The AI Great Leap Forward

via: The AI Great Leap Forward
Images: uncredited

The Great Leap Forward’s most tragicomic chapter was the 除四害运动 (Eliminate Four Pests Campaign). Mao declared sparrows an enemy of the state — they ate grain seeds, so killing them would increase harvests. The entire country mobilized. Citizens banged pots and pans to keep sparrows airborne until they dropped dead from exhaustion. Children climbed trees to smash nests. Villages competed for the highest kill count. It worked. They nearly eradicated sparrows.

Then the locusts came.

Sparrows ate locusts. Without sparrows, locust populations exploded. The swarms devoured far more grain than the sparrows ever did. The campaign to save the harvest destroyed it. Mao quietly replaced sparrows with bedbugs on the official pest list and never spoke of it again.

Every AI Great Leap Forward has its sparrow campaign.

We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History, and Almost Nobody Has Noticed

[ed. Well, good luck with this one.]

The first four months of 2026 have produced a sequence of cyber incidents that, if any one of them had landed in 2014 or 2017, would have dominated a news cycle for a week.

A Chinese state supercomputer reportedly bled ten petabytes. Stryker was wiped across 79 countries. Lockheed Martin was hit for a reported 375 terabytes. The FBI Director’s personal inbox was dumped on the open web. The FBI’s wiretap management network was breached in a separate “major incident.” Rockstar Games was breached through a SaaS analytics vendor most people have never heard of. Cisco’s private GitHub was cloned. Oracle’s legacy cloud cracked open. The Axios npm package, downloaded a hundred million times a week, was hijacked by North Korea. Mercor, the $10 billion AI training-data vendor that sits inside the data pipelines of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta simultaneously, was breached through the LiteLLM open source library and had 4 terabytes extracted by Lapsus$. Honda was hit twice. The new ShinyHunters/Scattered Spider/LAPSUS$ alliance breached approximately 400 organizations and exfiltrated roughly 1.5 billion Salesforce records.

Stacked on top of each other across roughly a hundred days, these events are something a historian of computing security writing in 2050 will probably file as a turning point, regardless of what else happens between now and then.

And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange. This is a curious observation more than a complaint. And the goal of what follows is to gather the events into one place, cite the publications that reported each one, and then ask, gently, why the period feels so undocumented in real time.

Every named incident below is followed by inline parenthetical citations to the publications that broke or covered it, in the same way an academic paper would.

I am not arguing that the cybersecurity community is failing. I am noting that something unusual is happening.

by Patrick Quirk, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. Hmm... sounds suspicious.]

Coby Whitmore, The Eternal Blossom
via:

A Monkey Goes to Court

What happens when something that isn't human makes art? A series of bizarre court battles trying to answer that question centred around this image. Ultimately, it will influence what ends up on your screens and headphones forever.

It was a humid day in the Indonesian jungle, and photographer David Slater was following a group of crested black macaques, a critically endangered and particularly photogenic species of monkey.

He wanted pictures, but the macaques were nervous. So, Slater put his camera on a tripod with autofocus on and a flashbulb, allowing the monkeys to inspect it. Just as he hoped, they started playing with his gear. Then one of them reached up and hit the shutter button while staring directly into the lens. The result was a selfie, taken by a monkey. And its toothy grin inadvertently answered a basic question that sits at the heart of technology.

What came next was nearly a decade of legal battles around an unusual dispute: when something that isn't human makes a work of art, who owns the copyright? Thanks to AI, that's become a issue with some deep implications for modern life – and what it means to be human.

One of the most alarming predictions about AI is that corporations will replace the human-created music, movies and books you love with an endless stream of AI slop. But the US Supreme Court just upheld a decision about AI and copyright which suggests that future may be harder to pull off than the tech industry hoped. The path is still uncertain, and right now, the legal system is the site of a battle that will shape what you read, watch and listen to for the rest of your life. It all traces back to that one little monkey.

Monkey business

The monkey took that selfie in 2011. For a brief, blissful period, Slater enjoyed global attention from the picture, but the troubles began when someone uploaded the photo to Wikipedia, from where it could be downloaded and used free of charge. He asked the Wikimedia Foundation to take it down, arguing it cost him £10,000 (worth about $13,400 today) in lost sales. In 2014, The organisation refused, arguing the photo was in the public domain because it wasn't taken by a person.

The row prompted the US Copyright Office to issue a statement that it would not register work created by a non-human author, putting "a photograph taken by a monkey" first in a list of examples. (Slater didn't respond to interview requests, but his representation arranged for the BBC to use the photo in this article.)

The story gets weirder. Soon after, the advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) sued Slater on behalf of the monkey. The case argued all proceeds from the photo belonged to the macaque that took the picture, but it was really seen as a test case, an attempt to establish legal rights for animals. After four years and multiple court battles, a San Francisco judge dismissed the case. The judge's reasoning was simple: monkeys can't file lawsuits.

"It was kind of the biggest public conversation piece on this topic," says intellectual property lawyer Ryan Abbott, a partner at Brown, Neri, Smith and Khan in the US. "At the time it was very much about animal rights. But it could have been a conversation about AI." [...]

The missing author

When the US passed the Copyright Act of 1790, we only had to deal with things like writing and drawing. But the invention of photography decades later raised troubling questions. You could argue cameras do the real work, a person just hits a button.

"The Supreme Court looked at this and said, you know, we're going to interpret this purposively," says Abbott, who represented Thaler in a case against the Copyright Office. "Copyright was designed to protect the expression of tangible ideas. And that's broad enough to cover something like photography."

The same logic could apply to AI. "What you really have in photography is exactly the same thing you have here. You have a person issuing instructions to a machine to generate a work," he says. "What's the difference between that and me asking ChatGPT to make an image?"

by Thomas Germain, BBC | Read more:
Image: David Slater/ Caters New/BBC
[ed. More issues than you might imagine.]

Mythos and "New Sages Unrivalled"

For the last six weeks or so, at least one American company has possessed a tool that could damage the operations of critical infrastructure and government services in every country on Earth, including the United States. Within another six weeks or so, if not already, 2-3 American companies will possess this capability. Some time after that, perhaps not much time at all, adversaries of the United States—principally China—will possess tools of this magnitude.

The company I am referring to is Anthropic, and the tool they posses is called Claude Mythos. Researchers at the company have said that the new model stands to fundamentally upend cybersecurity. At least, for the time being. They postulate that after a transitional period, the world will end up in a steady state where advanced AI benefits defenders rather than cyberattackers. Yet the transitional period could be a long and brutal storm, and we do not know what will break as it hits.

“The threat is not hypothetical,” they conclude. “Advanced language models are here.”

What we do next, both collectively and as individuals, will determine if we can weather the storm.

***

What do the capabilities of Mythos mean, prosaically speaking? It’s hard to say, because I do not have access to it, and in all likelihood, neither do you. The model is not currently public, and may never be in its current form. But broadly speaking, if one takes Anthropic at their word, the model can conduct automated software vulnerability discovery with nearly superhuman performance in some domains.

The model can find security vulnerabilities in software, including software systems upon which modern civilization rests, that have eluded security researchers for years, and sometimes decades. The model has found thousands of vulnerabilities so far, most of which have not yet been fixed (for this reason, Anthropic has not publicized the exploits, but they have reported them to the developers of the software in question). An enormous range of consumer and commercial services--from banking to healthcare to education to AI itself—are plausibly implicated.

My model of modern software is that, if you look hard enough, you will find critical vulnerabilities. Looking hard, however, used to be expensive—only the best hackers in the world could do it, and their time was limited. With Mythos, the price of “looking hard” at software has plummeted, and it will get cheaper each month.

This is not wholly bad news; after all, “looking hard” at software is also how software gets improved. Mythos and similarly capable models from other companies that will soon follow, in that sense, are one of the greatest gifts to cybersecurity ever given.

Yet as things stand today, the world is deeply vulnerable. Every day, you rely on untold millions of lines of code maintained by a global population of millions of developers. It will not all be fixed tomorrow, or next month, or next year. The reality is that models of this capability level—and more capable—will almost certainly diffuse widely before all “critical” software is patched. How much damage will be done is anyone’s guess.

If you doubted whether AI systems might have object-level national security implications, now we have clear evidence. Some of the most capable and prized teams in the United States intelligence community do precisely the kind of work that Claude Mythos automates. The same is true of China. You can be inclined to believe this will all work out fine in the end, but it is simply no longer credible to contend that there are no implications for national security from large language models, and therefore for government as a whole.

***

This has been a frustrating issue to discuss candidly for the past two years. The reason is that, in the adolescent period of AI policy and discourse that is now—I hope—coming to a close, taking AI risks seriously was considered uncouth. Speaking about how near-future models might have straightforwardly dangerous capabilities was enough to provoke suspicion: were you a secret “doomer” or Effective Altruist? Were you part of a grand conspiracy to achieve “regulatory capture” for the frontier AI companies? Were you trying to “ban open source”? These sorts of questions constrained debate and put blinders on a large number of otherwise-sane policymakers and other influential people. And these constraints, in turn, meant that one had to tiptoe around reality.

But I am done with tiptoeing now, and so should everyone else be. It is a great relief, albeit also a bit uncomfortable, to feel the biting winds against one’s face.

In that spirit, here are some things I believe to be true:

1. Actors who are hostile to the U.S. will possess the capabilities of Mythos, if not better, within a year or two. We will not stop this through “nonproliferation” or some other clever regulatory scheme. We can only blunt the impact of this reality by strengthening our cyberdefenses rapidly.

2. Strengthening cyberdefense will require coordination among state and local government entities, private sector critical infrastructure operators, frontier labs, and the broader private sector, as well as the federal government. But even more importantly, it will require compute: data centers. In recent testimony to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, I wrote about the urgency of speeding transmission siting to facilitate the buildout of supercomputing infrastructure for national security. Running massive fleets of automated software vulnerability researchers was precisely one of the use cases I cite in that testimony. In addition to speeding up the FERC process through administrative actions, we need permitting reform urgently.

3. Speaking of national security: The U.S. Department of War, and the federal government more broadly, are engaged in a lawfare campaign against Anthropic whose underlying motivations are deeply unclear and which attacks core American values. Now, the strategic wisdom looks worse and worse by the week. We are fighting a war against Iran, a highly capable cyberoffensive actor. It is inconceivable that the government can have a healthy relationship with the frontier AI industry while attempting to destroy what is arguably the field’s leading company. Anthropic and the Department of War must come to a truce, if not a resolution, as soon as possible, for the good of America’s national defense.

4. In the context of national-security-relevant cybersecurity capabilities, the key and salient difference between the United States and China is not our “innovation ecosystem,” but instead the simple reality that our firms possess the computing power to train and operate models like Mythos today, and theirs do not. It is that simple. China is prioritizing its efforts to develop its own compute manufacturing capacity, and this development is likely to motivate them even further. The best way to disrupt this is a serious increase in targeted export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, too much of which flows freely today from the U.S. and its allies to China. It is long past time for major effort here from Congress and the Trump Administration.

5. The utility of SB 53, which requires frontier AI companies to disclose their assessments of their own models’ cybersecurity risks, is hopefully more apparent now. Some criticisms of that legislative framework have asserted that it attempts to control frontier AI or micromanage companies. But in truth, the framework rests on the notion that AI will not be controllable--that stopping the diffusion of potentially dangerous capabilities is impossible--and that therefore today’s “frontier” capabilities will be broadly dispersed within a short while. This is exactly we need transparency about what developers see at the frontier: so that a large range of societal actors can prepare their defenses appropriately against the developments we see forming at the frontier.

6. Today, Mythos is accessible only within Anthropic and to Anthropic’s chosen partners. Limited releases of this kind will likely be a growing trend because of both compute constraints and safety concerns. Mythos appears to be about five times more expensive to run than Opus, which was already not cheap, but for Anthropic the issue is not so much cost as it is allocating sufficient compute to serve Mythos to the public. This means that the best AI models of the future may be disproportionately, if not exclusively, used within frontier labs for their own purposes, which at least at first will be automated AI R&D. These so-called “internal deployments” have motivated my own pursuit of transparency and private governance frameworks, the latter being private organizations that would audit the safety and security posture of frontier AI companies, including their internal deployments.

*** 

I wrote on X that Mythos means the training wheels are coming off on AI policy. Perhaps the Department of War’s effort to strangle Anthropic is, to use another metaphor, a sign that the gloves are off too. If the last month has made anything clear, it is that we are in a nastier, sharper, harsher, meaner era of AI discourse, policy, and—ultimately—of AI development and use.

I will be honest: I do not see how it is possible for Mythos-level capabilities to diffuse through the world without causing at least some significant security crises and economic disruption. And of course, this cycle of compute infrastructure buildout has only just begun; within a year or so, gigawatts of additional AI compute capacity will be online.

The pimply and ill-shapen adolescence of AI and AI policy have come to an end. The first maturity has now begun.

by Dean W. Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: Everything Reinforces Predictions and Policy Preferences (DWAtV):]

***

Indeed, Anthropic itself has ‘slowed down AI’ in this situation, and done the closest thing we have had to a pause, by not releasing Mythos widely, and pretty much everyone agrees this was the right thing to do. Consider that we might need more similar capabilities, including more broadly.

But how long will it be before an open source version, even if somewhat inferior, is available? Will OpenAI and Google soon be showing similar capabilities? (And how will that shift the equilibrium?) Should we upgrade our estimates of the returns to investing in compute?

That depends on what counts as similar, especially with the ‘even if somewhat inferior.’ For reasonable values my guess is 1-2 years for open models in terms of absolute capabilities (by then bugs will be a lot harder to find), and on the order of months for OpenAI, and probably a few more months for Google.

How will the willingness of attackers to pay for tokens evolve, relative to the willingness of defenders to pay for tokens? Which are our softest targets?

As a side effect, will this also lead to higher economic concentration, as perhaps only the larger institutions can invest in quality patches rapidly enough?

I think this absolutely will lead to higher economic concentration, as it favors economies of scale across the board. [...]

Solve For The Equilibrium

Tyler Cowen shares a model from Jacob Gloudemans of what might happen, where vulnerabilities become much easier to find quickly, but the big problems actually go away due to the increased velocity of defenses and patching.

Rather than being able to hoard exploits everyone has to use their exploits right away or lose them, and most of the time most important actors don’t especially want to mess with any particular target, so they won’t even look for the exploits.

This model assumes good defense is being played where it counts, and that the supply of exploits is limited, and that when you catch an exploit you can defend against those who have already found it and tried to use it. I don’t think those are safe assumptions.

One also should consider the opposite scenario. Right now, an intelligence agency might find an exploit and sit on it for years, perhaps forever, because even if it normally goes unused its value at the right time is very high. But, if that exploit will not last, then they may try to use it.

Ultimately the equilibrium will still involve cyberattacks, because the correct number of cyberattacks is not zero. It might be correct to price out attacks to the point where everyone involved should have better things to do with their time, but if we collectively actually cause everyone to fully give up and go home then everyone is selfishly overinvesting in defenses, unless there is a modest cost to being fully safe. [...]

Conclusion: How To Think About Mythos

[ed. Ten points...]

Things are only going to get faster and weirder and scarier from here.

The Linguistic Foundations of Project Hail Mary

The film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary hits general release today, March 20, and it’s great—go see it! Though a little light on the science, the movie goes hard on the relationship between schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and an extraterrestrial named Rocky, and it’s a ride well worth taking.

But as good as it is, the movie shares a small flaw with the book: Despite having very few things in common, Grace and Rocky learn to communicate with each other extremely quickly. In fact, Grace and Rocky begin conversing in abstracts (concepts like “I like this” and “friendship”) in even less time than it takes in the book. Obviously, there are practical narrative reasons for this choice—you can’t have a good buddy movie if your buddies can’t talk to each other. It’s therefore critical to the flow of the story to get that talking happening as soon as possible, but it can still be a little jarring for the technically minded viewer who was hoping for the acquisition of language to be treated with a little more complexity.

And because this is Ars Technica, we’re doing the same thing we did when the book came out: talking with Dr. Betty Birner, a former professor of linguistics at NIU (now retired), to pick her brain about cognition, pragmatics, cooperation, and what it would actually take for two divergently evolved sapient beings not just to gesture and pantomime but to truly communicate. And this time, we’ll hear from Andy Weir, too. So buckle up, dear readers—things are gonna get nerdy.

A word about spoilers

This article assumes you’ve read Weir’s novel and that you’ve seen the movie. However, for folks who haven’t yet seen the film, I don’t think there’s much to be spoiled in terms of the language acquisition portions that we’re going to discuss—the film covers rather the same ground as the book but in a much more abbreviated way.

Still, if you want to avoid literally all spoilers, skip this article for now—at least until you’ve been to the theater!

The yawning chasm of “meaning”

Dr. Birner’s specific field of study is the science of pragmatics. “Pragmatics has to do with what I intend by what I say and what I mean in a particular context,” she explained to Ars on a Zoom call earlier this week. She elaborated by bringing up her (nonexistent) cat—the phrase “my cat” can have a multitude of meanings attached, all of which are inferred by context.

If you know Dr. Birner has a cat, her saying “my cat” could refer to that cat; if you know that she doesn’t have a cat but used to, “my cat” could refer to that cat instead, even though the semantics of the phrase “my cat” haven’t changed. That’s pragmatics, baby!

Pragmatics are particularly relevant to the Grace/Rocky language-acquisition problem because the discipline involves the creation of inferences by the listener about the speaker’s mental state and about what specific meanings the speaker implies.

But “meaning” is a fraught word here, too, because ultimately we cannot know for certain the exact meaning being implied by another person because we cannot ever truly peek inside someone else’s mind. “We are always making guesses about what our shared context is and what our shared cultural beliefs are, and, indeed, what our shared knowledge as members of the species are,” Dr. Birner continued. “And I think of this because of thumbs-up/thumbs-down.”

“The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put out a book, boy, back in the ’80s,” she said. “They talked about all of language as metaphorically built up from embodiment, our embodied experience, and our senses. So we sense up and down, and then we have this whole metaphorical notion of happy is up, so we have a thumbs up, ‘I’m feeling up today. I’m just feeling high. My spirits are lifting.’”

“Or, I can be down in the dumps,” she said. “I can be feeling low, my mood is dropping, thumbs down,’ and there’s this whole metaphorical conception. And I loved the way Project Hail Mary played with that in that Rocky didn’t share that. Rocky did not have a metaphor of ‘happy is up,’ the way Lakoff and Johnson would say we all just do.”

I asked Dr. Birner if our “up is good, down is bad” association has a biological basis in our cognition or if it’s something that has simply been shaped into a broadly shared metaphor over thousands of years of language use, and she took a moment to answer.

“That’s a really good question, and I don’t remember whether they deal with that,” she said. “But I could imagine it being biological because we start as little helpless things that can’t even stand up. And soon we stand up, we get taller, we get smarter, we get better and better the taller we get. I can actually very well imagine a biological basis for it.”

The first leap—not math, but truth

Let’s focus in on some of the specific linguistic mountains Grace and Rocky would have had to climb. The one that struck me as perhaps the most basic would be starting from pantomime and figuring out the most important thing: the twin concepts of yes and no, and the companion dualities of true/false and equal/not-equal. To me, this feels like the most mandatory of basics.

And here, perhaps, we can fall back on some good ol’ Sagan—or at least the movie version of Sagan. Dr. Birner and I (along with my colleague Jennifer Ouellette, who also hung around on the Zoom call) went back and forth for some time, but in the end, no one could really figure out a more straightforward way to demonstrate these concepts than the “primer” scene in 1997’s Contact, where the unknown alien signal is shown to contain a small grouping of symbols that appeared to represent addition, along with “equals” and “not equals” sign equivalents.

“That’s a good way to go about it, with equivalent and not-equivalent,” said Dr. Birner. “So at least you get negation, and now you can work on perceptual oppositions—up and down, black and white, loud and soft. I think that would probably be the jumping-off place for yes and no.”

Though there are linguistic biases in English and other human languages that might peek through even here—the inherent tie between “positive” (as in agreement) and “positive” (as in “this thing is good and I like it”). Careful aliens would likely want to spend a fair amount of time interrogating this bias—if it’s even visible at this point. And it likely wouldn’t be, as we haven’t built any of those syntactic bridges yet.

Pidgin? Not so fast

Getting those bridges built—going past “yes” and “no” and into some of the other basics that must be established to communicate—is not straightforward. Grace and Rocky benefit from being in a tightly constrained environment with a set of mutual problems to solve; two humans in a similar situation would likely develop a “pidgin”—an ad-hoc working language cobbled together out of components of both speakers’ languages.

But as Dr. Birner points out, true pidgin here is impossible because neither Grace nor Rocky is capable of actually producing the sounds required to speak the other’s language in the first place. “They don’t actually develop a pidgin,” she said. “They each have to learn the other’s language receptively, not productively.”

“Which is great,” she went on, “because when kids acquire language, it’s sort of a truism that reception precedes production. Every kid is going to understand more than they’re producing. Necessarily! You can’t produce what you don’t understand yet. So it makes the problem a little easier for Grace and Rocky—they don’t have to produce each other’s language, just understand it.”

Who is even there?

Grace and Rocky are lucky in that both humans and Eridians are ultimately extremely similar in their cognition and linguistics, even if their vocalizations aren’t alike. This means a lot of the mandatory requirements for conversation as we understand them are already present.

“If I encounter Rocky, I need to know, does he have a mind?” she posited. “Does he have what we call a theory of mind? Does he have a mind like mine? And does he understand that I have a mind like his, but separate? Does he understand that I can believe different things from what he believes? Can I have false beliefs? That’s all a prerequisite for communicating at all. If your mind and my mind had all the exact same stuff in it, there’d be no need to communicate.

“H.P. Grice said that communication doesn’t happen without the assumption that both parties are being cooperative,” she said. The word “cooperative” here doesn’t necessarily mean that both parties are copacetic—Dr. Birner pointed out that even when people are fighting, they tend to still be cooperatively communicating. There are rules to the interaction that must be followed if one party intends to impart meaning to the other.

Beyond adherence to the cooperative principle, another bedrock of communication is the notion of symbols, the understanding that a word can represent not just an abstract concept but can actually stand in for a thing. “I can use the word mug,” explained Dr. Birner, holding up a mug, “and mean this. And you understand what I mean, and I don’t have to show you the mug every single time.”

Also on the “mandatory” list is an understanding of the concept of displacement, which Dr. Birner attributes to the researcher Charles F. Hockett. “Displacement has long been said to be solely human, though not everyone agrees with that. It’s the ability to refer to something that is distant in time or space. I can tell you that I had a bagel this morning, even though I’m not having it right now and it’s not present right here. I had it elsewhere and I had it earlier,” she said.

She continued: “There’s this wonderful article, 1979 by Michael Reddy, called ‘The Conduit Metaphor,’ where he says that we think in metaphors. And the metaphor he’s talking about is that language is a conduit, and we really just pass ideas from my brain to yours. And he says it’s a false metaphor. It’s clearly not true that that’s what happens, but we talk about it as though it does. ‘I didn’t catch your meaning,’ or ‘Give that to me again.’ We talk as though this is a thing we literally convey, and of course we don’t convey meanings. Reddy argues that the vast majority of human communication is actually miscommunication, but so trivially that we never notice.”

By way of example, she referenced her nonexistent cat again. “If I mentioned my cat, Sammy, well, you’ll have some mental image of a cat,” she said. “It almost certainly isn’t remotely like Sammy, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to explain everything about Sammy. If I did, the conversation would grind to a halt and you’d never interview me again. Also, I’d be violating the cooperative principle because I would be saying too much for the current context.”

Math, the universal language?

It is a common trope in science fiction—and one brought up more than once in the comments on our last article on this subject—that “math is the only universal language.” It’s a fun, pithy saying that perhaps makes mathematicians feel good about their dusty chalkboards, but at least from my knothole, it’s a false generalization because the language in which one does one’s mathematics must be settled before any mathing can happen.

“I’m not sure that even is true on Earth,” said Dr. Birner about the notion of math as universal grammar. “The concept of zero hasn’t always been around, and how much math can you do without zero? There are languages that count, “One, two, three, many,” and that’s it. And those are human languages. So to say, ‘Math is a universal language,’ I’m already not totally on board there.”

“I think math would help, but I don’t think it would get them terribly far because they need the notion of objects. They need the notion of the semiotic function, that things stand for other things.” She paused pensively, then went on. “And once they’ve got that, that there are discrete objects and we both think of the same things as discrete objects, then we can talk about counting those objects and now we’re off and running.”

Whole-object notion is another oft-overlooked component here—often referred to as the “gavagai problem.”

“You’re pointing to a rabbit, and you say, ‘gavagai!’” said Dr. Birner. “Well, does that mean ‘rabbit?’ Does that mean ‘fur?’ Does that mean ‘ears?’ Does that mean, ‘hey look?’”

“Quine’s notion is that we default to a whole object. Well, does what counts as a whole object for me count as a whole object for you? Does every conceivable culture have discrete borders on objects?”

The author speaks on human-Eridian similarities

Fortunately for Grace and Rocky, humans and Eridians do have all these things in common because in the universe of Project Hail Mary, the species share a common ancestor. [...]

Weir notes that he worked through a number of the same linguistic issues that Dr. Birner and I raised as part of the story-generation process.

“Let’s say you have intelligent life on the planet,” he said. “What do you need? What does that species need to have to reach the point where they’re able to make spacecraft and fly around in space? Well, first off, you have to be a tribal thing. You can’t be loners. You can’t be like bears and tigers that don’t communicate with each other. You have to have the sense of a community or a tribe or a group or a gathering so that you can collaborate because you can specialize and do all these things. You need that.”

“Number two, you need language. One way or another, stuff from my brain has to get into your brain,” he said, echoing Dr. Birner’s note about Reddy’s conduit metaphor paper.

“Number three is you need empathy and compassion. A collection of beings altogether doesn’t work unless they actually are willing to take care of each other. And that’s not just found in humans—it’s found in primates. It’s found in wolf packs. It’s found in ants. It’s like any collectivized species has to have that trait.”

“You need to have compassion, empathy, which means putting yourself in somebody else’s situation. Compassion, empathy, language, a decent amount of intelligence, a tribal instinct, a group instinct, a society kind of building instinct,” he said. “You must, I believe, have all of those things in order to be able to make a spaceship. Any species that’s lacking any one of those won’t be able to do it. So any alien you meet in space is going to have all of those traits. The Friendly Great Filter is that any aliens you meet, I believe, have to have this concept of society, cooperation, empathy, compassion, collaboration, and so on.”

I’m here for Weir’s explanation—it works within the context of the science fiction universe we’re being presented, and Rocky and Grace need to be able to talk to each other or we don’t have a book (or a film!). But does it ring true under scrutiny? After all, even here on Earth, there is a wealth of problem-solving, tool-using creatures much more closely related than humans and Eridians with vastly different cognitive toolkits. Cephalopods (with distributed nervous systems and pseudo-autonomous arms), corvids, and cetaceans all have their own evolutionary approaches to communication. [...]

Here, Ars’ Jennifer Ouellette made an important point. “Rocky is basically a rock,” she said. “He’s not a human form, and that’s going to affect how a language, if there is one, evolves in that species—and it’s really going to impact how they communicate.”

“Yes, embodiment is a big deal in communications,” replied Dr. Birner, returning to the subject she’d brought up earlier, that the nature of our flesh-prisons inherently shapes not just how we experience the world but how we communicate. Our physical forms are the product of evolutionary pressures—they are the results of the inevitable, inscrutable dialogue between environment and organism. And the evolutionary pressures faced by Homo sapiens on Earth are vastly different from the evolutionary pressures faced by Eridians on Erid, and that same dialog on Erid led to vastly different outcomes. [...]

Friendly aliens

The most dangerous thing about communicating with aliens this way isn’t mistaking a word or two—it’s the more fundamental problem of what happens to third- and fourth-order assumptions when the foundations those assumptions are built on aren’t quite right. Sure, Grace and Rocky can agree that they are “friends,” but how do you explain “friend”?

“To be someone’s friend can mean a million things,” said Dr. Birner. “I have my best friend since high school. I consider you a friend,” she said, pointing at me through the screen, “and we’ve talked three times. My daughter, who’s now 35, has turned into my friend. What does that mean?”

Indeed, the notion of “friend” is a rough one—it’s fundamental to human interaction, and as such, it carries with it a huge number of (sometimes contradictory) behavioral expectations. When you’re explaining “friends” to an alien, how do you paint it? That you and the alien have shared interests and should therefore work together? That you are genuinely interested in the alien’s well-being? That you’d make sacrifices for them? That you’d expect them to help you haul furniture when you move?

And what assumptions might you make about the alien’s behavior once you’d declared each other “friends”? That they would make sacrifices for you? What if for the alien, the concept they’ve settled on for “friendship” means they’ll pull your limbs off when the adventure is over because that’s what friends do in their culture?

“You need societal grouping,” I supplied, “but you don’t necessarily need friends.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And now I’m going to another work from 1982, Maltz and Borker, who looked at kids on the playground, and at that time—I think it’s changed a lot, it’s been 40-some years!—but at that time, they saw that little girls had a horizontal set of relationships. It was all friendship-based and secrets-based, and you have your best friend and then your next best friends. And little boys had a hierarchy, and your whole goal was to get higher in the hierarchy by insulting the kids above you and whacking them and try to be king of the hill.”

“Get the conch,” I joked unhelpfully.

“Yeah, exactly—get the conch. Again, cultural knowledge.”

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Images: Project Hail Mary/Amazon MGM studios

[ed. I've always had a vague appreciation for linguistics (their effects on perceived reality and lately their nuances in bridging disagreements - for example, this is the second time in three days that I've heard the term gavagai). My grandson came over today and he went right to some YT videos explaining the basics of PHM's plot and science, especially how Ryland and Rocky communicated. Then we watched Ghostbusters. : )]

The Israeli Payoff

Russian political strategist Pavel Dubravsky shared a meaningful graphic: In the photo of US Congress members, those funded by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC are highlighted in red. 324 of the 435 members of Congress are controlled by Israel, and this is not a conspiracy theory.

via:

[ed. See also: Senate rejects effort to halt arms sales to Israel, but most Democrats vote to block them (AP/ST).]

The Never-Ending Tax-Filing Con Game

This tax season, as you wade through the absurdly expensive and complicated process of filing income taxes, remember to thank the Trump administration.

Filing taxes should be really easy and completely free. It is in most other developed countries. And in 2024, the Biden administration debuted a pilot program called Direct File that could have made tax filing easy and free for most American taxpayers, too.

President Trump killed it. He has destroyed things that are more important than Direct File, but this one sticks in my craw. It was a straightforward way to make life a little better for a lot of Americans. It was a step toward the kind of easy-to-use, efficient, high-tech government services that everyone claims to want. It worked. And now it’s gone.

Almost every president since Ronald Reagan has said that the government should create a simple electronic system for filing federal income taxes. The necessary technology has existed for decades. Many developed nations operate such tax filing systems. In countries including Japan and the Netherlands, the government handles the paperwork and then provides most taxpayers with a statement for review and approval.

Americans, by contrast, spend an average of 13 hours and $290 to file.

Why? Because tax preparation companies and Republican lawmakers have a shared interest in torturing taxpayers. The companies want to ensure that Americans remain dependent on their services. The Republicans want people to hate paying taxes.

In 2024, after decades of false starts, the Biden administration mustered the courage to defy that coalition. The Direct File program started small. It was limited to taxpayers with simple returns in a handful of states, processing 140,803 returns in its first year.

The Government Accountability Office, which audited the pilot, said it was a success that should be expanded.

Last year, the number of people using the program more than doubled. It processed 296,531 returns. An internal I.R.S. report concluded that Direct File “is beloved by its users.”

Unfortunately for American taxpayers, Direct File was not beloved by the tax preparation industry. Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, which dominates the industry, collected almost $5 billion last year from Americans who sought its help to file their income tax returns. The company fought to preserve that business. The Trump administration acquiesced.

In killing the Direct File program, the administration insisted it had been little used and expensive to operate. It assured that outcome by making no effort to publicize the program in its second year. While the cost per user was high, at about $138, that would have declined as more people used the program. And no matter the number, it is a cost that should be borne by the government, not individual taxpayers.

The Trump administration says it has a better alternative: A “Free File” partnership with eight private tax preparation companies that allows some taxpayers to use basic versions of their software at no charge.

It’s a new chapter in a long-running con game. The Free File program, which dates back to 2002, allows the industry to claim that it’s possible to file taxes free while working to ensure that most people keep on paying.

The bottom 70 percent of taxpayers ranked by income are eligible to use the Free File program. That’s about 100 million households. Only about three million use it each year. Instead, every year, millions of people eligible for Free File pay to use virtually the same software from the same companies.

Intuit’s behavior has been particularly egregious. ProPublica reported in 2019 that the company had concealed the landing page for the Free File version of its product so that it was invisible to Google and other search engines. It also created a stalking horse called TurboTax: Free Edition, which pushed users to pay for add-ons. After it got caught, the company abandoned the Free File program. 

by Binyaman Applebaum, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Jackson Gibbs

[ed. Old news, I know. The government has all the information it needs to do your taxes (or they wouldn't be able to audit you). What isn't old news (to me anyway) were the underhanded tactics Intuit used to conceal and kill free tax filing efforts. Happy Tax Day, April 15, 2026.]

Visual Cues and Valuation: Evidence from the Housing Market

 Abstract 

We examine the economic impact of non-consumable visual cues through home staging on high-stakes housing transactions. Using hand-collected listing photos for 15,777 transactions and a machine-learning algorithm to detect furniture, we provide the first large-scale evidence that staged homes sell for roughly 10% more and one week faster than comparable homes without furniture. Our pre-registered online experiment establishes causality and uncovers mechanisms. We find that furniture clarifies spatial use, while decor enhances emotional attachment, jointly driving the higher willingness-to-pay. These findings demonstrate how visual cues impact high-stakes decisions and systematically shape valuations in the largest asset market for households.

1. Introduction 

Behavioral economics has advanced significantly in demonstrating how cognitive, psychological, and emotional factors systematically influence economic decision-making (Rabin (1998), Heath et al. (1999), Rabin and Schrag (1999), Kahneman (2003), Gneezy et al. (2014), Chang et al. (2016), and Hirshleifer (2020)). Yet, many foundational models of consumer choice still presume a high degree of rationality in high-stakes environments, where the sheer magnitude of the transaction, in theory, should discipline behavior and mitigate the impact of biases. This paper examines the economic impact of nonconsumable visual cues through staging, a common practice in the U.S. housing market, on high-stakes housing transactions. 

House staging is the practice of furnishing and decorating a property for sale to create visual cues that help potential buyers imagine themselves living in the space. Importantly, the furniture and decor are classified as personal property, which consists of movable items that are typically not included in the sale unless explicitly stated in the contract. Standard asset pricing theory dictates that the value of a residential asset is a function of its fundamental hedonic characteristics (e.g., location, size, school quality, and structural condition), discounted by the user cost of capital (Sirmans et al., 2005; Poterba,  1984; Himmelberg et al., 2005). Rational agents should not price movable, non-consumable personal property (furniture and decor) into the value of the fixed asset, especially when such items convey no transactional value. However, the popularity of home staging, a common industry practice costly to the sellers or their agents, suggests a possible disconnect between theory and behavior. This disconnect gives rise to fascinating and largelyunanswered economic puzzles (Yun et al., 2021): Do homebuyers pay for things that they know they cannot consume? If so, what is the magnitude of this staging premium? In addition, what underlying mechanisms do these visual cues activate that lead to a higher willingness to pay? This paper aims to answer these questions by exploring homebuyer behavior in the largest asset market for most households. 

Deviations from rational valuation can carry substantial financial consequences in the context of home buying. For the average U.S. household, purchasing a home is arguably the most significant financial decision: Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), a measure of the typical home value in the U.S., has grown to over $357,000 in the second half of 2022. The housing market also features high transaction costs, infrequent purchases, and the involvement of professional intermediaries such as real estate agents. These characteristics are commonly believed to mitigate the impact of behavioral biases. Hence, the housing market offers a real-world laboratory for testing the limits of market efficiency and rational decision-making. 

An ideal experiment to establish the causal effect of house staging on prices would be to compare two identical houses in the same location: one staged and the other empty. Such an experiment would eliminate the confounding effect of location and unobserved house quality, allowing us to isolate the effect of staging on house prices. However, conducting such an experiment in a real-world natural setting is both financially and logistically prohibitive, if not impossible. One useful alternative that may convincingly approximate this experiment is to follow the historical transactions of each house and compare transactions with staged houses to empty ones, holding location and unobserved house quality constant. In particular, if prices are driven purely by location and unobserved differences in house quality, staging should have no effect on prices. In this paper, we start with the real-world transaction data by hand-collecting house listing images associated with each transaction for a set of houses across the U.S.3 We then complement our empirical analysis with an incentivized and preregistered randomized controlled trial (RCT) to disentangle the underlying mechanisms.

by Puja Bhattacharya, Sherry Xin Li, Yvonne Yu Wang, Cedric Wu, Xiang Zheng, SSRN | Read more (pdf):
[ed. Funny, I was always told the opposite - that potential buyers wanted open space to imagine their own living arrangements.]

What is Populism Actually Good For?

Why does yelling about “corrupt elites” seem to work in politics? From Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán to Marine Le Pen, politicians who rail against the establishment and claim to speak for “the real people” keep winning elections. The populist playbook, us versus them, the pure people against the rotten elite, appears to be one of the most effective strategies in modern democratic politics. But what if it isn’t?

I’ve spent the better part of a decade studying populist rhetoric with my co-author Yaoyao Dai, now at the University of Pittsburgh. We just published our third and latest paper on the topic, and I thought this was a good moment to reflect on what our research program has found. The short version: populism’s power is real, but much more limited than most people assume. And the reasons why it works are not what you’d expect.

What we mean by populism

Before getting into the findings, a quick definition. Political scientists generally follow Cas Mudde’s influential framework, which defines populism not as a full political program but as a simple worldview (or what Mudde calls a “thin ideology”). This worldview is based on three pillars: people-centrism (politics should reflect the will of “the people”), anti-pluralism (there is one authentic popular will, not many competing interests), and moralized anti-elitism (elites are not merely wrong but evil). This is what scholars call “thin” populism because it doesn’t tell you much about actual policy. A left-wing populist like Hugo Chávez and a right-wing populist like Trump share the same rhetorical structure, the people versus the elite, but disagree on virtually everything else.

This distinction between populism and its “host ideology” (the actual policy positions a politician holds) turns out to be crucial. Because when you peel them apart, something surprising emerges.

When politicians gamble on populism

Our first paper, “When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric?“ published in Political Communication in 2022, asked a deceptively simple question: if populist rhetoric is so effective, why don’t all politicians use it all the time?

To answer this, we built the most comprehensive corpus of U.S. presidential campaign speeches at the time: 4,314 speeches from 1952 to 2016. We used a novel text analysis method combining active learning and word embeddings to measure how much populist rhetoric each candidate employed across the campaign trail. I (Alex) should say, thanks to the prowess of Yaoyao, we did all that fancy text analysis stuff before it was cool and before LLMs were even around.

The pattern was striking. Candidates who were trailing in the polls consistently used more populist rhetoric, regardless of whether they were Republicans or Democrats, incumbents or challengers. Populism, we argued, is a gamble: a high-risk, high-variance strategy that trailing candidates adopt because conventional campaigning isn’t working. If you’re already behind, why not shake things up?

Think of it like a football team that’s losing in the fourth quarter. You start throwing long passes not because they have a higher expected value, but because safe plays guarantee you lose. Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, and Donald Trump (in 2016, when most polls had him behind) all fit this pattern. They reached for populist rhetoric when they had little to lose.

The (in)effectiveness of populist rhetoric

But does the gamble actually pay off? Our second paper, published in Political Science Research and Methods in 2024, tested this directly with a survey experiment.

We presented U.S. respondents with pairs of realistic campaign messages from hypothetical primary candidates. The messages varied on two dimensions: populist features (people-centric language, anti-elite attacks, anti-pluralist framing) and substantive policy positions (on immigration and other issues). This design let us isolate the effect of populist rhetoric from the underlying policy content, something that is nearly impossible to do when observing real elections, where populism and policy positions come bundled together.

The result was unambiguous: none of the populist features had an independent effect on candidate choice. Not people-centrism, not anti-elitism, not anti-pluralism. Not individually, and not in combination. What did matter, enormously, were policy positions that aligned with voters’ own preferences. Voters chose candidates based on what they promised to do, not on how dramatically they framed the conflict between the people and the elite.

This finding is consistent with other experimental work. When researchers across multiple countries carefully separate populist style from policy substance, the style itself contributes very little to voter decisions.

So: if populist rhetoric doesn’t actually persuade voters, why does it seem to work? Why do populist candidates keep winning?

What populism is actually good for

This puzzle motivated our newest paper, our first ever registered report (where scholars publicly specify their hypotheses before running their experiment), now published at Research & Politics. We hypothesized that populism’s real contribution might not be persuasion but mobilization: getting people who already agree with you to actually show up and vote.

Previous studies, including our own, used what’s called a “forced choice” conjoint experimental design: respondents had to pick one candidate or the other. But in real elections, people can also stay home. To capture this, we ran a large-scale, preregistered survey experiment that added an “abstain” option, a seemingly small change that turns out to matter a lot.

What did we find? First, the basic persuasion result replicated: policy positions still dwarfed populist rhetoric in driving vote choice. Having a policy-congruent candidate increased the probability of voting by a massive 27 percentage points. Populist rhetoric, by contrast, had no meaningful persuasion effect.

But here is the twist: populist rhetoric did have a small but statistically significant mobilization effect. Having at least one populist candidate in a race was associated with a ~1.5 percentage point decrease in abstention. The effect was concentrated among voters who already held populist attitudes and encountered a candidate whose policy positions they liked. In other words, populist rhetoric didn’t convert skeptics; it energized true believers to get off the couch.

by Alexander Kustov and Yaoyao Dai, Popular by Design |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Sinéad O'Connor

[ed. I didn't know she died, in 2023. How could I have missed it. This song from her stunning album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got came out just around the time my own marriage was breaking up. It still resonates.]

Ichiro Tsuruta

via:

Right and Left

No great American novel has ever emerged from the nation’s capital, Christopher Hitchens once observed. London had Dickens—Paris, Zola and Flaubert. And Washington, D.C.? A city cut out for genre fiction: dutiful historical reconstruction, or else cheap political thrillers, sold at airports with raised gold lettering. Evidently, the town’s bureaucratic processes and brutalist office architecture just cannot deliver an exhilarating prose style. Nor can the self-serious men and women, with their big egos and small ambitions, attract literary sympathies.

If literature is no place to turn, perhaps there exists some great work of art? It was 2025, and I had to escape a May Day protest on the Mall (grown men in FUCK TRUMP wifebeaters, a crimson Handmaid’s Tale girl zapped back from a fascist-lite era). So far 2025 had been no 1963, 1982 or even 2017. CSPAN-watching geriatrics waving cardboard signs on bridges felt at times like the only symbolic act fending off the wacko, dark-web authoritarianism radiating from Pennsylvania Avenue. When May Day turned to more “mayday, mayday!,” rather than going to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to drown myself, I ended up in front of a painting in the American Wing of the nearby National Gallery.

Right and Left (1909) by Winslow Homer might be altogether disqualified from Great Washington Painting. For one, the work is not set on the banks of the Potomac but off the shore of Prouts Neck, Maine. Surely the craggy presidential faces in the Portrait Gallery or Gordon Parks’s solemn American Gothic (1942) would make for more obvious contenders. But the painting’s perfect, suggestive title, paired with the melancholic mood of the hunting scene, relaxed all critical judgment that afternoon, as I reached for something, anything, to explain a strange city in strange times.

Over gray waters, a pair of goldeneye ducks are tossed mid-flight like clown juggling pins. Distant waves carry the sportsman who has just fired on them. As if rendered by a Persian miniaturist, the diminutive scale of the shooter makes clear human motives are entirely incidental to the painting. The real drama, and damage, is in the foreground—the freakish, jack-o’-lantern yellow eye of the bird on the left, the terrible head-first plummet on the right. Both birds’ bodies are a cohesion of awkward, unnatural angles. The animals are alive and dead. The waves crest and fall. There is nothing romantic about the state of suspension: the setting sun, low and feeble, is a single orange stroke Homer has made over the indefinite horizon, like a pencil scratch on a doorframe marking the growth of a child.

In late January of last year, a quiet panic began rippling through the capital when the little figure skaters’ plane went down in the Potomac. This was around the time the government was purging tens of thousands of jobs that do things like keep planes in the sky. Countless entries follow in the region’s diary of a bad year. Authorities abducted a local Maryland man from an IKEA parking lot, to then erroneously deport him to a Salvadoran mega-prison. Gold-chained tech barons snapped up mansions in Massachusetts Avenue Heights as the welcome mat was laid out in the White House. A gunman mowed down embassy sweethearts in the streets; seventy-ton M1 Abrams tanks squeaked through a militarized birthday carnival. The clangor of dissent played out on pots and pans as the National Guard rolled into town. M4 semiautomatic rifles circled two-year-olds’ birthday parties in Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park. Meanwhile, immigration authorities began quietly patrolling the District alongside the police, making more than triple the number of arrests in a month than in the first half of the year. Come fall, the president spent the longest government shutdown in U.S. history gussying up the White House, with such understated measures as razing a wing. The year rounded out with two shot National Guard members and a hydra-headed call for five hundred more on the ground: Christmases lost protecting deserted streets in camo and Santa hats.

In a city being pulverized and remade seemingly daily, where even as recent of history as the Black Lives Matter plaza is jackhammered to oblivion, the sense of dread and unknown can bully one into a state of mental submission, or else frantic, desperate attempts to make sense of the nonsense—“rational delirium,” I underline in a hip novel I can’t finish. One of these disposable origami thoughts comes to me in the museum. It is futile surely as any other attempt to say something intelligent about such deeply stupid times. But there it is: like Homer’s bewildering birds, the targets in Washington have also been two. They have also been twinned. In this city, maybe no one has been thumped harder than undocumented workers from Central and South America, on the one hand, and federal public servants, on the other. Their red-alert existential terror—though quite incomparable in kind—might even be held within a single frame. Both perform types of labor deeply distasteful, or perhaps incomprehensible, to the administration: manual labor and public-serving work.

What I mean to say is, hardworking bricklayers and line cooks are being criminalized as hardened gangsters. Dedicated civil servants, meanwhile, are roasted as do-nothings, forced to correspond with HR black holes and polygraph machines. D.C. flags may have sold out across the city in protest of the paramilitary takeover, but Trump’s nostalgia for tough-on-crime 1970s New York increasingly feels like the sideshow. The real story of this past year, the story that will have the longer historical afterlife, is a quieter one. It is one of draining the intrinsic value from labor yoked to repetitive, inglorious and truly vital tasks: the maintenance of the civic home, on the one hand, and the literal home, on the other. (If you want to call these real, productive forms of labor feminized versus a masculine world of bullshit finance capital or big tech, I, for one, won’t object.)

In this bleak picture of 2025 Washington, both civil servants and undocumented workers were said to be living off ill-gotten gains. Both were targeted at the places of their work. Both, like the pair of mid-flight sea birds, found themselves in kinds of godless existential suspense. And both, I would argue in a more grandiose mood, if I could summon it, were subject to an elitist attack on the American work ethic. A work ethic that arrived in the rugged hills of New England with… the Puritans!

Leaving the museum, I retraced the perimeter of the protest on the National Mall, where it turned out I might have misunderstood the Calvinist commitments of the Handmaid girl whose outdated display had driven me away. Now sitting cross-legged, ringed by the roots of an American elm and the rim of her red dress, eyes closed, bodice pooling around her waist: She was topless? Stamp-sized leaves overlaid her nipples and inked across her chest in lipstick were the words “Non Violent Vibes.” (Two words, not one.)

The Puritans had their maypoles of Merry Mount and were, in reality, a band of certified neurotics (Max Weber’s description was always too somber). But even at this lefty protest, the Protestant work ethic—its seriousness, self-discipline, prudishness—appeared to be in somewhat dramatic retreat.

I supposed. Who the hell knew what was going on anymore. I was pregnant and needed to go home and lie down. [...]

●

Around Washington, the flat, SSRI-pilled Zoomers wear shirts that read like floating signifiers or non sequiturs. A girl brandishes SOLD OUT across her sweatshirt in Capitol Hill. (She sold out? Her shirt is sold out?) MAIN CHARACTER traipses toward the zoo in Northwest. (Surely the pandas are the protagonists?) LET’S GO FOR A WALK crosses Penn Quarter, alone, as if the invitation has gone declined. I haven’t seen a slogan fit for the moment of deep unease in a city in which 20 percent of the workforce is federal, tens of thousands have left or been fired since February, and where the unemployment rate has been leading the nation for months. Why not say what we mean? CANNED, FURLOUGHED or PROBATIONARY. DAMNED. SAVED.

In every other respect, the people of this city speak in a direct manner, so rarely a note of the ironical or bohemian. Washington can feel like inhabiting a LinkedIn hologram: transactional, oppressively chipper, neutered. At the tasteful, wood-paneled bistro, a young woman in athleisure sits alone reading Gung Ho! Increase Productivity, Profits, and Your Own Prosperity over a shrimp salad and pale coffee. (The endearing maître d’ who used to inhale drags of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. behind the counter seems to have evacuated his post.) Steel yourself: the first question out of a new acquaintance’s month really might be “What d’you do?”...

Laments are often operatic, duly so, but from people whose professional life and manner are the definition of restraint. A physician running miraculous clinical trials described to me a Looney Tunes world this past winter: a futile Road Runner-Coyote chase sequence, until the latest cuts made by the DOGE kid stuffed in the utility closet inevitably get reversed. Another fed worker is witnessing his unit transform into a “tabloid operation,” he says, “a craven institution stewarding the demise of the nation.” He continues: “What do you do stuck in a job with career-preservationists in charge who bend 93 different ways a day?”...

An elder nanny sidles up at the library to tell me about more ICE sightings. Arrests of nannies at Turtle Park, now Macomb. “They called the parents to come get the child,” she says of yet another raid I cannot confirm. When I ask her where she is hearing these reports—that I think they really might in fact be false—she just points to her phone, to the WhatsApp-group rumor mills, like it is an investigative report published by the Washington Post. It doesn’t matter that she is a citizen, she says. “They don’t care who you are, what your status is. And they go right to us,” she says, pointing to her skin and pursing her lips. Other nannies in the area are forgoing Venmo or check payments. Cash only. “Soviet practices=best practices in this climate!” a Russian-American mom texts me.

No one can even pretend anymore that Americans will take over all these jobs, particularly in the realm of construction or farming, giving the lie to an “American-made” future. An artist acquaintance has been photographing housing construction sites to imagine what it would look like for the power tools and saws to go silent in an industry where undocumented workers constitute more than 20 percent of the workforce. In a film she is making, she interviews a worker who says in Portuguese: “That guy that makes the hole, that breaks things, gets on the roof, lays down brick—they [Americans] don’t want to do that.” He adds, lightly: “So that is why they have us.” I hear of another young woman’s Bolsonarista father in São Paulo finally turning on the Bolsonaro of the North: “Who will do the work?”

The tariffs on trade suppose we want our goods “American-made,” returning the old glory back to the American working-class and blue-collar jobs. But by treating undocumented laborers in the appalling manner we are, it sends the message, rather loudly, that the work done by these individuals does not confer one ounce of dignity or worth. In fact, it disqualifies one from living even a quiet life on the margins. Who wants to be the understudy to the guy who worked so hard he was rewarded with being disappeared to a country he doesn’t even come from?

Another South American living near Rock Creek Park tells me he woke up recently in the middle of the night to the cry of a rabbit shrieking, pursued by a fox, an owl, some kind of predator. It was the most chilling sound he had ever heard. “I feel like that,” he says, “like a chased animal.”

by Noelle Bodick, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Winslow Homer, Right and Left

Aesthetics As a Housing Barrier?

Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?

Patrick Collison’s YIMBY credentials are unimpeachable. He is a major backer of California YIMBY, the organization that has passed a stunning array of pro-housing bills in one of the most anti-development states in the nation. So it was interesting to see him claim that the movement has made a big mistake — or even been downright dishonest — by ignoring the aesthetics of apartment buildings:

For reference, here’s Sejong City in Korea, whose residential districts do indeed look rather bland and oppressive:

Some urbanists agreed, calling for regulatory reform that would allow American apartment buildings to look like the famous Haussmann buildings in Paris (depicted at the top of this post). So did some conservatives, which is unsurprising; intellectual conservatism has always called for a return to classical architecture and a rejection of modern styles. In fact, the idea that ugly building styles are a key reason that Americans disapprove of housing construction has been around quite a while, and it even has a name — “QIMBY”, meaning “quality in my back yard”.

Chris Elmendorf protested Patrick’s framing, arguing that YIMBYs have been active in pushing for reforms that would allow more beautiful buildings to be built in America: [...]

YIMBYs have been pushing for single-stair reforms that would allow more "Paris-like" buildings…The municipal design standards & reviews that YIMBY laws allow developers to bypass did not improve designs. Per [Arthur] Stamps's studies (the only relevant empirical evidence of which I'm aware), they made things worse…[T]he problem of housing aesthetics deserves more attention -- and is receiving more attention -- but it's not like YIMBYs broke something that was working.

Elmendorf also pointed out that California YIMBY itself recently came out with a plan to encourage the building of more beautiful multifamily housing. The plan reads like exactly the kind of thing that Patrick might like: [...]

If California wants more European-feeling mid-rise development with courtyards, better daylight, shade, and balconies, it has to keep modernizing the [building] code…Too many building, electrical, and fire rules (in California and across the U.S.) [forbid] the buildings people actually like: bright cross-ventilated homes, true courtyard buildings, and mixed-use ground floors. All these requirements – egress, stairs, corridor, and elevator – often make projects bulkier and require much bigger lots, limiting where we can build new housing…[T]he web of building code regulations denies light, proportion, street connections, courtyards, greenspace – everything that makes buildings feel humane…Passing single-stair reforms and elevator reforms makes smaller mid-rise buildings possible, which fit on smaller lots, can be nestled into existing buildings, add variety to the streetscape, and reduce the pressure for larger, monotonous developments.

So at least one prominent YIMBY organization — the one that Patrick supports — is already answering the call to focus on building aesthetics. Others are likely to follow.

I think that’s a good thing. Eliminating onerous building codes and regulations will kill two birds with one stone, making it easier to build housing even as it also makes it possible to build more of the European-style ornamentation that commentators always call for. And allowing American developers to experiment with ornamentation and alternative styles will help break up the sameness of an urban landscape dominated by endless forests of boxy 5-over-1 buildings.

But that said, I highly doubt that this — or any stylistic change — would move the needle on public acceptance of new apartment buildings.

First of all, I’m skeptical that regular Americans actually like the kinds of building styles that intellectuals often yearn for. If you plunk down old-looking European-style buildings in the middle of Houston or Seattle, people tend to ridicule them as cheesy and inauthentic. The typical insult is “pastiche”, a derogatory term for a style that jumbles and mixes old European styles (even though, as Samuel Hughes points out, mixing and matching older ideas is exactly how classic European building styles were created in the first place).

Many local design standards explicitly discourage old-style buildings. For example, Los Angeles’ planning department, in its design guide for Echo Park, writes: “Do not imitate historic architectural styles; a modern interpretation may be appropriate if architectural features are borrowed and replicated to a simpler form.”

Nor is it just old European-looking buildings that leave many Americans cold. Pietrzak and Mendelberg (2025) find that although people tend to dislike tall buildings, traditional brick facades fail to move the needle on support for housing. Alex Armlovich points out that when New York City came out with new limestone skyscrapers, only three were permitted. And Brooklyn Tower, a recently built art deco style skyscraper in Brooklyn, has drawn tons of criticism for its style.

And Elmendorf cautions that no one has yet managed to find a specific architectural style that Americans like enough to move the needle on their support for new housing: [...]

All this suggests that while some American intellectuals may pine for the cornices and mascarons of Haussmannian Paris, most Americans just think that style — and any old style — looks cheesy when it’s transplanted to an American context. This may be because Americans consciously think of their culture as a young one, more suited to modern styles than traditional ones. Or it may be because America’s artistic culture has always focused on critique and fault-finding. But whatever it is, it suggests that allowing — or even forcing — cities to build ornamented buildings will not garner a wave of popular support for new development.

Conversely, the places that do build a lot of housing tend not to build it in old, ornate European styles. Texas, which is one of the best states when it comes to building new housing, mostly constructs single-family homes with lawns. When it does build apartment buildings, they tend to look like this:

Texas builds them anyway, for much the same reason that the Koreans built Sejong City — they’re cheap and efficient, and the state needs them to support its rapid population growth.1 You do see a little experimentation with slightly more European-style apartments in a few places, but overall it’s just boxy and functional. The fundamental driver of housing abundance in Texas isn’t architectural beauty; it’s a culture and politics that values and seeks out economic growth.

Nor is ornamental architecture necessarily what makes people love a city. Traditionalists may sigh over old European styles, and urbanists may salivate over the superilles of Barcelona, but the city that has captured the hearts of Americans in recent years is Tokyo. Downtown Tokyo is a forest of electric lights, strung up along the sides of stubby concrete mid-rises called zakkyo buildings. There’s nary a fancy cornice to be found; instead, the beauty comes from the bright cheery emblems of commerce:

Tokyo’s residential neighborhoods have even less ornamentation. They often feature flat brown or white or tan facades, hanging power lines, and bare asphalt streets with no setbacks or lawns or even trees:

And yet these are absolutely enchanting places to live. Why? Not because of the architecture, but because of the design of the city itself. The small curving streets make perfect walking paths, undisturbed by zooming traffic. Mixed-use zoning gives the neighborhood a communal, lived-in feel. Plentiful public transit makes it easy and stress-free to get around, while Japan’s peerless public safety makes it fun to hang out on the street or in a park at any hour.

Americans who go to Japan have definitely noticed this:

It’s no coincidence, I think, that Japan is one of the best countries when it comes to building plenty of housing. Yes, most of its apartment buildings look like crap when evaluated in isolation on their pure architectural merits. But the urban system made up by those buildings is a wonderful place to live, and so Japanese people have few qualms about building up that system. And Americans go there and love it.

And if America built a bunch of Haussmann buildings instead of boxy 5-over-1s, it would probably only marginally improve the feel of the country’s cities. [...]

If you want American cities to look and feel so nice that Americans are willing to build housing in them, I think you have to do a lot more than give the buildings fancy facades. You have to do the hard work of putting in train lines, making side streets safe for pedestrians, rezoning for mixed use, and — perhaps most important — policing cities in order to ensure robust public safety.  [prescriptions follow:]

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Wyatt Simpson on Unsplash/X/Minseong Kim via Wikimedia Commons/ Kevin Doran on Unsplash/ Kentin via Wikimedia Commons/Karan Singh on Unsplash

[ed. I imagine people might feel differently if Japan's commercial ornamentation districts were exported to America and composed mostly of Taco Bell, McDonald's, and other corporate fast food signage. In fact, we already have that, and it sucks.]