anymore. As soon as a ball touches dirt, it’s tossed out of play before the next pitch.

It’s got to be a rule, right? To root out the trickery that crafty pitchers once mastered?

“No, no, it’s not automatic,” said Marvin Hudson, an MLB umpire since 1998. “If it hits the dirt, catchers will throw it out quicker than I would. If they hand it back to me, I look at it, and if it’s not scuffed, I’ll wipe it off and keep it in my ball bag. But players are a lot different than they were back when I first came in, as far as what type of ball they want. It’s kind of comical, to be honest with you.”

Watch a ballgame today — really watch it — and you’ll be amazed at how often the pitchers, catchers and umpires change the ball. Just how many does it take to get through a game? It’s like trying to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. You can’t tell on TV, because the ball isn’t always on the screen. And you can’t tell in person unless you commit to looking solely at the ball the entire time.

So that’s what I did. Twice this summer — on July 22 in Philadelphia and August 11 in the Bronx — I tracked the fate of every baseball used in the game. (...)

Both of the games were fairly ordinary: The Phillies beat the Red Sox, 4-1, and the Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins, 6-2. They were both night games, outdoors on grass, with no precipitation. Eleven pitchers combined to throw 508 pitches — 249 in Philly, 259 in New York — while using 202 different baseballs.

That comes out to 2.51 pitches per ball, right in line with MLB’s official data from the last few seasons: 2.60 in 2023, 2.52 in 2024 and 2.44 this season through August 20th.

Pitchers tend to know this without being told. Ask a pitcher to guess the lifespan of a baseball, and he’ll almost always nail the answer.

“I’d say the average life expectancy is less than three (pitches), slightly above two — and it didn’t used to be like that,” said Boston’s Liam Hendriks, 36, who started his pro career in the Gulf Coast League in 2007.

“We had a couple dozen balls for a GCL game. Any time a ball was in play and it was fielded, you’d use that ball unless you asked for a new one. And if you were a starting pitcher that wasn’t pitching that day, you had to chase down the foul balls.”

Things were similarly loose in the college game. Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy, who spent 22 years coaching Notre Dame and Arizona State through 2009, said umpires very rarely changed out the balls.

“I’d stick a road apple in there when the guy asked for balls — you did that sometimes, slip in an old BP ball just for fun,” Murphy said. “You knew the budgets were always tight. A big slice on the ball, they’d change it out. Other than that, no way.”

For decades, this is how it was in the major leagues, too. Oversight of the game’s foundational object was not a priority.

“When Don Mincher was our first baseman, if I had a guy up like Bubba Phillips, who was a notorious first-ball hitter, they’d throw the ball around the infield and Minch would come over to the mound and I’d say, ‘Give me the infield ball,’” said Hall of Famer Jim Kaat, who pitched from 1959 to 1983. “I’d give him the game ball and he’d throw it in the dugout. So the first ball I threw was the infield ball with all the grass stains on it.”

Coaches from that era would pass down the dark arts to the next generation. Mel Stottlemyre, a contemporary of Kaat’s, had pitched with Whitey Ford for the Yankees. Ford loved using scratched baseballs – he would apply it himself with a specially designed ring, or have the catcher, Elston Howard, subtly drag the ball across a metal buckle on his shin guards.

“Whitey was a master, and Mel was a master, too,” said David Cone, who pitched on staffs coached by Stottlemyre with the Mets and Yankees. “The trick he taught me was to keep the ball in your hand when you go down and grab the rosin bag, then touch the ball to the ground and you get a little dirt on it. You’d have a little sweat on the ball so the dirt would stick. He could make the ball dance and sink naturally with just a couple of pebbles of dirt.”

Cone, who pitched from 1986 to 2003, learned the perils of this about halfway through his career. One afternoon in 1995, pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays in Oakland, Cone got a ball with a scuff in the perfect spot: the middle of the leather, on the wide opening between the seams of the horseshoe.

He put the scuff on the left side and gripped it like a sinker, knowing the ball’s right side — now heavier than the left — would naturally shift away from the blemish. And it did, much more than he intended.

“It just went vroooom — shot up and hit Mark McGwire right in the helmet,” Cone said. “Sent him to the hospital and knocked him out of the All-Star Game. That’s when I said, ‘Oh s—, I’ve got to be a little more careful here.’ Scared the hell out of me. That’s when I stopped doing a lot of that.”

Cone’s awakening roughly coincided with a shift in attitude about the supply of baseballs for any given game. Until returning from the 1994-95 strike, when teams were eager to repair fan relations, MLB discouraged players from giving balls to fans. Memos posted in clubhouses warned that fans could be injured, but teams were also just stingy with the supply.

“They were counting every baseball and reusing things – and don’t take this in a bad light, but we weren’t pushed to make it a fan-friendly experience,” said Jamie Moyer, who pitched from 1986 to 2012. “Right now it’s fan-friendly. If you can give away all the balls, go ahead, give them all away!”

That’s the illusion, anyway.

Once the game starts, if a staffer down the foul lines tosses a ball into the crowd — or a player does it, as they do at the end of almost every half-inning — it’s OK. And if a player in the dugout snatches a foul ball and holds onto it, nobody’s going to take it from him.

Almost every other ball goes to the MLB authenticator, who sits by a little tabletop in the corner of (or adjacent to) the home dugout. Once each ball is logged and labeled, it is ready to be sold; prices at a recent Phillies game ranged from $39.99 for a ball pitched by the visitors (and not put in play) to $199.99 for an RBI double hit by a Phillie. (...)

Baseballs arrive at the ballpark in cases of 72 boxes, with each box holding a dozen balls. That’s 864 balls in a case. The Phillies estimate that their storage room holds somewhere between 36 and 48 such cases. If it’s four dozen, that means more than 40,000 baseballs waiting to be used.

To be game-ready, though, the balls must be stored for two weeks, untouched, in a humidor set to 70 degrees at 57 percent relative humidity. Three hours before each game, clubhouse attendants apply a mixture of water and mud to 192 balls (16 dozen), which are then inspected by an MLB gameday compliance monitor. Fourteen dozen approved balls, or 168, must be available for each game.

The mud itself has a charming baseball backstory. It is named for Lena Blackburne, a light-hitting infielder from the 1910s, and still sifted from the same spot.

by Tyler Kepner, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Dan Goldfarb

Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?

A few days ago, The Atlantic published an article on esteemed author John Cheever (1912-1982). But the magazine is almost apologetic, and feels compelled to admit the “final indignity” suffered by this troubled author—”less than 30 years after his death, even his best books were no longer selling.”

What a comedown for a writer who, during his lifetime, was a superstar contributor to The New Yorker, and got all the awards. Those included the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature.

But that’s not enough to keep any of his books in the top 25,000 sellers at Amazon. Try suggesting any of Cheever’s prize-winning works to your local reading group, and count the blank stares around the room.

And it’s not just Cheever. Not long ago, any short list of great American novelists would include obvious names such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. But nowadays I don’t hear anybody say they are reading their books.

And they are brilliant books. But reading Updike today would be an act of rebellion. Or perhaps indulging in nostalgia for a lost era.

The list goes on—Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Agee, etc. Do they exist for readers under the age of forty?

Their era—mid-20th-century America—really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.

And what about music?

The New York Times recently noticed that mid-century American operas never get performed by the Met. It’s almost as if the 1940s and 1950s don’t exist at Lincoln Center. (...)

But I see the exact same thing in jazz. Most jazz fans want to listen to music recorded after the the emergence of high fidelity sound in the late 1950s. So they are very familiar with Kind of Blue (1959) and what happened after, but know next to nothing about jazz of earlier periods.

If I were making a list of the greatest American contributions to music, my top ten would include Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s and Charlie Parker’s recordings from the mid-1940s. But even jazz radio stations refuse to play those works nowadays. So what hope is there that these musical milestones will retain a place in the public’s cultural memory?

Jazz musicians who died in the mid-1950s, such as Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and Clifford Brown should rank among the great musicians of the century, but somehow fall through the cracks. Maybe if they had lived a few more years, they would get their deserved acclaim. But the same fans who love Monk, Miles, Ornette, and Trane often have zero knowledge of these earlier figures.

Now let’s consider cinema from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t exist on Netflix.

You might say that Netflix has eliminated the entire history of cinema from its platform. But it especially hates Hollywood black-and-white films from those postwar glory years.

Citizen Kane is the greatest American film of all time, according to the American Film Institute. But when I try to find it on Netflix, the algorithm tells me to watch a movie about McDonald’s hamburgers instead.

The second best American film of all time is Casablanca, according to the AFI. When I tried to find it on Netflix, the algorithm offered me an animated film from 2020 as a substitute.

The sad reality is that the entire work of great filmmakers and movie stars has disappeared from the dominant platform. It wouldn’t cost Netflix much to offer a representative sample of historic films from the past, but they can’t be bothered. (...)

Not all of these works deserve lasting acclaim. Some of the tropes and attitudes are outdated. Avant-garde obsessions of the era often feel arbitrary or constraining when viewed from a later perspective. Censorship prevented artists from pursuing a more stringent realism in their works.

But those reasons don’t really justify the wholesale erasure of an extraordinary era of American creativity.

What’s happening? Why aren’t these works surviving?

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!

• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!

• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums. A visit to an Ivy League campus conveys the same intense feeling, if only via the architecture.

You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations—and with a responsibility to future ones.

The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

But it can act as if they never happened.

This is especially damaging to works from the 1940s an 1950s. These are still remembered—but only by a few people, who will soon die.

This is the moment when works from 80 years ago should pass from contemporary memory and get enshrined in history. But that won’t happen in an age that hates history and wants to live in the eternal present. (...)

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now. The same brand franchises get reheated over and over. The same song styles get repeated ad nauseam. The same clichés get served up, again and again.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image:Bettmann/Getty/reddit

Already Pardoned, Jan. 6 Rioters Push for Compensation

The rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, secured a shocking double victory this year.

President Trump granted them clemency for their crimes on his first day back in the White House, and in the months that followed, he allowed his Justice Department to purge many of the federal agents and prosecutors who sought to hold them accountable.

But even though the president has given the rioters their freedom and has taken steps toward satisfying their desire for retribution, they are asking for more. In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.

On Thursday, one of the lawyers, Mark McCloskey, said during a public meeting on social media that he had recently met with top officials at the Justice Department and pitched them on a plan to create a special panel that would dole out financial damages to the rioters — much like the arrangement of a special master to award money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The panel, which Mr. McCloskey called a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee,” would consider rioters’ cases individually, he said, then assign them sums according to harms they had purportedly suffered at the hands of the federal government.

Mr. McCloskey said that he wanted the panel to be overseen by Jeanine Pirro, who runs the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington that took the lead in filing charges against nearly 1,600 rioters who joined in the Capitol attack.

“The only thing I can do as your lawyer,” he told the rioters who were at the online meeting, “is to turn your losses into dollar bills.” (...)

Mr. McCloskey, who rose to prominence five years ago after he pointed an AR-15-style rifle at social justice protesters outside his home in St. Louis, has been leading the efforts to secure restitution for the rioters since at least March, when he announced that he and another lawyer, Peter Ticktin, a former classmate and longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, were planning to sue the government. (...)

During the online meeting last week, Mr. McCloskey acknowledged that he and Mr. Ticktin had also run into “significant difficulties” in pursuing legal action on behalf of the rioters.

He acknowledged that there could be problems following through on his initial plan to file cases under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows individuals to sue the government for injuries caused by federal employees. He also said it could be challenging to overcome the two-year statute of limitations on bringing tort claims against the government for things that happened nearly five years ago.

But Mr. McCloskey assured the rioters that they had allies inside Mr. Trump’s Justice Department. Chief among them, he said, was Ed Martin, who runs the so-called weaponization working group, a body that was created to investigate those who investigated Jan. 6 and other people whom Mr. Trump perceives to be his enemies.

“He’s 100 percent on our side,” Mr. McCloskey said of Mr. Martin.

Mr. Trump’s grant of clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants was one of the most remarkable uses of presidential mercy in modern history. But also remarkable is the extent to which many of the rioters have remained unsatisfied by the measure, as well as by the subsequent firings and demotions of more than two dozen federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who worked on Capitol riot cases.

On Saturday, for example, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was freed by Mr. Trump from a 22-year prison term stemming from Jan. 6, posted what amounted to a list of demands to the administration in a social media message. Among the things he called for were compensation for the rioters “for their suffering and that of their families” and the firing of “everyone involved” in the riot cases.

“If this isn’t done,” Mr. Tarrio wrote, “we will all hang together.”

On Sunday, another rioter, Ryan Nichols, a former Marine who was sentenced to more than five years in prison for joining a crowd that shoved at officers in a tunnel outside the Capitol, doubled down on his attacks against the police in a post on social media.

“I’d do it again given the same situation,” Mr. Nichols said of attacking officers. “They attacked Americans and killed innocent protesters.” He added that “we should have” dragged foes “through the streets.” (...)

One rioter, Shane Jenkins, who was sentenced to 84 months in prison for assaulting an officer and shattering a window at the Capitol with a tomahawk on Jan. 6, spoke during the online meeting and captured the spirit of loss and disillusionment that many of the pardoned defendants seem to feel.

Mr. Jenkins compared the rioters to the biblical story of the Israelites who were enslaved and then released by God from bondage in Egypt, only to roam for decades through the desert.

“Through Trump, God pardoned us and set us free, right?” Mr. Jenkins said. “Well, then what did they do? They wandered around the desert for 40 years and I don’t think very many of them got to see the Promised Land.”

“I just feel,” he went on, “like that’s kind of where we’re at right now.”

by Alan Feuer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
[ed. Missed this bit of stupidity when it came out but the smell eventually became unavoidable (like stepping on a dog turd). Courts already sent these assholes to the Promised Land once, but the Don broke them free. Now this is the thanks he gets? Speaking of stupidity (so much, so little time) remember the Cracker Barrel 'controversy' a few weeks ago? Conservative cancel culture (CCC, not KKK, although...) went apoplectic over corporate wokeness, old time values and something or other. In a logo. Anyway, ever wonder how and why this became a thing? Here you go (WSJ) - Sardar Biglari, activist investor, competitor, hedge fund manager with an axe to grind and an army of credulous MAGA idiots. Truth doesn't stand a chance these days. See also: Sure, Let’s Try Bribes! (Atlantic):]

***

Last year Tom Homan, the border czar, was allegedly recorded accepting $50,000 in cash in a bag (specifically, a bag from CAVA, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain) from undercover FBI agents posing as government contractors in a sting operation, in which Homan intimated that he would now try to steer DHS contracts their way. And then they … let him hang onto the cash, to see what he would do with it. Maybe nothing! Maybe report it to the IRS in a really scrupulous way!

When the Trump administration took over, it dropped the case. FBI Director Kash Patel even said that there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” Homan also denies doing anything wrong. Remember, a wad of money in a weird bag intended for food only looks like a bribe, as a City Hall adviser recently explained.

[ed. Update: Also this real piece of work: How One J6er Has Been Emboldened by His Pardon (New Yorker):]

***

"On January 7th, according to prosecutors, he head-butted someone and then punched that person while they were on the ground. He also texted a friend, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG cunt,” adding, “I hope you’re reading this Mr. FBI agent, FK U.”

The F.B.I. arrested Meredith, who goes by Cleve, at a Holiday Inn a mile from the Capitol. Inside his room were some THC edibles and a vial of testosterone. In Meredith’s trailer, authorities found a 9-millimetre semi-automatic firearm with a Stars and Stripes pattern, an assault-style rifle with a telescopic sight, approximately twenty-five hundred rounds of various kinds of ammunition—some of which could pierce armor, he’d noted in a text—and multiple large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices. He was charged with possessing unregistered firearms and unlawful ammunition, and with making a threat to injure someone from across state lines. (...)

Some J6ers have already run afoul of the law again. Baumgartner has counted nearly two dozen people who have so far committed a variety of offenses since the insurrection, including three who have been arrested since Trump’s mass-pardoning earlier this year. “They range from physical assaults to child pornography or sex-abuse charges,” he said. In January, a Missouri woman, photographed holding Nancy Pelosi’s broken nameplate on January 6th, received ten years in prison for killing a woman while driving drunk. In April, a Tennessee man, who’d been among the first to enter the Capitol, was found guilty of plotting to murder F.B.I. agents last year. (In July, he was sentenced to life in prison.) Also in April, a West Virginia man, who had attacked federal law enforcement during the insurrection, was indicted on charges of armed robbery and assault after stabbing the owner of a Mexican restaurant. (He took a plea deal and is serving six months in jail for unlawful assault.) Then there is Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent—who yelled, “Kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em, get ’em, get ’em,” as Capitol Police officers were being attacked—previously charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and aiding and abetting an assault on law-enforcement officers. Wise’s case was dismissed when Trump took office, before Wise had entered a plea, and in early August he received a new job: he is now a senior adviser in the Department of Justice."