There are three points of possible—three headings, we might say—for possible kinds of confusion that we can have with reading: first, vocabulary; second, reference; third, attitude. A lot of different kinds of questions or problems might emerge under these different headings, so I’ll go through each in order to give a sense of what might be involved for each one. They are sequenced in a particular way: problems of vocabulary should be addressed before problems of reference, and when possible, problems of reference should be addressed before issues of attitude. All three areas might, in some contexts, implicate one another, but hopefully this more discrete treatment will facilitate making judgments about those hybrid cases.

Vocabulary

Unfamiliar words. So, first: vocabulary. “Do I recognize these words?” This is the first question, and the happiest one, if we arrive at a passage where we find a word that we don’t know. Here, we have such an array of reference tools to look at and use. Dictionary is the first among them. If we are wholly unfamiliar with the term—we don’t recognize it at all—this is when we use general-use dictionaries. In a pinch, a quick Google search might suffice, but the more we might, the better sense we might get from a highly researched dictionary that will give us all of the lemmas (which are dictionary entries) that represent what those lexicographers (the people who have put together a dictionary) have discovered about the average kinds of use that could occur within a corpus. (For me, the Cadillac of English-language dictionaries is the Oxford English Dictionary, but Americans tend to prefer Merriam-Webster. Whatever dictionary you prefer is the one to go with.)

Terms of art. Sometimes that might not be enough. We might recognize a term, but we might be reading it in a unique context. A legal document or a medical document might not be the ones—the usages—that give us just the average sense of a term. That’s why we have things like medical dictionaries and legal dictionaries—specialized dictionaries that we can go to when we know that we’re in an area of specialized reference. Really good dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary, will often make a gesture in that direction, but the specialist dictionary will give a broader sense of it. So, when we come to that word that we don’t recognize, we want to get the general sense of the term, determine if it’s being used in a special sense, and then still go to a dictionary.

Slang etc. Of course, not every term will be in a dictionary. Slang moves ahead of lexicography, and portmanteaus, neologisms, coinages, puns, initialisms, abbreviations, and perhaps dozens of other verbal phenomena might appear in a text that don’t have a dictionary lemma. (This is even more true for work in languages that are more rarely spoken or written, have a smaller community of speakers, or are from less resourced areas of the world. Dictionaries and all reference works are investments of collective labor, time, and capital, and at a scale much larger than most other books.) Here immediate context will help establish the general attitude, and collecting or noting usages of the term over time can help. Also, you might look to the “morphemic,” those little parts of the word that indicate some aspect of meaning — in English, we might casually divide these into prefixes, suffixes, and roots. If you recognize some morpheme, that can help give a clue to the larger meaning.

Dialects, sociolects, idiolects. We might still not be done there, though, because there could be other possible questions about non-generalizable meanings of words phrases. Even with a phrase or a word that we might be familiar with, we might ask whether it’s being used as part of a dialect (regional use), a sociolect (group use), or an idiolect (use unique to an individual). We might not be able to address that question by simply looking at something in a dictionary, but we can sort of mark it and say, “Given that we don’t think that they’re using this term in the general way, we then can go and say, ‘Ah, they might be using it in a specialized way,’ and if the specialized way is also not clear to us, we might determine that they are using it as part of an idiolect.” (How do you sort of get the sense of how someone’s using a term in an idiolect? This has to come from context. Here, what you can do is use a Control-F search and find all of the other instances of that term in the piece that you’re reading and try from there to cobble together what you think might be the way that this person uses that term.)

Phraseology. Sometimes, however, vocabulary doesn’t come down to a question just of a word. It might be a phrase, or it might be something where we need to recognize an idiomatic expression or an adage. So, this isn’t something that is as easy, but we’re looking out for that possibility in our first guesses about something—that it’s not just a specialist’s term, or it’s not a term of art in a particular discourse, or even an idiolect’s term. Maybe it’s not the word that’s confusing us, but some other kind of phraseology.

Sometimes phrases like these are going to be included in dictionaries, so looking up a phrase can be helpful. This happens sometimes when I read a work in something other than English — not knowing an idiom means I second-guess my sense of each word, until I hit upon the idea that the phrase might be taken together to mean something. (No, to avoir le cafard does not mean “to have a cockroach” but to be “out of sorts.”) Erasmus put together his great reference work, Adages, to try to give contextual background for common adages that would come up largely in the Latin and Greek literature that was of his time. We have some of these kinds of reference tools available, but more or less just marking something as a possible distinct phrase or a kind of quotation without quotation marks could help us get a better sense of what that term might mean, even if we can’t figure it out all at once. Of course, there might also be foreign language terms that appear in a particular text.

Reference

Pronouns. Reference implies that reference will be preceding us in the text and should be proximate in some way. If there’s a chain of pronominal references, this might lead us to have to track our steps backward, like Hansel and Gretel following breadcrumbs. But there can also be ambiguity here sometimes when there is more than one candidate. Still, articulating this ambiguity between two or three possible candidates of anaphoric reference will allow you to work through the meaning of the text. If it’s this subject, or that subject, or that other subject, what would be the meaning in each case? Working through all that, usually, a best candidate will emerge.

Genre. However, more difficult is when a term or a phrase is known, but what it hopes to pick out precisely in the world of the text, or the world of the reader, or whatever overlap there may be between them, is not exactly clear. One possible consideration here is to think of genre. Clearly, in fictional texts, reference will, in most cases, be to a fictional reference point. But in all other kinds of texts, that doesn’t mean that the reference has to be real. Fiction emerges as a quality of reference in even scientific papers on occasion.

History. The reference point for a text that is speaking indicatively in its own voice might also be considered in light of its temporality. When was the text published? Could it know about what I would assume that to be? Oftentimes, when students read historical texts, the work of establishing historical distance in their reading is working through this aspect of reference—that a term like vehicle, set in the 16th century, will pick out a very different kind of reference point than, for them, the most obvious idea of an automobile or something similar. This can just clearly be established, at least in the negative, by recognizing that in the 16th century, the automobile did not exist.

Intentional ambiguity. Again, there might be ambiguity of reference, not just because of the use of the pronoun, but because of multiple possibilities. Here, again, the best practice is to try to articulate or make concrete what those distinctions are, but also leave open the possibility that the ambiguity is intentional. Complex or difficult texts that are well-written may employ ambiguity in order to produce a particular effect, to challenge a way of thinking, or any other number of possible motives. So, while making these options discrete, that is something to be considered.

Tropes. Figurative meaning is also important to think about in reference. A student confronted with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea of “Golden Grove” might, on first instinct, Google it, only to be led back to the poem itself. But “Golden Grove” picks out a kind of placeholder for a proper noun, but we should understand it metaphorically and metonymically. The tropic dimensions of reference, which have long been the fascination of rhetoric, have been boiled down by Peter Ramus and then later expanded upon by Vico and Kenneth Burke into the four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Having some ability to at least make a candidate of what this reference might mean if we were to take it as one of those four forms should equip most readers to move through exceptionally difficult passages that appear confounding when taken in only a literal way.

Culture. Another possibility is the distinction of cultural reference points, not just historical ones. Knowing something about the history and origin of the text can sometimes be a clue to this, but this can’t always be easily determined. So, simply to recognize or put a variable in over a term of reference and say, “This might mean more or less than I think that it means, or might signify differently among the intended readers,” is very useful. Of course, when possible, having a critical edition or an annotated text allows the editors to help readers with this most difficult of contexts to fill in, which is what lies upon the other side of your cultural horizon. Broad and consistent reading, needless to say, habituates us to make these inferences ourselves, even if it doesn’t always allow us understanding.

Attitude

Evaluation. Does the sentence or passage seem to imply a confusing attitude toward its object of reference? Does it seem like it hates something that just before it loved? If we ask these questions, we are already making an advance. Sometimes we arrive at the judgment “I don’t know what this means,” because we don’t know how the text wants us to take it. That might imply a truly enormous number of possibilities, but we can try to reduce them to three questions: What is the author/text/character’s relation to the referenced subject? What do they assume the reader’s attitude is or should be? And what does the author/text/character imagine is their relationship to the reader? This is a version of the “rhetorical stance,” and though there are often ambiguities here, those are sometimes productive of the kind of complex meaning that a text is working with and through.

Irony. Considerations of surprising evaluations in a text return us to one of those four master tropes: irony. When I’m reading something in a text, is it—am I meant to take it as true? Of course, irony—and all of its shades and hues—shows that sometimes a sentence might be stated and should be taken as exactly the inverse. If the context is surprising—if I’m surprised based on what else I have seen from this author, from the words in this character’s mouth, etc.—then I should make the consideration of ironic usage as one possibility.

Indirect Discourse. Another very common source of confusion is when a text is representing, as opposed to asserting, some kind of discourse. This could be something in quotation marks, but oftentimes it could be indirect discourse where the speech of another is represented, sometimes for a very brief passage, implying that a reader should be able to detect this shift merely on the basis of the changes of attitude in the vocabulary and the description of some phrase.

Contradiction. And, of course, we should allow for a text, an author, or a character to have some contradiction—to be able to consider potentially contradictory positions and maybe not arrive at one. If that is the source of confusion, one of the questions to ask is whether the text, the author, or the character is aware of this, or should be understood to be aware of this contradiction, or is this something that we bring, ourselves, in our reading?

However abstract and programmatic these considerations are, my hope is that they sketch out a way that one could proceed through reading that feels difficult. The worst result of reading a difficult text would be intimidation. This obliterates the possibility of conversation beyond the borders of our comfort and is something that can’t be resisted merely by moral force, but by technique, practice, habit, attention, and, yes, a certain amount of perseverance.

n+1, “In the Reality Lab”

Presence is a favorite word of Zuckerberg’s. The feeling of presence, he explained in a promotional video from 2021, would be “the defining quality of the Metaverse.” The video cuts to a scene of Zuck’s cartoonish Metaverse avatar playing poker with a giant robot in a space station. No one could mistake that for presence. Variously mocked and ignored, the Metaverse withered. As of last month, Reality Labs’ losses since 2020 totaled more than $80 billion.

Some interesting drawings and thoughts on making them by Atticus Lish at The Metropolitan Review:

The Metropolitan Review

Art Act

When I was a kid, writing and drawing were joined in my imagination as a single magical scribe-like activity…

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12 days ago · 67 likes · 6 comments · Atticus Lish and The Metropolitan Review

Although I’m usually wary of The Economist, this short article is interesting:

The true symbol of Goma, however, is an idiosyncratic, man-powered wooden scooter known as a tshukudu. It looks as if it has been drawn by a child, with its simple, angled frame and two-metre-long deck. Yet as a way of carrying cargo in this chaotic city, it has proved perfect. It is narrow enough to zigzag through busy markets. Rubber strips around the wheels and a spring beneath the cow-horn handlebars help absorb the shock of potholes. It can bear more weight than a bicycle: riders brag about carrying loads of more than 500kg on a single tshukudu. At $200, with no petrol costs, it is cheaper than a motorcycle.

China builds first offshore wind turbine:

I would love for my next car to be a Chinese EV, but that seemed like an impossibility. But wait…

Chinese EVs may hit U.S. within a few years, one way or another, CNBC:

Because direct imports of Chinese-made EVs into the U.S. seems highly unlikely, allowing them to be manufactured here is becoming a realistic option. In January, President Donald Trump expressed support for letting China set up shop in the U.S. as long as they employed American workers. The remark led to wide speculation that the issue would be raised at the recent Beijing summit with Xi Jinping, yet there are no reports that it came up. Among the entourage of CEOs that accompanied Trump, the only auto executive was Tesla’s Elon Musk, whose company has a presence in China, though it is far behind domestic leader BYD.

Sally Rooney to publish Hebrew translation of novel with BDS-compliant publisher, The Guardian:

Rooney is publishing her bestselling 2024 novel, Intermezzo, through November Books, an independent Israeli publisher that supports Palestinian rights, with +972 Magazine and Local Call, two independent media outlets in Israel and Palestine.

The 35-year-old has published four wildly popular novels that have been translated into dozens of languages. The first two – Conversations with Friends and Normal People – were translated into Hebrew by the Israeli publisher Modan. But in 2021, Rooney turned down a translation offer from the publisher for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, citing her desire to support the BDS movement, a Palestinian-led, global campaign that seeks to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”.

The cover art:

Section 224 has passed. I guess that’ll maybe cut down on all the espionage Israel is conducting directly on the Pentagon (NYTimes), or maybe it will help ex-spy Jonathan Pollard’s electoral chances.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

AI Watch

Universal vaccine design. Promising, but still a promise.

The vaccine triggered immune responses in the volunteers not only to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS, but to related bat viruses that could potentially jump from animals to humans and cause future pandemics.

This trial proves the safety of an entirely new way of designing vaccines. The technology uses an AI-designed ‘super-antigen’ to provide lasting protection against a broad range of viruses - for example the Ebola group, or Sarbeco coronavirus group - even as they mutate.

But also needle-free! I wonder if that’s an effect of vaccine designers now thinking about post-pandemic public health issues—or just marketability.

Stealth facial recognition technology, you say? Meta’s back on their bullshit. From WIRED:

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software.

Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.

Xwitter’s new algorithm, analyzed. Reddit.

The biggest architectural shift is that they removed all hand-engineered features. There is no manual weighting for follower counts, account age, or historical engagement rates. Instead, the core ranking layer is entirely powered by a Grok-1 transformer. It takes a raw sequence of your historical interactions and predicts probabilities for 19 distinct actions (likes, replies, continuous dwell time, off-platform sharing).

I wonder how this will affect this finding. Nature:

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects¹. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Fiction from Craig Bernadini. At Conjunctions:

Today, Ana, or “anA,” as she is known to her adoring public (“fanAtics”), who come to her concerts bearing bouquets made from eleven small sheaves of tightly-wound barley to leave upon the stage, the gift the Russian oligarch is said to have received when he first took little Ana to Moscow—or wearing one of dozens of T-shirts with logos of the same—has become one of the most sought-after and respected artists of her generation: a musician of broad interests and curiosity, a performer of commanding technique widely praised for her expressive artistry and the effortless yet disciplined lyricism of her movement. Called a tour de force, palindrome and paradox, cipher and cynosure, anA has brought her quiet revolution to concert stages in every major musical capital of the world.

Did you see that game? SI:

The Knicks may have a true ref problem on their hands in the NBA Finals. The opening tilt against the Spurs featured plenty of officiating controversy, though there was hope a new crew and how things played out in Game 1 would cause a course correction.

Instead, New York’s questionable whistle on both ends continued in Game 2, and was arguably even worse than Wednesday night. Following two contests that have now unfolded with a heavy San Antonio leaning from the refs, it’s difficult to write this off as a non-issue for the Knicks.

Sincere thanks to all readers who immediately upgraded to paid subscription. Your support means a lot.

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1

This is an update about this blog, Occasional Hazards, which has existed now, believe it or not, since 2021. This upcoming academic year will be its fifth anniversary. The update consists mostly of promising you more regular posts.

Recently, in the last few months, I’ve added the “Week Links” every Sunday. I try to get it out before noon, but sometimes it comes much later than noon. Nevertheless, I’ve been able to be more or less consistent—with a one- or two-day margin sometimes—on having “Week Links” available to you. That feature will remain going forward.

2

I also want to add in a mid-week, probably Wednesday, post. However, I won’t be able to have the kind of in-depth post every week that has normally emerged on a very erratic, but roughly monthly basis. Moving forward, the mid-week post will rotate between four different formats:

• Featured Posts: These are the previous kinds of posts—detailed explorations or inquiries based on my current research projects, thoughts I have from teaching, or a specific concern of mine. These will continue, but will be published approximately once a month.

• Fragment Posts: Once a month, I will explore a specific quotation from my commonplace book. This will be a way of performing the history of rhetoric: explaining how I think about it, why it is significant, and introducing you to its historical context.

• Case Posts: This will take a contemporary case going on right now—something from the news or recent memory—and perform a short piece of brief rhetorical criticism, pulling out the elements of the rhetoricity of the case and how that might change how we think, feel, and respond to it.

• Wildcard Posts: Bingo space. Some weeks, this might feature aphorisms that I tend to write in my spare time. It might be a piece of criticism about a work of art or a poem. It could be a short audio message, or it might be an expanded, in-depth version of any of the other posts (including the “Week Links”). It may also be an archived post—now that there’s five years in the tank, I have a feeling a few may have gotten past you, dear reader!

This increased regularity is coming at a time where I actually expect to have less time for free writing—a baby’s on the way, my professional obligations are increasing, and I am renewing efforts on my book manuscript. So this is a perhaps quixotic outcome of my commitment to have a more disciplined writing schedule. Hopefully, this will help organize and punctuate the other kinds of writing projects that I am currently involved in, either by myself or with collaborators.

I also hope that it helps give this blog a little more of what my students always request: structure. I work in three different but interrelated areas—history, theory, and criticism. “Rhetoric” is the term that organizes all of these for me, but I understand that unless you’ve been hanging around these parts for some time, it probably doesn’t have the same significance for you. (To rib me, my sister used to call me a REE-tor, and sometimes I hear that intonation accidentally from the undergraduate students who are supposedly studying the subject with me.) So here is the new formula for understanding this blog:

Cases are criticism — Fragments are history — Features are theory. Summed together, they are my actively elaborated practice of rhetoric before a public.

3

I hope this is good news for you. If you are a subscriber to this blog, I hope you are excited to be getting more content. But there is also one other change: this blog allows for paid subscriptions. It has for some time, but I haven’t really advertised it. Now, I would like to go forward with making some of these posts accessible only at the paid tier.

Before I permanently roll out that feature, I want to talk about the reality of what it means to write two posts a week while maintaining a full-time academic appointment—with all that that entails—and why supporting writing that you enjoy or benefit from is important.

When academics write, we almost never get paid for our writing. An academic life—especially one like mine at a liberal arts college in the humanities—consists of an enormous amount of reading, writing, and reviewing, in addition to teaching. Even when we review other people’s work, this is considered “service” and is completely unpaid. Academic publishers, like Taylor & Francis, make 100% of the proceeds from the academic articles they publish. Editors, reviewers, and writers receive no money from their writing.

When academics publish a book at a university press, they may receive some proceeds from sales, but they tend to be very minimal. For context, I know one academic personally whose book sales—which I would consider highly successful—financed her dining room furniture. That is sort of the “high level” of financial success for an academic writer.

I am salaried, but most faculty (>70%) are contingent faculty who are often on term (1- or 3-year contract) or adjuncts paid per class, often without benefits. I am lucky enough to have a non-contingent position here, though I have been in contingent positions for most of my academic life up to this point. But even those of us in tenure-track or tenured positions are facing increased pressure from an academy that, for reasons longer than I want to go into here, is no longer making investment into its faculty its number one priority. (Or two, or three….)

4

Given all of these pressures, maintaining an academic blog is a concern because it is not considered part of my academic service, my research publications, or my job at all. (Trust me, I asked.) Up until now, I have been doing this mostly for myself and for the small community of readers here. Because of the changes to my life going forward, I am going to seek to subsidize this writing habit with paid memberships.

If you are a reader and you are unable to afford a $6-a-month subscription, no worries. Some number of the weekly posts and the “Week Links” will continue to be free. I am not sure exactly which pieces will be put behind the paywall yet, and I would be highly interested in your comments as I make that determination to figure out what is best for this community. Also, feel free to DM me with your thoughts or opinions, even if it is a Goodbye to all this note! If you subscribe for a year, at $60.00, you get all posts. To be a founder, at $200, you can commission an article from me—we have to work out the details by email, but that also of course gets you access to all paywalled content.

There are other ways you can support the blog beyond just being a paid subscriber. Sharing this blog with others and helping me to grow the readership is incredibly helpful. While the current audience is very engaged, I think there are probably more people out there who would be interested. As an incentive, when you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you’ll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

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Part of the slow growth has been my fault, as my posting has been very scattershot. The name of this blog, Occasional Hazards, was sort of my inside joke about writing very occasionally (only when I felt like it). It was also a nod to it being an “occupational hazard” that has nothing to do with my actual job, and a play on the idea that I am “hazarding” guesses—a slightly different version of a hot take, though I have my own feelings about that term.

I apologize that this is not as substantive an update as I have promised before. Something like that will be coming very soon.

Thanks again for your continued subscription to Occasional Hazards. I hope that you find value in this blog, and as always, I am interested to hear from my readers.

This morning my wife and I watched the astounding film Black Orpheus. I now count it alongside The Color of Pomegranates as one of the most gorgeous films I’ve seen.

Relatedly, Lula launches a free-of-charge streaming service for Brazilians showing Brazilian film. A model for a reinvention of public media?

And in case you missed the Note, I also wrote about a film. Read it here:

this is a newsletter

Familiar Strangeness: Tim Barr on A.I. Artificial Intelligence

On perhaps the strangest film in Spielberg’s sprawling filmography we’ve got Tim Barr. Tim is a professor at a sleepy liberal arts college in the Midwest. He directs the Depauw Debate Society and is writing a book on Baroque melancholy. He also writes on Substack at…

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13 days ago · 3 likes · 1 comment

Some new attention to old psychoanalysis. One of the names listed here, Patricia Gherovici, is a personal acquaintance. I have never met a more generous thinker or person. I’ve also recommended Jacqueline Rose’s work to a number of psych-suspicious friends and colleagues. And earlier this week, in one of those lovely kinds of casual conversations that is the most serious kind life can offer—between friends thinking together differently—I introduced Lacan’s concept of the “four discourses.” “I can’t believe I care about Lacan,” she said. Here’s one of Steve Llano’s takes on it — you will find it illuminating, I promise:

News

I’m not normally one to recommend calling your elected representatives to other fellow US Citizens, but if you are opposed to US militarism and the Gaza genocide, this is one you should pick up the phone on. From Responsible Statecraft:

Buried in the House’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948.

Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.

Wars are always worse than you know. Recent evidence from the Iraq War. Photos revealed from the Haditha massacre. Reported at The New Yorker.

Another consideration of yesterday’s violence and its repercussions. On Uvalde, and the response to the failures of policing being more policing, from The Intercept:

This failure to save lives was not, as I wrote at the time, a failure of police work. It in fact exemplified what police critics and abolitionists have stressed for decades, with reams of evidence. Police do not save lives or prevent crime. Policing is not the “thin blue line” between social peace and chaotic violence. And the work of policing is a far cry from the heroic myth so stubbornly lodged in the American imagination. This was not, of course, the lesson learned by Texas authorities after the shooting. Instead, the state’s response was as predictable as it was doomed to produce only more violence in Texas schools: They added more cops. There were no well-researched, pragmatic policy changes around limiting assault rifles, regulating the hyper-destructive expanding bullets that ripped children’s bodies apart, and increasing mental health support — things that could actually stop shootings like in Uvalde, which was carried out by a troubled 18-year-old. Texas school districts instead poured billions of dollars into stationing police at every public school campus in the state. The results, as a New York Times report published this week found, has been an horrific spate of violent police abuse against children in schools across the state.

AI Watch

As I frequently tell my debate students, one of the capacities you must develop to be able to competently participate in public argumentation is an understanding of commonly used examples. The article below explores the history of one commonly made by economists (though, as noted, also commonly misused by them): that the ATM did not replace the bank teller.

But we also need to be able to supply our own examples should we wish to develop or extend a point in public discourse. One that may be relevant to the “discussion” over AI regulation. In 1807, the US Federal Government abolished the slave trade. In 1820, slavers could be tried with a capital offense. Obviously, whatever moral righteousness may have inspired this legislation did not end slavery.

AI refusal requires understanding, not just refusal:

Seventy-five percent of professional artists say they want to block AI crawlers from using their work, but research suggests that even on platforms where those options are available, only a fraction actually do. Why? Because while many opt-out tools exist – including robots.txt, NoAI meta tags, the TDM Reservation Protocol, and platform-specific directives like Google-Extended – they are not easily accessible, and subsequently adoption is negligible.

Believe it or not, a book called The Future of Truth may contain a lot of AI-generated statements.

From Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon:

Just something neat:

PBS News:

"This case is nothing but a racket designed to take $1.7 billion of taxpayer dollars out of the Treasury and pour it into a huge slush fund for Trump at DOJ to hand out to his private militia of insurrectionists, rioters, and white supremacists, including those who brutally beat police officers on January 6, 2021, and sycophant accomplices to his election stealing schemes," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. Trump's attorneys suggested in their court filing seeking to dismiss the case that the resolution would not be reviewable by a judge. But a group of 93 members of Congress filed a brief teeing up a challenge. Justice Department announces a $1.7 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ fund to compensate Trump allies.”

Less mentioned is that the award aount is actually 1.776 billion — cute huh?

This absurdity (click for a link to the CRS report)

quickly became

Price tag? The CBO estimates 1.2 TRILLION.

The so-called “defense” industry is doing very well. Consider how much we are currently spending on destroying our expensive missile systems and aicraft in Iran. From Stars and Stripes:

At least 42 U.S. military aircraft have been lost or damaged since the start of the war with Iran, according to a recent analysis that compiled news reports and officials’ statements to tally losses. The Congressional Research Service report comes as lawmakers push Pentagon leaders for more clarity on timelines, costs and outcomes pertaining to Operation Epic Fury. Pentagon acting comptroller Jules Hurst testified to Congress this month that the estimated cost of military operations in Iran had reached $29 billion.

All while Ben Gvir oversees the torture and assault of international humanitarians, in acts so heinous even the craven “diplomat” Huckabee condemned it. The way the story is reported in here is that France has banned him. Listen to the testimony of the survivors:

AI Watch

A diptych:

"As A Doctor, I Can Understand the Allure of ChatGPT,” NYTimes:

It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.

Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.

Consider also how the NYTimes captioned this image:

But first, congrats to the grads:

I am finally getting around to reading Vollmann’s No Immediate Danger, vol. 1 of his Carbon Ideologies. A passage from the intro:

My sister is forced to go into private practice now that the amazing Women’s Emotional Wellness Center is being shuttered. This made me return to a work we both value, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. A passage that might be valued by many now:

The most important step in learning concentration is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio, smoking or drinking. Indeed, to be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself—and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will discover how difficult it is.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 112

The difficult, long reading I recommend this week is Francesca Albanese’s report on torture and genocide in the occupied territories. Both your courage and your intellect are required, along with your heart, to confront the American-sponsored genocide that is still underway:

A poem, for these times, from Geoffrey Hill:

“There is No Hard Problem of Consciousness,” Noema:

Updating the understanding of a phenomenon is not to deny it. Sunsets were understood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the descent of the sun in its daily motion over the Earth. Today, we understand them as a result of the Earth’s rotation, which turns us toward its shady side, where the sun gradually becomes no longer visible. Such an update in understanding does not make sunsets illusory or unreal.

Similarly, our soul won’t become illusory or unreal if we get a better sense of how our brain functions. We can still call our soul our “soul,” even if we understand ourselves better. I call it so, because this notion — the soul — is dear to my soul.

Mamdani’s media team has a no-meme policy. HuffPo:

“Social-first formats like short-form video only work when they carry useful information,” she told HuffPost. “Strong political communicators answer the questions people actually have: What does this mean for me? Why should I care? What can I do next?”

To answer those questions in a way that’s compelling but not cringeworthy, Mamdani’s digital video team said, they maintain a strict “no meme policy.”

“You see other politicians trying to do that, and it never works, it always feels forced,” a spokesperson for the video team said. “We’re not doing this to go viral. We are trying to make stuff that is engaging, and if it goes viral, awesome.”

Javier Milei’s popularity plunges as corruption scandals shake his cabinet, Monocle:

The scandals are clearly irking Argentines, who voted for Milei in 2023 on the back of pledges to overhaul the political system. Now corruption ranks as a major public issue again, with polls showing it to be a major concern for 50.3 per cent of Argentines. Milei, meanwhile, appears to be foundering with an approval rating of 35.5 per cent. Despite a landslide victory in last year’s midterms, Milei is now at the weakest point of his term so far. What until recently looked like a safe re-election for Milei next year is now increasingly in doubt.

But corruption is not the only issue weighing on the minds of voters. Argentines appear to be tiring of the country’s lethargic economy. For years, Milei was given the benefit of the doubt as he implemented a programme of reforms and austerity, which succeeded in taming triple-digit inflation and bringing a semblance of stability to one of the world’s most fragile economies.

Thousands run Palestine Marathon under shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza, AJE.

I wish the analysis here had gone a little deeper, but worth a read:

A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

Three Theses on Aesthetic Judgment

Some scenes of judgment…

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2 months ago · 91 likes · 12 comments · Dan Sinykin

In US higher ed, Canvas was hacked, Cornell’s president runs over students after a debate, and the Yale Report on trust in higher ed raises hackles. Llano on the Canvas debacle:

The Sophistic Take: Rhetoric, Debate, and Argument Today

Oh No, Not Canvas!

The Canvas outage - about 14 hours long give or take - was frustrating and stressful for those involved in education. For me, it was the moment when the theater tricks broke, the lights came up, and the set and its workings were revealed in the work lights. Canvas is a learning management system which mea…

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a month ago · 1 like · Steve Llano

LARB on Hungarian elections:

To understand Orbán’s defeat, one needs to reflect on the visible and underground opposition streams as they manifested themselves in investigative journalism, academic institutions, civil society activism, cultural projects, and political contestation over the last decade and a half. These streams put up a resistance that, in the long run, contributed to the erosion of the regime’s legitimacy. There are, in fact, marked similarities between this moment and the collapse of communism in Hungary in the 1980s, as both “late Orbánism” and “late Kádárism” lost their capacity to control the circulation of information, becoming increasingly illegitimate in the eyes of their citizens, even though they still retained a hard core of true believers and cynical fellow travelers.

And The Economist copes with Reform election result in the UK:

Results in Wales show that Reform’s path to power is far from assured. In the country that Mr Farage once called his main priority, Plaid Cymru, a nationalist party, consolidated the centre-left vote and won 43 seats to Reform’s 34. “Stopping Reform UK” was the second most commonly cited reason for supporting Plaid, after a belief that the party is “standing up for Wales”. If centre-left voters across Britain can similarly be persuaded to co-ordinate to stop Reform, Mr Farage’s current support would be insufficient to form a government—a dash of hope for Labour on a bleak day.

Drawing from Miklós Radnóti’s notebook — its remarkable story can be read here.

And here, her now decades-old essay against on the horrors of nuclear nationalism, The End of Imagination.

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living. All I can say to every man, woman and sentient child in India, and over there, just a little way away in Pakistan, is: take it personally. Whoever you are - Hindu, Muslim, urban, agrarian - it doesn’t matter. The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate. The bomb isn’t in your backyard. It’s in your body. And mine. Nobody, no nation, no government, no man, no god has the right to put it there. We’re radioactive already, and the war hasn’t even begun. So stand up and say something. Never mind if it’s been said before. Speak up on your own behalf. Take it very personally.

Some fresh hell:

The key to facial recognition is changing it like your underpants

The threat model in the article acts like a static face meets a perfect camera meets an immortal template. None of those three assumptions hold, and the reason they appear plausible at all is cultural. White Christian American identity practice treats the childhood face as the true face, with adult modification read as deception or instability. Protestant investment in the unchanging soul, the passport photo as legal anchor, the LinkedIn headshot as professional contract, the absence of veiling traditions, the cultural prohibition on radical appearance change in adulthood.

Where are the youth protests movements, called Gen Z Revolutions, now? One look at Kenyan politics, from World Politics Review:

With hindsight, the events of 2024 can be understood more clearly than they were at the time. They came to be known as Kenya’s Gen Z protests, a label also given to uprisings in Bangladesh, Nepal, Madagascar and other countries around the world. It conjures up an image of tech-savvy youth unburdened by deference to their elders. “Respectability makes you very docile, very civil and forces you to have false humility,” says Boniface Mwangi, an activist who is himself in his 40s. “But these kids had nothing like that. They’re telling you as it is.”

Yet Mwangi, Wanjiru and other leading activists also say that the Gen Z label was initially imposed from outside, by the media—even if it was later adopted by many of the protesters themselves. Their struggles are rooted in a long history of organizing, with support from young and old alike.

Compare that story with the situation in the US, where student protests were crushed by a coalition of university boards, various branches of federal government, and Israeli-backed groups like Canary Mission. Jacqueline Sweet at Drop Site:

Canary Mission’s dossiers were used by the Department of Homeland Security in 2025 to build lists of foreign students who expressed pro-Palestine views, with over 75 people identified based on Canary Mission’s anonymous blacklists, according to deposition testimony by DHS officials in a federal lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. In January, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and said the case revealed an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate the First Amendment.

The State Department, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

And nothing smells like fighting anti-semitism like creating lists of Jews for the government. NYTimes:

A federal judge agreed Monday to delay his order that the University of Pennsylvania comply with a Trump administration subpoena for information about Jews on campus.

The judge, Gerald J. Pappert of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, had ruled in March that Penn had until this Friday to turn over the records that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought as a part of an investigation into antisemitism.

But as the deadline neared, Judge Pappert agreed to pause his order while Penn pursued its appeal. Monday’s ruling means that Penn is no longer facing an imminent deadline to share, among other records, the names and contact information it has for people who worked in the university’s Jewish studies program or were members of “clubs, organizations and recreation groups” that were related to “the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.”

AI Watch

If you’ve heard something about the MIT study that found 95% of business AI adoptions have failed to create profit or productivity increases, it might be worthwhile reading Ed Zitron’s blog, particularly ,his recent article, AI’s Economics Don’t Make Sense.

My own sense is that AI is not just a bubble, but a foam—a series of interconnected investment and subsidization schemes that will collapse but not precipitately. There will be phased failures, and investors and the politicians they are funding are betting that they will be able to stay ahead of it, manage it, and create a new form of crisis economic politics. See also:

Boondoggle

Data Centers Reveal America's Economic Development Brain Rot

This is Boondoggle, the newsletter about how corporations rip off our states, cities, and communities, and what we can do about it. If you’re not currently a subscriber, please click the green button below to sign up. Thanks…

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2 months ago · 26 likes · 1 comment · Pat Garofalo

I think many people are hoping that the financial bubble around AI will also mean that the overhyped tech will fade into the background like NFTs or cryptocoins. This, I feel, is a grave misunderstanding—first, because the crypto analogy should make us more vigilant: the currency of political favor has decidedly gone to the crypto “space.” But second, AI technology is not only a bunch of investor hype. In some future post, I’ll try to set out some of what I’ve learned about imagining the AI future from assigning myself ever-so-loosely to this beat.

Also:

AI Can Spot Pancreatic Cancer Years Before Diagnosis, Study Finds

Thanks to a newly developed AI model from researchers at the Mayo Clinic and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, that might be about to change. Their new system, called REDMOD (radiomics-based early detection model), was tested on CT scans from people later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In nearly 3 out of 4 cases, REDMOD successfully spotted the most common form of pancreatic cancer around 16 months before diagnosis. That's nearly double the detection rate of specialists reviewing the scans without AI assistance.

To riff on a Kenneth Koch poem, One Spectacle May Hide Another:

California Man in Custody After Shooting at Dinner Attended by Trump, NYTimes.

On Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that appear to be connected to him, Mr. Allen described himself as an independent game developer, posting about a game called “Bohrdom” that he had released in 2018. Described online as “a skill-based, non-violent asymmetrical fighting game loosely derived from a chemistry model that is itself loosely based on reality,” the game appeared to have almost no reviews and almost no followers on its linked social media accounts before Saturday.

Kash Patel needs a new alarm sound to wake-up. Suggestion:

More knock-on effects from the war:

The Helium Crisis That Won’t Go Away, Lever News

A crucial resource is being choked off from the world amid the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran — and it’s not oil. It’s helium.

The rare, nonrenewable gas is a key ingredient for more than just party balloons. It’s needed for lifesaving medical procedures, groundbreaking research, and the current tech boom underpinning much of the U.S. economy. The gas was also vital in the recent Artemis II mission that sent four astronauts around the moon and back.

But the war in Iran has cut off a significant portion of global helium resources, leading to a 50 percent price increase and warnings of a debilitating supply shortage. And although the U.S. and Iran are working to open key shipping routes in the region, the arrangement is far from certain, and the monthlong closure that has already transpired will still lead to supply shocks.

This made me think about a remarkable set of images from Cuba. Despite the restrictions on shipping to Cuba, these therapy clowns managed to provide a birthday party, and even helium balloons, to children whose chemotherapy has been interrupted. Credit to People’s Dispatch.

As the US siege continues to kill in Cuba, an interesting history to recall:

Why hurricanes rarely kill in Cuba, PreventionWeb

Cuba's focus on hurricane preparedness dates back to Hurricane Flora. Flora devastated the east of the island in 1963 - the same region now struck by Melissa. On the eve of its landfall, the government had introduced a sweeping land reform to nationalise all but the smallest farms. Party militants and soldiers had been dispatched across the island. When Flora hit, people found these representatives of the revolution enduring the hurricane alongside them. Fidel Castro flew east to lead the rescue operations. Historian Mikael Wolfe argues that Flora transformed the rebel army from "a controversial force of expropriation" into "a nearly universally admired source of rescue".

Voting is linked to living longer, Penn Today

In the study, published in the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Studies, Handy and her co-author, Sara Konrath of Indiana University, tracked older adults who voted in the 2008 presidential election and those who did not and examined participants’ risk of dying over the next five, 10, and 15 years.

The researchers find that older adults who voted experienced a significantly reduced mortality risk, with those in poorer health benefiting more from voting 15 years later. These results are not explained by participants’ prior wealth, education, civic engagement, or political affiliation, says Handy. And even when their candidate lose, voters still have a lower risk of dying years later.

AI Watch

How Amazon’s AI Algorithms Raise the Prices You Pay, Washington Monthly

Central to Amazon’s monopoly power, the complaint alleges, are sophisticated AI-driven pricing systems that draw on torrents of real-time data and “can detect any price change virtually anywhere on the internet.” Amazon has used these algorithms not only to adjust its own prices in real time, but to monitor how competing retailers’ algorithms react, probe their strategies, and learn how to shape their behavior—including how to induce them to raise their prices.

The FTC singles out what it calls Amazon’s ‘anti-discounting’ algorithm. According to the commission, it was conceived by Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s former head of Worldwide Consumer, to avoid what he described internally as a “perfectly competitive market,” in which rivals compete on price and drive down profits. Instead, Wilke argued for Amazon to adopt a “game theory approach,” predicting that if it did, both the company’s and its competitors’ prices “will go up.”

Three reasons why DeepSeek’s new model matters, MIT Technology Review

For V4-Pro, DeepSeek charges $1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output tokens, a fraction of the cost of comparable models from OpenAI and Anthropic. V4-Flash is even cheaper, at about $0.14 per million input tokens and about $0.28 per million output tokens, making it one of the cheapest top-tier models available. This would make it a very appealing model to build applications on.

In terms of performance, V4 is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge jump from R1—and it seems to be a strong alternative to just about all the latest big AI models. On the major benchmarks, according to results shared by the company, DeepSeek V4-Pro competes with leading closed-source models, matching the performance of Anthropic’s Claude-Opus-4.6, OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, and Google’s Gemini-3.1. And compared to other open-source models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen-3.5 or Z.ai’s GLM-5.1, DeepSeek V4 exceeds them all on coding, math, and STEM problems, making it one of the strongest open-source models ever released.

Great piece from JSTOR Daily on Chinese-Indonesian photography.

Some context:

The major obstacle to understanding the 1965–66 killings as a case of genocide, he explains, is the exclusion of “political groups” from protection under the 1948 Genocide Convention—the standard legal definition of genocide under international law. He proposes, however, that “in the slaughter of the Communists, the criterion of past affiliation had a finality and immutability quite comparable to massacre by virtue of race and it was based on a similar imposition of collective responsibility.” The killings, moreover, he explains, transcended the boundaries of inter-group conflict, by additionally drawing upon “class” and “religious” differences between victims and perpetrators. Likewise, ethnicity was also a factor, as evidenced by the killing of “Chinese merchants and their families.” He thus suggests that the military’s target group was substantially broader than a political group and contained elements of deep inter-generational identity.

Because Communists were the target of violence, as opposed to an ethnic group, has led also to controversy in the scholarly literature about whether to understand the mass killings as genocide. Coppel concluded in 1983 that “the total number of Chinese killed can scarcely have exceeded two thousand.” But Communists and “Chinese” ethnic identity were often conflated. If you have not seen the brilliant, troubling documentary The Act of Killing, check out the trailer below:

RIP Alexander Kluge. I have recently been reading work by him and his longtime collaborator, Oskar Negt. A fine write-up in The Baffler.

In the United States, the book by which he is probably best known, with the possible exception of Air Raid, is Public Sphere and Experience (Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung). Written in 1972 in collaboration with the sociologist Oskar Negt and not translated into English until 1993 (Verso reissued it in 2016), Public Sphere and Experience was a response to Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, translated 1989). Against a backdrop of Frankfurt School pessimism about the so-called consciousness industry, which seemed to leave no place in society for active political dissent, Habermas had developed the concept of publicity or public-ness—in German, Öffentlichkeit, or openness—in an attempt to salvage the emergent institutions of the eighteenth century, where free discussion flourished outside both the government and the market. For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere offered both a valued history and a still-viable norm. Kluge and Negt, arguing that the existing bourgeois public sphere had largely suppressed working-class experience, put forward the alternative concept of a subaltern counterpublic. They paid more attention to modern mass media, especially television, and (naturally enough) the student uprisings of the late 1960s, which had not yet happened when Habermas was writing. Unlike other critics of Habermas, however, who saw the concept of the public sphere as fatally compromised by its exclusion of non-normative gender, class, racial, and sexual experience, they retained Habermas’s key concept. For as Kluge put it, “The public sphere is the site where struggles are decided by other means than war.”

His remarkable film The Power of Emotion is available on Youtube.

The war against Iran sputters on, like a mower low on gas.

After the Ceasefire, LRB Blog:

‘The funniest part of this war,’ Mohsen said with a faint smile, ‘was when the US vice president suggested sending carrier pigeons to tell Iranians about the ceasefire.’

We laughed. Perhaps the first real laughter in weeks.

Amin, the café owner, said: ‘I was reminded of a Charlie Chaplin film – the one where the war is already over, but he doesn’t know it and keeps standing guard. Or that day Kuwait accidentally shot down two American planes. History is full of these absurd moments.’

It seems that the US has an oversupply of absurdity, a net exporter of the absurd. This morning, Trump Threatens Peace:

US President Trump says Iran has committed a “serious violation” of the ceasefire but a peace deal “will happen one way or another – the nice way or the hard way”.

If you are looking for something other than the Anglophone slant on this story, the Substack below collects and translates Lebanese reporting. Very useful.

Conflicts Forum’s Substack

What happened in Islamabad regarding Lebanon?

Al-Akhbar: What happened in Islamabad regarding Lebanon? …

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2 months ago · 80 likes · 3 comments · Conflicts Forum

Compare that coverage to today’s NYTimes front page:

Qatar in the past tense — Lebanon simply absent.

The view from US military deployments is just as grim:

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

What will be our next space adventure?

The plan is to send a nuclear reactor into space. Last year, Trump issued a plan to install a nuclear reactor on the surface of the moon, but new orders describe a brand new vision. The April 14 plan lays out a mandate for NASA, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy to develop a nuclear system capable of orbiting the moon, and to have it launch-ready as soon as 2028.

To achieve this vision, NASA will partner with various agencies to fast-track mid-power fission reactor designs and surface power variants, which will compete to achieve near-term demonstration of viable models. “The White House’s overall strategy is to conduct parallel and mutually-reinforcing NASA and Department of War (DOW) design competitions to enable near-term demonstration and use of low- to mid-power space reactors in orbit and on the lunar surface, and prepare to deploy high-power reactors in the 2030s,” Interesting Engineering reported this week.

Although there’s little new here, Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov’s recent press tour for his book seems to indicate that bastions of liberal Zionist consensus like The New Yorker are no longer. Here’s the interview with David Remnick, who has to be given some credit for pushing the editorial line beyond most of his peers in so-called “legacy” media.



Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts University grad arrested by ICE agents last year, returns to Turkey, Boston Globe

“I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States — all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights,“ Öztürk said in a statement released Friday. “I invite everyone to recognize the privilege it is for any country to host international scholars, and the hole that is left in our society when that privilege is lost.”

Climate

The Man Whom Exxon Tried To Drill, Lever News

Mark van Baal is considered a pioneer of shareholder activism in the fossil fuel industry. But the Dutchman, now in his late fifties, with short gray curls and bushy black eyebrows, didn’t set out to be; he more or less fell into it. His story perhaps doubles as a lesson on why regular people can — and should — care about the strange, esoteric world of corporate proxy votes, SEC “no-action letters,” and annual general meetings.

Wildfires used to ‘go to sleep’ at night. Climate change is turning them into prime burning hours, Phys.org

Fires used to die down or even die out at night as temperatures dropped and humidity increased, but that’s happening less often. The number of hours in North America when the weather is favorable for wildfires is 36% higher than 50 years ago, according to a study Friday in Science Advances.

Places such as California have 550 more potential burning hours than the mid-1970s. Parts of southwestern New Mexico and central Arizona are seeing as much as 2,000 more hours a year when the weather is prone to burning fires, the highest increase seen in the study, which looked at Canada and the United States. The research looked at times when conditions were ripe for fire, but that didn’t mean fires occurred during all that time

AI Watch

Possibly the most famous living mathematician, Terence Tao, has chimed in with a philosophical reflection on AI and its relationship to mathematics:

Our piece took over a year to write – which means, at the current pace of development in the field, that some of it is already slightly out of date. Nevertheless, it was an instructive exercise for both of us to try to look beyond the immediate technical issues presented by current AI and formalization tools and try to point out the philosophical questions that we will have to grapple with as these tools become increasingly capable and integrated into our profession, using prior examples of technological advancement as a guide.

The paper itself is quite interesting. Though some of it is sort of a compilation of commonplace arguments, it also discusses the unique problems AI poses to mathematical research. Neither the “smell test” of intuition nor formalization of proofs will solve the practical and theoretical challenges of huge numbers of AI-generated mathematical papers. I also like their metaphor that AI is the “vanilla extract” of intellectual production.

Our suggested guidance for navigating this current transition is to make a culinary analogy: vanilla extract, a common ingredient in most sweet recipes famous for its nearly universally appealing scent. Ingested by itself, vanilla extract is usually considered extremely unpleasant, but its addition in small amounts is widely regarded as improving and enhancing the other flavors of the dish, even when it cannot be differentiated from them. While it is easy to conclude that more vanilla extract is better, most people who have used it understand there is some upper limit beyond which it ruins the dish entirely. Most of us do not have a clear sense of what that upper limit actually is, so find it wisest to keep it as a very minor addition.

The debate tournament topic was about Arctic exploration. Relevant news concerning AMOC, a very important global current system you may not have heard about. Though it’s long been known that Arctic ice melt could lead to the collapse of AMOC, recent research shows just how devastating these impacts could be. From Nature:

The potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could profoundly impact regional and global climates, yet its effects on the carbon cycle and subsequently global temperature remain seriously underexplored. Here we quantify carbon cycle responses across different background global warming levels using a fast Earth system model. We find that Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapse increases atmospheric carbon dioxide by 47–83 ppm carbon dioxide, leading to around 0.2 °C of additional global warming at higher carbon dioxide background levels after offsetting ocean-dynamics-driven cooling. Despite the modest global warming effect, regional temperature anomalies are pronounced: Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7 °C (60 °N–90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6 °C (60 °S–90 °S). This latter response originates from deep convection triggered in the Southern Ocean, which ventilates deep carbon-rich waters. Such long-term equilibrium responses reveal key physical and carbon-cycle mechanisms and highlight substantial regional climate risks associated with an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapse.

In light of this, this:

Even celebrities are trapped within celebrity:

Through Spear’s own framing (which is really the only one that should count), her conservatorship reads less like an anomaly and more like the plot of any gothic novel. I’d argue that Britney Spears is not just the victim of an unusually punitive legal agreement, but our most public gothic heroine.

As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic, the gothic heroine is not simply trapped by a villain but by a structure that renders her both spectacle and prisoner, her confinement aestheticized even as it is enforced. The house, in this formulation, is not just a setting but an apparatus: it produces the conditions under which women can be controlled, misread, and ultimately pathologized.

But so are we. From Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”:

Alarm in health service over Palantir staff being given NHS email accounts, The Guardian:

The use of NHS email accounts and internal systems by private contractors is not unusual. However, Palantir’s association with AI-powered surveillance and war technology has made some staff, patients and human rights campaigners question the ethics and implications of allowing the spy-tech company to become embedded in the UK public sector.

Rory Gibson, a resident doctor, said: “I – as a doctor – absolutely don’t want my personal email and number to be accessible to someone who works for Palantir on the NHS, and might next month be working on systems for drone strikes. NHS staff have not consented to sharing their email addresses with Palantir staff.”

The Guardian has seen evidence that at least six Palantir engineers supporting NHS staff with the FDP rollout have been given NHS.net accounts.

A Palantir spokesperson said: “This is normal practice for government suppliers. Indeed the government’s own guidance states that using government systems is more secure than suppliers using their own systems.”

AI Watch:

All alarms, no surprises. The prices that AI has debuted at are undergoing enshittification rapidly:

Related:

And in my own backyard. From Fortune:

The shooting appears to have been politically motivated, tied to a proposed data center in Indianapolis’s Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood. Less than a week prior to the incident, Gibson had voiced his support for the construction of a data center in his district. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Development Commission approved a rezoning petition on April 1 in a 6-2 vote for a 14-acre $500 million data center project for Metrobloks, an LA-based data center developer, as reported by Mirror Indy. Gibson isn’t on the commission that voted to approve the rezoning measure, but he supported the commission’s decision in a statement last week as the data center construction site falls in his district.

This memorable aria is one of Verdi’s most hummable. Famously, he forbid anyone from singing it outside of the rehearsals before its opening in Venice, lest the gondaliers pick it up and steal the thunderous applause due at its debut. But despite the catchiness, its most powerful effect only comes from how it is set within its opera, Rigoletto. The Duke of Mantua sings it in the opening act, characterizing him as a rake, misogynist, libertine, and cynic. Women are fickle, alas, but you can’t be happy without them! Rigoletto, his hunchbacked court jester, plays along with this persona, but when the Duke’s malevolence turns on Rigoletto’s (secret) daughter, he vows revenge. But a complex ruse goes awry, and the assassins Rigoletto hires end up killing his own daughter as a substitute for the body they are owed. As Rigoletto goes to dump the Duke’s body, he hears, once again, his infamous song — only then he realizes that his plot of revenge has ended killing his bella figlia, his own beautiful daughter.

2

Why does my unconscious mind associate the nerdy problematics of a weekend debate round with this operatic high drama? I think, perhaps, that I feel like Rigoletto, the despised panderer to the cruel and despotic rule of debate tournaments, but that in hoping to avenge myself upon them, I may risk destroying what I have sought to protect.

Of course, it is not women who are fickle — it is the Duke, the Master, who projects his own incontinence and appetitiveness onto the objects of his perverse desires. Just so, the Tournament projects rule-breaking and rule-changing onto the debaters, when really (says the splenetic jester) the Tournament keeps changing the rules!

What could Rigoletto have done to avoid his calamity—Fate, crudele, you are invincible!

3

So long as the Tournament is the Ruler of debate, the Rules of Debate will be whim. And the thing everyone will remember, that the public will hum and sing, about debate will be the sign of that whim. It is catchy, infectious even.

Instead of trying to kill the Tournament, we must seek to invert the role — the Ruler must become the jester, the sideshow, that sings a song we all know is amusing because it is a joke, not the law. And the Ruler of Debate would be the place for the Fool. We debate precisely because there are no rules to tell us what to do or what to think about so many crucial aspects of our life.

However, we need to avoid the baleful influence of Saturn, which eats its own progeny. Instead, we must find a way to turn debate into a Saturnalia, the place where the rules become the fools.

Israel’s Knesset has approved execution for terrorists — an actually convicted Kahanist terrorist, Ben-Gvir, who is also a defender of the terrorist “hilltop youth,” led the campaign:

Compare this hypocrisy to the US definition of terrorism developed for the War on Terror:

See the current list of FTOs, that includes the admittedly non-existent Cartel of the Suns.

A brief history of the Israeli nuclear program, the open secret at the heart of the Iran war, Mondoweiss

To this day, there are estimates of Israel’s nuclear capacity: 90 warheads; 750–1110 kg plutonium stockpile, approximately – potentially enough for 187-277 nuclear weapons; 6 Dolphin-I and Dolphin II-class submarines believed capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles; and Jericho III intermediate-range ballistic missiles with a potential range of 4,800 – 6,500 km.

Globally, these numbers would make Israel the second-smallest nuclear power after North Korea, but just as seventy years ago when Israel began building nuclear weapons, it remains impossible to know anything for a fact.

A diptych on drugs:

Trippy tobacco? Plants engineered to make five psychedelics at once, Science

The concentrations of 5-methoxy-DMT were very low, so the researchers turned to artificial intelligence software called AlphaFold3, which can predict the structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. This allowed them to figure out why the key enzyme was underperforming. After the team fixed the problem with a targeted mutation, the amount of 5-methoxy-DMT in the tobacco plants increased 40-fold. The team even managed to engineer tobacco plants to produce five different psychedelics at once. “That has some cool novelty, but it doesn’t have a lot of practicality,” Jones says. When made simultaneously, the concentrations were all much smaller. Still, he predicts, “There are a few psychonauts out there that will get a kick out of it.” Much work remains before tobacco plants could make pharmaceutical-quality psychedelics, the authors say, including figuring out how to process the plants and extract the compounds. Jones suspects that it will be more practical to make DMT or other compounds with microbes in industrial tanks. The main point of the research, says Aharoni, is to demonstrate the feasibility of biosynthesizing DMT and other compounds. “The industry can decide what’s more commercially viable.”

Trump’s White House Was ‘Awash in Speed’ — and Xanax, Rolling Stone (Archive link, 2024)

Modafinil — also known by its brand name, Provigil — wasn’t the only controlled substance that Trump officials young and old routinely acquired. “It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” one source with direct knowledge of the matter recalls. The anti-anxiety medication Xanax was also a popular, easy-to-get drug during the Trump years, three sources tell us. Neither Xanax nor its generic, alprazolam, is mentioned in the Pentagon report, which notes that it is not a comprehensive list of the controlled substances ordered during the Trump years. Two people with direct knowledge of the situation recall senior officials getting Xanax from the White House Medical Unit — and sharing it with colleagues.

And another comparison on the theme of the economic life of writers. Excellent read from The Baffler on how writers do and do not get by:

The Profession That Does Not Exist

Compare to NYTimes write-up of a new author:

A Tradwife Wakes Up in 1805 … (Gift article)

What followed was a kind of M.F.A. graduate’s fever dream: a first draft that unspooled in a giddy, dizzying two-month sprint, which set off an international bidding war won by the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a low seven figures. Soon after, the film rights sold to Amazon with Anne Hathaway, who said she devoured the novel in one sitting, attached to star and co-produce.

Alarming climate data comes in many forms:

AI Watch

Important, troubling security development for AI zero-day attacks. From Forbes:

The open source FreeBSD operating system is not ordinary, consumer software. It powers Netflix’s content delivery. It runs PlayStation’s operating system. WhatsApp built its infrastructure on it. For decades, FreeBSD has delivered a rock-solid, trusted foundation precisely because its codebase is mature, audited and hardened by engineers who take security very seriously. And yet an AI, given only a vulnerability advisory, constructed a complete attack chain that hijacks kernel threads, writes shellcode across multiple network packets and spawns a root shell in userspace. In other words, AI just hacked one of the world’s most secure operating systems. Last week, FreeBSD published a security advisory for CVE-2026-4747, a remote code execution vulnerability in its kernel. The advisory credited "Nicholas Carlini using Claude, Anthropic" for discovering the flaw. That credit line understates what happened. The AI system did not merely flag suspicious code or identify a potential bug. It developed two working exploits, from scratch, that deliver a super user, or root shell, on unpatched servers. The AI agent did this in roughly four hours of compute time.

And they have their own security to worry about too: Anthropic Races to Contain Leak of Code Behind Claude AI Agent, Wall Street Journal (gift article link)

Programmers combing through the source code so far have marveled on social media at some of Anthropic’s tricks for getting its Claude AI models to operate as Claude Code. One feature asks the models to go back periodically through tasks and consolidate their memories—a process it calls dreaming. Another appears to instruct Claude Code in some cases to go “undercover” and not reveal that it is an AI when publishing code to platforms like GitHub. Others found tags in the code that appeared pointed at future product releases. The code even included a Tamagotchi-style pet called “Buddy” with which users could interact.

After Anthropic requested that GitHub remove copies of its proprietary code, another programmer used other AI tools to rewrite the Claude Code functionality in other programming languages.

Space is back on our minds.

Or not.

Two related reads from Substack:

In 2019, the STS scholar Morgan Ames published The Charisma Machine, a study of how certain technologies draw attention, resources, and attribution toward themselves and away from everything else in the system they inhabit.5 The usual framework for understanding this dynamic is “hype,” but hype only describes what boosters do, and it assigns critics a privileged debunking role that still leaves the technology at the center of every argument. A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organizes iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history. By the time the war began, the discourse had already become magnetized. “AI safety” and “alignment” and “hallucination” and “stochastic parrots” had become the terms of every argument about artificial intelligence, structuring and limiting what we could even say. Worse, “artificial intelligence” itself had come to be synonymous with LLMs. When the school was bombed, those were the terms people reached for, despite the fact that this critical apparatus offered a poor fit for the older, more mature stack of technologies involved in targeting. The real question, the question almost nobody was asking, is not about Claude or any language model. It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir.

Artificial Bureaucracy

Kill Chain

A revised version of this article appears in the The Guardian. You can read that version here…

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3 months ago · 730 likes · Kevin Baker

A week ago, I built WorldView — basically a geospatial command center that fuses open-source intelligence feeds onto a 3D globe. It was a weekend project. The internet went kind of crazy over it. One person joked I’d “vibe-coded Palantir.” The actual co-founder of Palantir felt compelled to respond on a live show.

Then Saturday morning, the Iran strikes happened.

I’m sitting on my couch watching the news and I realize — holy crap, I have the exact infrastructure to monitor this. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I sent a WhatsApp message to my AI agent and told it to start recording everything.

By evening, I had banked every open-source signal I could find before the caches cleared. What came out the other side is a full 4D reconstruction of Operation Epic Fury — from the military and commercial satellites overhead to the cascading airspace shutdowns across the Gulf. Replayable, scrubbable, minute by minute on a 3D globe.

And I did it over the weekend. By myself.

Map the World by Bilawal Sidhu

The Intelligence Monopoly Is Over. Creating a God's Eye View of the Iran Strikes.

A week ago, I built WorldView — basically a geospatial command center that fuses open-source intelligence feeds onto a 3D globe. It was a weekend project. The internet went kind of crazy over it. One person joked I’d “vibe-coded Palantir.” The actual co-founder of Palantir…

Read more

3 months ago · 452 likes · 54 comments · Bilawal Sidhu

“The Authority of Thought,” Pankraj Mishra, Harper’s:

“Even in the darkest of times,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “we have the right to expect some illumination.” The words are prominent on the back cover of an early Pelican edition of her book Men in Dark Times, which I noticed on one of the crammed shelves in my Himalayan home one calamitous morning of the New Year. I had just recoiled from a New York Times headline: a defense of u.s. intervention in venezuela. The subhead was more horrifying still: the former envoy elliott abrams says the administration should push harder for regime change. I immediately reached for the Arendt volume, intrigued by her notion that in a dark time illumination is a human right. I couldn’t help but look at the other books in my library and wonder, with growing disquiet, how many of them might cast any light today.

“She Was in Labor at a Florida Hospital. Then She Was in Zoom Court for Refusing a C-Section,” Amy Yurkanin, ProPublica:

She arrived overnight at the hospital after her water broke. Doctors told her they were concerned about the risk of uterine rupture, a potentially deadly complication for her and her baby. She understood the risk to be less than 2% and repeatedly told doctors she wouldn’t consent to a cesarean without trying to have a vaginal delivery first. The doctors appeared to relent, leaving her to labor for several more hours.

Then a nursing supervisor wheeled a tablet up to her bed and informed her she was in court. The reason? Failing to agree to a C-section.

“Bottling the World Economy,” Adam Hanieh, NYRB:

The disruption of this vital artery has sent markets into convulsions, with the international price benchmark for Brent crude oil briefly surging to nearly $120 a barrel on March 9, its highest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked panic. Donald Trump has urged Western allies to help escort tankers through the Strait in an effort to keep prices in check, so far finding no takers; more recently he has threatened to strike Iran’s power plants if its government refuses to reopen the waterway. Oil, in this sense, has become a proxy for the war’s nearly incalculable costs.

Much of the instinctive anxiety around Hormuz is filtered through the memory of 1973, when several Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on the United States and other Western states in response to their support for Israel. Prices quadrupled within months, helping to produce recession, inflation, and a lasting sense that the Middle East possessed an “oil weapon” that could bring the global economy to its knees. Since then Western leaders and many commentators have understood wars in the region, above all, as potential threats to the global energy supply.

AI Watch
From Ed Zitron:

WoodMac also adds that PJM, one of the largest utility providers in America, “...remains in trouble, with utility large load commitments three times as large as the accredited capacity in PJM’s risked generation queue,” which is a complex way of saying “it doesn’t have enough power.”

This means that fifty eight god damn percent of data centers need to work out their own power somehow. WoodMac also adds there is around $948 billion in capex being spent in totality on US-based data centers, but capex growth decelerated for the first time since 2023.

See also:

MIRAGE: The Illusion of Visual Understanding, pre-print

Multimodal AI systems have achieved remarkable performance across a broad range of real-world tasks, yet the mechanisms underlying visual-language reasoning remain surprisingly poorly understood. We report three findings that challenge prevailing assumptions about how these systems process and integrate visual information. First, Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided; we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning. Second, without any image input, models also attain strikingly high scores across general and medical multimodal benchmarks, bringing into question their utility and design. In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images. Third, when models were explicitly instructed to guess answers without image access, rather than being implicitly prompted to assume images were present, performance declined markedly. Explicit guessing appears to engage a more conservative response regime, in contrast to the mirage regime in which models behave as though images have been provided. These findings expose fundamental vulnerabilities in how visual-language models reason and are evaluated, pointing to an urgent need for private benchmarks that eliminate textual cues enabling non-visual inference, particularly in medical contexts where miscalibrated AI carries the greatest consequence. We introduce B-Clean as a principled solution for fair, vision-grounded evaluation of multimodal AI systems.

The whole plea—for the dream was nothing else—reminded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at all.

This self-defeating “kettle logic” has a passing familiarity to the public statements of the Trump administration. But there’s a significant difference: the story is funny when we think of this man’s attempt to justify returning a broken kettle. In that, it resembles the Freudian unconscious, willing to use any psychic means necessary to ensure that repressed material remains repressed. The administration, however, is using contradiction to a different end: justification is unnecessary.

2

Critique has “run out of steam” because ideology is not felt as conviction. In his era-defining work, The Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk defined cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness.” The cynic is aware of ideological critique, but simply files it away as another curious fact of modern life. The cynic is the average subject of Enlightenment:

They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinctively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things. It is the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers. There even seems to be something healthy in this attitude, which, after all, the will to self-preservation generally supports. It is the stance of people who realize that the times of naivete are gone.

The healthiest cynics are “borderline melancholics” who, aware of the emptiness of all public pronouncements of ideals and virtues, manage a life of work and seek to maintain a personal, hobbyist interest in living.

This is old hat. Have you not been born into this cynical world? Are you only now realizing the mendacity of idealism? Can you keep a straight face when you speak of things like democracy, the public good, and freedom?

The reactionary response is to hold onto this idealism not through a reckoning with cynicism but through a lamentation: the ideals we once had have been lost! But this is thoroughly unserious: the Enlightenment critique began and always reinstates itself through a historical perspective that shows, as gross and brutal as our present is, the past is no refuge.

3

For a long time now, the only place where cynicism did not take pride of place was within financial markets. Technocratic power was the serious, responsible thing, because the bottom line was the truth of the world. Despite the disasters of austerity in Europe, the technocratic sneer held sway, just as the humoral theory continued on more than a century after Harvey discovered the circulatory theory. There was no other way of conceiving how a world might be put together than by central banks. In capital markets, it still mattered how and what you borrowed. There was no pretense of these borrowings being fair or noble, but if you returned with a broken kettle you would not be able to borrow so easily again. You’d have a higher interest rate at the very least. Even nations had to bend the knee. If you were poor, the IMF’s conditional loans became the conditions of all politics. If you were a “rich” OECD nation, you still had to worry about your exposure.

The Eurocrisis showed how the EU could no longer submit politics to the bankers, and instead we have seen the rise of a sincere (if horrifying) turn back to the mass politics of fear. Immigration, once the rhetorical trophy of the CDU and other European parties that reconstituted themselves after the Cold War, has become the spectre once again haunting Europe. But the US, with its world money petrodollars, was able to break and lend kettles whether they were broken or working. There was no recourse from the denominating power. And despite the Davos proclamation that we are in “rupture” and that the newest irrationalism of US policy would lead to some multipolar order, it is unclear that there is an alternative to US monetary domination. The most irrational policies—tariffs on bananas, war with Iran—can still line the pockets of speculators, even as they damage markets, banks, monetary exchanges.

The “kettle rhetoric” of our time makes cynicism official. It is not hypocrisy, but (an anal-sadistic) humiliation of the principle of justification. Justice is in the first and last instance an effect of discourse—a proposition can be challenged, and reasons must be given. But power today proposes nothing. It is for-itself, and whatever fantasies motivate its lashings out should not be put back into the rubric of even the rationalization of cynical greed and hypocrisy. We live in an era that hates not only the results of justice, but the very act of justifying one’s speech. This would suggest you were not in control, since the meaning of a promise depends upon its fulfillment, and the significance of a proposal is in its reasons.

4

Recently at a little get together, we were discussing the rollback of protections against child labor, and I said like the most naive person imaginable that “the public discourse” on this topic was “very low.” I got looks—who could say something like that in 2026? What public discourse did I even mean? Did I think that memefied propaganda was real democracy, or that real democracy was ever anything more than an ad that sold margarine and missiles?

No—I am as cynical as the rest. There is no public, no democracy, no project to be saved. But the official cynicism of our moment, not limited to the US or the Trumpians by any means, but perfected by them, does suggest that we should interrogate the self-certainty of the enlightened view. Justification is not a given, but this is why it should be assumed, as a piece of rhetorical violence. Justification must be demanded not only from our so-called public officials, but from one another. We have agreed too long as cynics—it is time to practice challenge and defense as a principle, not of some overripe morality, but as a shiv being made for a prison break. One shiv is a wild, desperate hope. But should every prisoner know how to make one, the possibility of a new justice becomes a violent reality.

Your Instagram DMs are no longer encrypted

from Fortune

Brian Long, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Security, a firm that trains organizations to defend against AI-powered attacks, including deepfakes and voice cloning, says the calculus both companies are making reflects a necessary course correction. “It’s a challenging place, because on the one side, I think a lot of these companies have leaned into privacy,” Long told Fortune. “But on the other hand, it’s also led bad actors to do anything from run scams in the background to attack consumers. What they’re recognizing is that as great as it sounds for everything to be encrypted, it’s giving a lot of runway to bad actors.”

The regulatory pressure is accelerating that shift. The Take It Down Act, signed into law last year, requires platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery—including AI-generated deepfakes—within 48 hours of a valid request, with enforcement beginning May 19, just eleven days after Instagram’s encryption cutoff. Long said that end-to-end encryption had made that kind of compliance nearly impossible. “If it’s all encrypted and they can’t see the messages, it gets harder for them to actually police those actions,” he said. “They’re going to be accountable under the law.”

Antisemitism’s Afterlives

from Boston Review

It is this sense of inversion that historian Mark Mazower’s new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, seeks to chronicle and explain. Opening with Victor Klemperer’s account of the way language became “an instrument of power” under the Third Reich, Mazower suggests we are witnessing a similar kind of transformation today: a nationalist and imperialist right in Israel, Europe, and the United States—abetted by timid or overtly complicit liberals—changing the meaning of words not to capture a new reality but to transform it in the service of holding onto and furthering their power. The term “antisemitism,” coined by a far right eager to couch its own Judeophobia in the modern language of scientific racism and later used as a term of condemnation to name that deadly form of bigotry, is now widely associated with hostility to the state of Israel, especially from Arab and Islamic quarters. How did a word originally intended to justify the exercise of state power over a long-persecuted Jewish minority come to serve as a tool for justifying the power of the Jewish state to persecute vulnerable and stateless Palestinians? That is the story Mazower wants to tell: the way the word tracks the history of state power as much as the history of Jews themselves.

Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years

Depressing. From the NYTimes:

The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.

A recent poster session with students at my university got me thinking again about a longtime fascination with Hans Selye, the originator of the concept of stress and the research program associated with it.

We are so accustomed to thinking about “stress” now that we forget that it is a very modern concept, and also a very weird one:

From Mark Jackson, “Evaluating the Role of Hans Selye in the Modern History of Stress,” in Stress, Shock, and Adaptation, 2014.

In trying to intervene into the increasingly inhuman AI-designed world, I’ve thought about developing creativity practices, modelled loosely on concepts from classical rhetoric as Python apps. The rhetorical practices of ingenium were about finding unlikely similarities or fine distinctions between the apparently similar. Here we have an early weird result from the prompt of “lens cap.” (A spleen — how appropriate.) Images are from Wikimedia Commons.

An exhibition review on the work of Ralph Lemon
from 4Columns

The exhibition’s sparse and minimal staging makes sense; it would have to be this way, as the photos and videos themselves are so weighted, multilayered, multifaceted, and overpopulated with memories. There is intended and allowed space for the colossal waves of feeling, thought, and reflection. Those smaller-scaled images play against From Out of Space (2018–21), a large and massive video of drone and aerial footage of the shop, the barn, and river where Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, was brutally murdered in 1955 by white men after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman outside a general store. His disfigured body was dumped into the Tallahatchie, where he was later found. This event galvanized the civil rights movement. The minimal scale of the photographs offset and underscore the monumental events and violence that took place.

did you know it’s

But how?

Motivation has two kinds:

You don’t want to be pushed. You need to be pulled. You need to find the joy in things you need to do. Mindcetera.

The difficulty of the man in the video who is the interviewer, maybe? It’s difficult to tell. He is interviewing, but also confessing. He is analysand and also just anal. But we know one thing: This man is having a difficulty. He cannot find enjoyment outside of work. He realizes though that he should probably do

Our main man here has, well, an “apathy issue.”

Well he has another issue. He loves fitness, but he has to do other things: sell fitness programs and communicate about them. He clearly just wants to get in that gym and help people find their physical potential, the kind of potential that is really at the core of all your different potentials: spiritual potential, sexual potential, business potential, potency potential, it’s all so potent and it’s so physical. But you know, after all that emailing

You just start taking things for granted. Let’s be honest, they often are, but those are brand deals, those are opportunities, you can find in that corporate gift a new challenge to expand your business. If you choose to accept it. But I am editorializing. I am losing my attention.

But our man is not. Despite his penchant for bobbleheads, his own head is on a swivel, and right now that head is locked in to wisdom and understanding and several other unmentionable virtues.

He hears the wisdom:

I too am tired of hearing people say this. Knock it off. We deserve happiness. We can’t be robots anymore.

Knock off that robot shit. You have, quote, way too big a heart. Remember what you thought about earlier?

Exactly. You’re a good guy.

Not sure why we are looking at this. Anyway.

But here’s the point.

You’d think the difference was having wealth versus not having it. That’s what they want you to think. Rich and poor is “not money. It’s feeling fully alive. That’s rich.”

Possibly this person in the stock video is rich. No not in the money sense, though possibly also yes, it’s a little expensive to go sky diving recreationally. (Is there another way to do it? Yes — joyfully.) But this person has someone’s hands on their back, so they are a beginning plane jumper, probably poor. But only in the money sense. They are rich in experience.

Surely you know the story of Jaques. No, he was not a CEO, he was not even a COO or a CFO of anything. I know what you’re thinking: no, he was not an entrepreneur. You know what he was? A traveller. And he was disrespected by this woman Rosalind: “I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.” But he knew his self-worth. “Yes, I have gain'd my experience.”

It’s all about gains. Spiritual gains. Soul optimization. And that is how you become rich. No, not in the money sense, though I will dangle that possibility before you on the basis of this coming out of my tightly packed head, my arms waving with expensive watches. Maybe the not-real, but quite significant money sense of being rich will happen only once, only after, only depending and contingent upon you being spiritually rich by finding the true joy and adventure in a smile. Or a frown of some bitch like Rosalind which you turn into a source of wisdom and challenge and joy.

But here’s what I am saying.

Passion, you know your passion. From the Latin passio, for suffering. But I bring up that etymology in order to reinforce the meaning you already know. It’s all about passion, your joy, which you have to suffer for.

No you’ve got it wrong guy-o. Pain is part of life, suffering is an option. That’s why you keep hearing that. Over and over. That commonplace phrase we all know.

Don’t screw happiness. Screw suffering.

The words you attach to your experience become your experience. And this is your experience. These words I’ve given you. Screw suffering — you’ve experienced that now. Now go and live it.

It’s simple linguistics. It’s me clapping. It’s the wooshing you hear behind all talk that has abandoned purpose, which is something you discover, with motivation, something you choose.

The U.S. Mint unveiled new designs for the country’s 250th anniversary and it left out one key detail: the olive branch from the newly designed dime. The new reverse shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right, with beneath, the inscription “Liberty over Tyranny.”

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental.

Unchanged since 1946, the Roosevelt dime is now replaced by a modern Liberty figure on the front, solely for one year as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. The U.S. Mint is marking the Semiquincentennial with a sweeping redesign of the coinage, something not undertaken since the 1976 Bicentennial. Authorized by Congress, the change touches the dime, quarter, half dollar, penny, and dollar coin, all bearing 1776–2026 dates.

Relevant locus:

On the whaling beat. Arkeonews:

A remarkable underwater discovery off the coast of western Norway is shedding new light on medieval hunting traditions. Archaeologists have identified a large, man-made belt of stones lying across a narrow strait near Øygarden, close to the city of Bergen. The structure, stretching more than 25 meters across the seabed, may be the remains of a thousand-year-old system used to trap whales in coastal waters. The find offers rare physical evidence of a hunting practice previously known mostly from historical texts.

Two significant articles on the state of universities:

A Third Way for the Humanities, from The Hinternet.

It will surely seem paradoxical to some to be told that the path to freedom lies in tradition. Today tradition is generally thought to limit self-realization, not to enhance it. Honestly, though, could anyone be less free than the young American who goes to “study” in Florence, but resents having to hear any mention of Dante once there? The institutions that have allowed this to happen have failed her, plainly and simply.

It is time for committed humanists to get over the idea that these same institutions offer the only setting in which humanistic inquiry might be collectively pursued. This does not mean we want to replace them, or that we must, individually, abandon them. Many of us will remain insider-outsiders, perhaps for the rest of our careers. But it is time now, at least, to begin building parallel institutions that can exert some real pressure, that can let the universities know just how deeply they’ve failed, by modeling a truer and more beautiful alternative.

The Misuses of the University. Francois Furstenberg at Public Books.

Everyone thinks universities have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. But that gets it backward, and not just at Hopkins. Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue. He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”

Then read Thomas Hardy’s poem.

IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

“What do you see in that time-touched stone,
When nothing is there
But ashen blankness, although you give it
A rigid stare?

“You look not quite as if you saw,
But as if you heard,
Parting your lips, and treading softly
As mouse or bird.

“It is only the base of a pillar, they’ll tell you,
That came to us
From a far old hill men used to name
Areopagus.”

- “I know no art, and I only view
A stone from a wall,
But I am thinking that stone has echoed
The voice of Paul,

“Paul as he stood and preached beside it
Facing the crowd,
A small gaunt figure with wasted features,
Calling out loud

“Words that in all their intimate accents
Pattered upon
That marble front, and were far reflected,
And then were gone.

“I’m a labouring man, and know but little,
Or nothing at all;
But I can’t help thinking that stone once echoed
The voice of Paul.”

AI Watch

A well-written and clear paper (mirabile dictu) from a philosopher of computer science on the distinction between human cognition and computation. Don’t be intimidated by the minimal amount of formalization — glancing through it is still worth it.

Vibroacoustic disease from data centers gaining mainstream attention:

Jürgen Habermas has died at 96. Though he had many critics (including the very minor one of myself), his work raised the level of opposing replies. What more can a scholar hope for?

Epstein’s art collection. Useful illustration of John Berger’s distinction between the “nude” and nakedness:

Labor Intensive Art

Jeffrey Epstein's Naked Paintings

A painting in the latest Epstein files drop caught my attention. Hanging somewhere in his New York City mansion, it depicts a nude woman from behind, her dull expression reflected back to us in a round mirror…

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4 months ago · 492 likes · 15 comments

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Why read? Why write?

When this question was posed to me today, the chorus of voices answered: to think. But I knew this was wrong. We must find a way to be restful in language and in meaning, to be able to discover in this strange fact of our being, this alien to our animal, we beings-in-language.

Some of our consolation must be for our animal. Like sleep, we also need the feel of care about our bodies. But our bodies must also be prepared for care—if not, its meaning too will shock and traumatize. In order to be our animal selves, we must find consolation in our language. That is why we should read and we should write.

Father Knows Best at Bookforum. On Father Daniel Berrigan:

He analogized going underground to dying, to “closing the lid of a tomb,” and wrote of the loneliness that came with the necessary separation from family, especially his hospitalized mother. Yet “what fun!” he thought after he evaded the FBI at Cornell in, famously, an oversize puppet costume. As a wanted man, he released public missives, granted interviews, even spoke from the Sunday pulpit, and so humiliated the federal agents in flat-footed pursuit. (Time called him “a modern Pimpernel.”) He made fugitivity look social, invigorating, the closest a lifelong celibate could come to being a rock star. “I am thriving to the point of obscenity,” he wrote to his brothers two months in. Three more months would pass before he was captured on the verge of eating an apple in theologian William Stringfellow’s Rhode Island home.

Iran After Khamenei at Boston Review. An interview.

Over the past decade, new developments in the political economy of these countries created fresh opportunities for mobilization, which ultimately found expression in the Arab Spring revolutions. First is staggering inequality and exclusion, resulting largely from neoliberal economic policies pursued by ruling regimes. Second is a large constituency of educated and aware citizens who nonetheless felt economically marginalized and socially devalued. The central force here has been what I call the “middle-class poor”: a contradictory social group with middle-class aspirations and expectations but living under precarious, often impoverished conditions. Third—and critically—the rise of digital technologies and social media enabled new forms of connective action, making mobilization faster, less costly, and more decentralized. Together these dynamics produced the wave of remarkable uprisings across ten Arab countries, and later in Iran.

Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You're Being Watched, Too at Gizmodo.

The investigation found that much of the footage captured by Meta’s smart glasses, of which more than seven million pairs have reportedly been sold, is reviewed by contracted workers at a Kenya-based company called Sama. These workers are data annotators who are tasked with reviewing footage captured from the camera on the glasses and labeling it to help AI systems get better at identifying what they see. The process is tedious and labor-intensive, requiring workers to meticulously label everything on screen that can be identified. The firehose of footage meant to serve as valuable training data that is being delivered to these contractors apparently doesn’t undergo much of a culling process before it lands at their stations, because, according to the investigation, a lot of private, personal, and at times intimate images are getting shared.

from After the Future, Bifo Berardi, p. 65:

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The Incomplete Glossary of Time:

More than what we can do with words, this glossary uncovers what words can do with us. These words give form to the unexplored nooks of everyday life: leaky sensations, fleeting feelings, in-between moments, and nuanced experiences that can be named but don’t seem to be.

We carry textured experiences of time, yet our vocabulary for them is surprisingly sparse. There are gaping holes in the lexicon of time that we don’t even realize we are missing. When these encounters remain unnamed, they remain unknown.

To name them, I tinkered with AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude) feeding them elusive experiences as prompts. What began as a playful experiment soon drew on AI’s ability to ‘hallucinate’ or imagine notions beyond the world we know. Each new word unearthed worlds within our world.

The frontier of AI consumer tech looks like gamifying data harvesting: