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

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13 days 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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21 days 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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2 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…

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2 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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3 months ago · 492 likes · 15 comments

3

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:

AI Watch

Ghosts of Electricity

Does overwork make agents Marxist?

To Future Worker C…

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2 months ago · 35 likes · 15 comments · Alex Imas, Andy Hall, and Jeremy Nguyen

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:

But the idea of a traditional masculine role being associated with working class culture is a put on. Adrian Street and Cassandro have led to generations of professional wrestlers and luchadores who perform femininity alongside their (faux) aggression. Rock-and-roll was never simply macho, starting with Little Richard’s wild and fruity performances, but including the and up to the punks and teddies and mods and of the UK (see the poor dandies in Thatcher-era England wearing lace ruffs), the glam and makeup of arena rock—KISS and Queen are still FM darlings—grunge’s penchant for drag, not to mention the genderbent world of contemporary hip-hop artists like Lil Nas X. Sports fans have always had fascination with figures like Dennis Rodman. Olympic diver Tom Daley is known for crocheting poolside. Recently, 76er Jared McCain started a nail polish line. This too is global: see the “velvet rebellion” of Congolese men, Japanese truck drivers who are dekotoras, or the zoot-suited Mexican pacuchos from the 40s.

2

But what makes that Onion video funny is a truth. There is a stylistic difference between the largely academic arguments about masculinity and the experience of people who are supposed to be masculine. So here’s another way to think about it.

All of these historical examples of masculinity in crisis see it as a phenomenon of decline. “Men aren’t made like they used to be.” At the same time, they believe the malehood and masculinity is natural and God-given. This leads to a paradox:

1. Men cannot be anything other than men.

2. Men no longer act like men.

Anyone who is supposed to be masculine has probably experienced someone telling them, at some point in their lives, “Be a man!” Whether encouragement or correction, this imperative is the crisis of masculinity. Masculinity, supposed to be a natural fact, actually requires a great deal of performance, a whole lotta maintenance. This might mean any number of contradictory things—working out constantly or not caring about your appearance, getting married or “playing the field,” hating quiche-eaters or being a very masculine chef who yells at the line cook for not properly making the quiche. But the imperative is ultimately this: Act like a man! Tony Soprano, ignorant of his involvement in a homoerotic fantasy, asked “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” The real man is an actor.

This is what made Ronald Reagan such a compelling persona for many — the actor was the “genuine article,” or, you might say, the Gipper was not a particularly good actor. He always sort of plays the same role, just like John Wayne or Gary Cooper.

But this is what makes femininity the more authentic subjective position: we don’t have to pretend we’re not acting.2

3

This impossible, irrational insistence on a masculine performance that does not perform leads to violence. Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit’s multi-volume history of men who moved from the Freikorps to the SS, gives an important witness to this with much documentary evidence. But we can also see it simply looking around today. Pete Hegseth’s insane press briefings are filled with an anxious bloodlust. His misogynistic tip started in his college days:

In February 2002, Hegseth became especially incensed when OWL helped mount a production of The Vagina Monologues. As part of the show’s promotion, students plastered pink posters around campus with sexually suggestive slogans, like “It’s 10 o’clock at night—do you know where your clitoris is?”

Hegseth responded with a coauthored screed in the student newspaper, charging that this band of feminist thespians had “violently hurled” a show that was little more than “pornography hidden under the cloak of artistic expression.” Around this time, OWL member Laura Petrillo caught Hegseth tearing down some posters for the show and called him out. He shot back with unsettling intensity. The former OWL member described Hegseth’s demeanor as “aggressive” and “antagonistic,” adding that he often used his military uniform as a sign of intimidation. “It really felt like he wanted to kill us.”

Is there any chance that Hegseth saw the Vagina Monologues? Of course not. This was just his reaction to the title of the play and the promotional poster.

What is sometimes called in psychoanalysis “castration anxiety” can be understood like this: there is no single symbol, sign, meaning that will ensure your “stable identity,” and the masculine sense of this impossible signifier is called the “phallus.” This is not the penis, but any sign or symbol that is supposed to be the guarantor of masculinity—but like the penis, it fails to. Transphobia is the aggressive lashing out from this castration anxiety — but it is also the nature of the masculinity crisis. There is no phallus, and therefore the idea of a “natural man” can only be preserved by the negation of Not-Men.3 These hatreds really are fears of a symbolic reality, where there is no guarantee of a meaning without response.4

It would be good to have a jobs guarantee program. I think it’s important that men can have open conversations about mental health. But the masculinity crisis is a symbolic and subjective one, and comfort with the reality of how language and meaning works is part of the “solution.” You are not in control of the meaning of your identity—that’s a good thing! You can be a man if you want, by acting like one, whatever that means to you. And others get to respond to that act however they will. Beyond this, there’s only giving more or less persuasive performances, and nothing is less convincing than an actor who is convinced he really is the character he performs. If young men are allowed to play rather than be, I wonder if the so-called crisis would require us to go to war. Perhaps instead we could just go to the movies.

IN MARCH 2025, two things happened. The Guardian published “A Machine-Shaped Hand”: a 1,200-word text generated by ChatGPT from the prompt “write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief,” which OpenAI’s founder, Sam Altman, effused was “the first time [he had] been really struck” by AI writing. And my colleagues and I in the School of Humanities at Coventry University (UK) were placed at risk of redundancy as part of a restructure generated by the administrative prompt to do something, anything, to salvage our collapsing finances. An email assured us that the cuts would help deliver a more “sustainable” model of education, which was not the first time we’d been struck by the administration’s idiocy. Other noteworthy instances included the proposal that we stop assigning essays since LLMs rendered good writing skills moot, and the suggestion, in response to staff concerns about spiraling workloads, to outsource lecture-writing to ChatGPT.

Child’s Play
Must-read of the week.

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.

On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare

I’m proud to call Eunsong a friend:

As reports of tech free Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley continue to make headlines, we can attest to how the upper-class raise children to be culturally distinct from the rest. The making of reading as luxury and the enclosure of public arts education is how new class hierarchies may be defined. This entrenchment must be fought with the fundamental and wholescale socialization of arts and culture. Such efforts will be considered unpragamatic, expensive, and above all not-useful in this current society, but they will be required in the making of another.

What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today

Yet when Palumbi — the director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station — and others dove near the crater’s rim, they encountered something even more astonishing to behold: a reassembling ecosystem, including schools of large fish, reef sharks and robust coral, which may have begun life as little as a decade after the area’s annihilation. “We found, much to our surprise, not just scattered corals, but very abundant, big healthy coral communities — corals larger than cars scattered about the edges of a hydrogen bomb crater,” he says. “You’re kind of looking at that and thinking, ‘Well, that’s strange.’ “Frankly, the visual and emotional impact of it is just stunning.”

Rick Steves’ travel video to Iran like a vision of a different, better world:

Fun to explore the submissions to AMAZE/Berlin, A MAZE. / Berlin is “an international festival, a platform for independent and arthouse games and explores the world and culture of playful media.” Here’s one from last year to help you understand LLM:

America has entered another war. In Trump's Truth Social post where he stands at a mock podium in Palm Beach, seeming like he is bored and wanting to make tee time, claims that Operation Midnight Hammer “obliterated” the nuclear program, but also that the current operation is justified because of Iran’s nuclear program. After a half dozen other fragments of warmed-over warmonger cries, we settle into lazy Manichaeism: the Iranians “just wanted to practice evil,” and evil that could soon “reach the American homeland.”

Some 200 people were killed today in Iran from these strikes, including at two schools, one a girls’ school in Minab where 108 people died, mostly young girls.

Chuck Schumer, the so-called leader of the so-called opposition party, made this serious statement with his hands in his pocket: “The American President must make his case to the American people.” The issue is that there was no debate. Congress did not have a chance to approve this war. Of course, it is clear from the rush of every politico appearing on cable news who begins by telling us how delighted they are to hear of the latest assassination of a foreign leader, and their but being a big foam finger pointing in the direction of procedural debate, that the majority of the opposition would have approved. They are relieved there was no debate, because there was only ever one foregone conclusion.

Nor is there any sign of debate from the Community Formerly Known As International. Mark Carney, still inwardly tan from the artificial glow of his much-praised Davos speech about a “rupture,” a moment where the world was departing from American hegemony, justified the attack by condemning Iran from not ending its nuclear program and citing Israel’s “right to protect itself.” Ursula Von der Leyen’s statement audaciously foists the blame on Iran, claiming that “it is of the utmost importance that there is no further escalation through Iran’s unjustified attacks on partners in the region,” with nary a mention of the US or Israel’s role. Kaja Kallas, as always leading from behind, happily beats the war drum: Iran’s “regime” is murderous, while the other “governments” are being consulted and are on standby. Keir Starmer, with all the gravitas of a recently ensouled financial statement, claimed that though the UK played “no role,” they are happily cheering it all on from Downing Street. In Europe, only Spain and the Scandinavian countries registered official dismay.

The media, as ever, welcomes the spectacle. Chiming in, as always, are the moralists of Anglophone diaspora, who speak of nuance but have no details to offer. They are ready to serve the purposes of propaganda. The media with furrowed brows asks now serious questions

And what of the public? The war-weary “America First” crowd is already pumped and primed with propaganda to read this as a win for their lobotomy-friendly nationalism, though the arguments for it are of course self-contradictory. “Strikes are not wars,” says some lickspittle, asking Americans to forget the little they’ve learned about Pearl Harbor and the Blitz, but also to accept that “Iran has been at war with the US for 43 years.”

But who needs debate when you have prediction? Here, in the overheated troughs of prop bet speculation, the true ball knowers put their money where their mouths used to be. Over half a billion dollars was bet on Polymarket on the beginning of a war:

Of course there is no debate. Where would it be held? Who would be in it? What audience would it be for? We already have a full slate of programming: propaganda for the concerned, entertainment for the rest.

2

Here is my gut check for you: if any part of your thinking, feeling existence is inclined to support this war, you are infected with propaganda. This is not entirely your fault—no one can escape the propagandized media environment. Even if you try to not to read or warch anything, others you talk to will have and their common sense wisdom and advice, seeming to emanate from the confidence of tested experience, will communicate it to you all the same.

The kind of debate the Democratic Party is currently saying needs to have happened (do they still want it to happen now?) is a ritual, itself part of propaganda. But it is an old ritual, from a time when legitimation of rule was still thought to depend in part on public justifications. But we need a real debate. Not about whether this obviously illegal, criminal war is justified. It plainly is not, and any justification offered resorts to propaganda. We need a debate on what to do, how to respond, wherever we are, to a situation of chaos. Perhaps in your own life this chaos still feels contained. Money still purchases things, even though prices increase “dynamically” and tariffs mean that whatever you purchased online may or may not arrive. You still have infrastructure around you, though recent (or not so recent) dramatic weather may be having you deal with more “workarounds” than you are used to. Communication technology still gives you access to information and entertainment, but perhaps you have felt over the past few years more confused by the information and more disturbed by the entertainment. But no, you do not know the chaos of war, of what it means to have aerial bombardment rip apart your life—not only in the event that it kills you or someone you know or love, but in your inability to move through the world without breathing in Chaos, where even as you try to maintain a routine Chaos looms over every promise, plan, and project. You still live within the world of a Readymade Future, where despite your struggle to maintain your life and its standard, as long as you maintain it things should unfold in a narrative sequence.

In the Fictional Real Debate that we must but cannot have, we need to take a position on this Chaos. Do you wish to ride it, trying to cash in on spikes in unregulated markets, windfalls of crisis and calamity, the luck of the 5th generation Irish? Are you hopeful that some shibboleth of your identity will mark you as one to be passed over when the Angel of Death visits your neighbors homes? Or do you stand against a world of Chaos, and welcome the difficult world of the Plan.

There can be a Plan. But the Chaos lovers want you to believe that there isn’t one, or rather, there is One, and it is already being executed. The powerful people, sure they may be evil, but they know what they are doing! They enjoy themselves doing it to, and they are all in on it.

This tale, though it sounds like a horror story, is really a lullaby. You, yes you reader, want to believe that there is an evil man who is enjoying himself, that all these evil men are so powerful and pursue, relentlessly, their own desires. Then there’s nothing you can do about it, so you might as well not worry. But even more importantly, someone, somewhere is enjoying themselves. It would be a shame if all our misery did not even become a sacrifice for an evil deity, if there was no one to benefit. There’s a comfort in this image of an evil monster with desire. But whether you despise the monster or wish to be identified with it, you have relied on it too long. You have let the image of this Monster of Chaos convince you that desire is simple, and someone, though not you, can achieve it. If only you were willing to be so evil…It would be worse, somehow, to know that all the violence done to our hopes is mistaken, that it is the lashing out of a class of people who do not understand their own desires, who are responding like children to the symbols of the desirable in the hopes that others will not ask them What do you really want? The orgy of sadism fills in with unreason that place where reason would be, and would feel lacking: What do we hope to achieve?

One of the largest known structures in the universe is discovered to have axial spin.

The Geopolitics of the Commencement of Ramadan

This last point is crucial: in reality, there is little difference if mosques follow Saudi, Türkiye, or Morocco simply because they are financed by them. The strongest opinion within Islamic jurisprudence is that moon sighting is primarily a local matter. While there are “areas of reference” (where those in the vicinity follow a confirmed sighting), the concept of a “global sighting” is not well supported historically.

This suggests that Islam has a built-in mechanism to oppose religious monopolization by any single government, supporting the local governance of affairs. However, the global standardization of culture—the expansion of the production/consumption cycle based on the needs of global finance—is also being adopted by many Muslims and Muslim majority countries. This creates a greater push for a set global calendar based on astronomical calculations to avoid disrupting the global economic cycle.

Trump illegally used executive power to impose global tariffs, supreme court rules

The US supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal on Friday, in a sharp rebuke that topples a key pillar of the president’s aggressive economic agenda.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court decided that a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies did not provide the legal justification for most of the Trump administration’s tariffs on countries across the world. It is the first time the court has overruled one of Trump’s second-term policies.

Trump reportedly called the ruling “a disgrace” while hosting a White House breakfast with governors.

Alysa Liu Is Untouchable

By far my favorite Olympic performance in memory.

Alysa Liu has no need for any of that nonsense. Where ordinary—or even extraordinary—athletes might be fueled by pressure, she simply doesn’t feel any, ever. She thrives because she is immune. It was always understood that Liu could win gold at the Olympics, but with her technical content, she would need other skaters—say, Kaori Sakamoto, Ami Nakai, and Amber Glenn—to make errors. That assumption, however, always took one thing for granted: Of course Liu herself would never falter.

He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.

Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.

Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.

“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”

@palmertrollsKindergarten teacher wants kindergartener deported. Starting new tour soon, be first to get notified of shows in your area: https://benpalmertour.com unposted bits: https://benpalmerpatreon.com

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Kars4Kids or Kars4Israel?

Kars4Kids’ stated mission is “to fund educational, developmental, and recreational programs for low-income youth.” Kars4Kids has been accused of false advertising as the kids the charity helps are exclusively Jewish kids who live in and around Lakewood. Kars4Kids has been fined in several U.S. states for misleading practices and for failing to disclose their religious affiliation and the fact that the donations mostly go to serve kids in a very limited area of the U.S. where Oorah is located, in New Jersey. Also, Kars4Kids has been found to use a substantial amount of assets on failed real estate deals, including two high-rises in New Jersey, a Staten Island outlet mall and a mixed-use project in Jerusalem.

If you were not aware that those annoying commercials from Kars4Kids is a front for a cultish summer camp program, you might be interested in watching a new documentary about it. Or you might just watch the children’s television programming from Oorah, the company that they send ~95% of their proceeds to:

AI Stupidity Watch:

Brain science:

Today, one of my colleagues sent a thoughtful, if doomladen, message to our local listserv about AI writing. His recommendation was to no longer assign writing “outside of the classroom.”

I have many thoughts about this discussion, but since I already wrote a reply to that email, I thought I’d also just post it here. I hope to see your thoughts and arguments in the comments.



fellow colleagues and discussheads,

I am grateful for the opening of this little klatch to discuss some big issues. I want to offer a few considerations to lend weight to a different but not necessarily opposing view. I too am skeptical of the claims made for LLMs by Silicon Valley, the push to stop thinking and get on board. But I also believe that there is an opportunity to reexamine some of the assumptions about academic writing and our students.

We must teach writing as composition, not documentary evidence. There are deep histories to why the university has come to privilege the written text as documentary evidence (see Carlo Ginsburg and Tony Grafton for details). When we assign writing, we sometimes also presume that students are working in this same relationship to writing: the writing is evidence of their thought, a document of research, or for discussion board posts, just proof of life. LLMs do threaten the documentary status of student writing--have they even read what they submit? But this can also be read critically not against students or the AI, but against an outmoded approach to writing in the classroom. Writing is an art, with all the splendor and misery that entails.

I am not a compositionist, but I am very grateful for our colleagues who have worked for many decades in a tradition that has given deep and careful consideration to writing pedagogy. Since around the 1970s, scholars and teachers, many of whom had adjunct status, have produced a rich literature on how we should imagine student writing. These programs that hired these teachers were often originally titled Basic English, like Mina O’Shaugnessy’s program at CUNY. They were for “remedial” writers, and the college just demanded that they learn the “mechanics” of writing. What these academic laborers learned from their work was the impossibility of teaching writing in a serious, rigorous way when it was approached as mechanical. One of the landmark texts in that tradition is Donald Murray’s “Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product,” first published in 1972 when people were still using mimeograph machines. He writes: “Instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness.” What might that mean practically? There’s any number of practices, and I’m sure many of you have your own. But composition has already offered us the imagination and practice of new modes of composition, whether we see students as digital griots, treat the classroom as a ‘happening’, approaching composition in a multimedia or multimodal genre. Not least is to see writing in relationship to speech, both in the process and defense of what is written.

This is all the more important with LLMs. Students who see us buying into the writing as product model will correctly reason that the LLM can produce a better product than they can. We need to adjust to be open and encouraging of a process that may be messy, unfamiliar, chaotic, but perhaps also fun, engaging, and challenging not merely because of difficulty but because they are undergoing an examination of their own thoughts, opinions, understanding, and beliefs.

Let’s have fun: LLMs can help students understand voice and style. LLMs are often criticized for being “stochastic parrots.” Rightly so -- but I dunno, it sounds like it would be cool to have a pet parrot that could generate variations on what was said. In one class, I had ChatGPT criticize LLMs for their environmental impact and affect on users. It produced its usual slick, sycophantic talking points. The students yawned. But then I asked them what kind of styles we should put this through -- we had it vary it as Gilgamesh, as a snake oil salesman, and a brainrot influencer. The students asked for it to dial up the “rottiness.” It was a carnival. It was fun.

But could there be more serious usages of this? Think of how we sensitize ourselves to nuances and subtle differences -- the way that parfumiers, for instance, are trained on a set of distileld scents to be able to pull out a specific element. We could ask ChatGPT to generate a passage on a topic in the style of Sylvia Wynter, Benedict Anderson, or Homer, and then compare that BS version to the real thing. Can you hear the differences?

Often students detest academic writing for good reason -- the style is alienating and feels like it comes from nowhere. The justification of all these stylistic moods and moves can be learned through a kind of “theme and variation” approach. Style and verisimilitude are what LLMs actually produce, because they are statistical rather than definite kinds of objects.

Let’s stop surveilling students. When we create assignments that are about their own difficulty, we turn ourselves into a police force. It is demoralizing and laborious to try to “detect” LLM usage -- and also potentially disastrous. Our students who do not have English as their first language may use LLMs for translation purposes. AI tech is already integrated into much assistive technology. And not least, it makes the classroom a space of latent antagonisms, where the students appear guilty until proven innocent. Instead, we need to reconsider evaluation and assignment design that is premised upon the image of an original, integral voice of an already polished mind--the kind of voice that has always been one of privilege or its imitation.

On the environmental impacts of Generative AI. There is definitely a great deal of concern for how generative AI increases power demands from data centers and the use of (often potable drinking) water for cooling. Just as with carbon accounting, there’s a bit of legerdemain and double-counting going on that gives the impression that you, the LLM user, are responsible for water usage and carbon emissions from LLM.I suspect that like BP’s Ogilvy consultants inspired concept of the “carbon footprint”, energy industry-led carbon accounting practices, or the petrochemical companies’ lobbying for plastic recycling, the talking points of environmental concern are sometimes emerging as propaganda from the industry itself, attempting to muddy the issue and distribute social responsibility to users rather than producers of technology. For instance, the claims around how many “teaspoons” of water are used per query make it seem like water demand is sensitive to the number of user queries. A recent study suggests that ~50% of GenAI water usage happens in the training phase, and the investment model means that they are continuing training LLMs at close to maximum capacity independently of user queries. (Hoosier Hank Green has a student-friendly video essay that works through some of these nuances, in that very snarky and to me disagreeable YTuber style.)

This of course is not meant to say that we should not be concerned about LLM environmental impacts, but only that we should understand what those are in relation to other uses of water and energy and the greenhouse emissions that emerge from that. This has some immediate practical impacts and some deeper implications for a politics concerned with AI. For instance: The difference in “compute” for training also means that different LLMs have different kinds of environmental impact. DeepSeek, for instance, used far fewer GPUs in its training than ChatGPT, and therefore needed to use less water. You might, then, seek to use LLMs that have more efficient training and have smaller impacts. One of the issues is with Silicon Valley AI hype as part of investment cycles, which keep pouring massive amounts of money into new data centers without much return. The investment of new capital in AI has largely been premised on the promise of achieving GenAI (General Artificial Intelligence) through modifying LLMs and increasing computational power in training. That vision is no longer credible, and is one reason why many are fearful of an “AI bubble” bursting soon.

But there is a fight that is important to the Midwest between investment in corn and soy, renewable energy tech, and now AI data centers. Focusing primarily on the impacts of LLM usage may distract us from the investment in data centers that will do anything to make shareholders happy and produce a return on investment. Once the data center is built, it is going to be run at full steam, regardless of our individual choices. Collective thought and action is needed there, and we have all three of these fights happening in our backyard. [Corn and Soy] [Solar Farms]

Creating a purpose for writing. Many of us lament the rise of LLMs not only because of the difficulty they pose to our work, but because we fear students will not know the joys of writing that we have experienced. This is a very real fear -- but it seems like what it calls for is a commitment to articulating the purposes of writing for life, beyond the academic conventions that give writing a purpose for scholars. Writing, as others have already said, is one of the core features of liberal arts education not only because it has practical utility in the workaday world, but because in writing we discover and develop into the kinds of people who are capable of critical, creative, and technical thought and communication. Our students want that too -- let’s invite them into that purpose rather than forbid them from the shortcuts to it.

I look forward to more discussions and possibly even debates with you in the months and years to come.

Tim

“Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, 24

Why the Line Between Coercion and Consent in Policing Eludes Us

Intriguingly, even in the distant year of 1983, the editorial board of Encyclopedia Britannica ends with a prescient, chilling paragraph warning that the western world’s run of good luck in maintaining civil police might have already run out:

“We may not soon again enjoy the possibility of a return to the social behavior that prevailed in at least some parts of the world for the better part of the past two centuries, when coercion had little overt part to play save as demonstrated by routine criminality and ordinary public disorders. If we do not have that possibility, neither will there be any chance of a truly civil police. We must expect instead coercive enforcement that in many respects is paramilitary and that has more faith in manipulation and technology than in an open presence and civil exchange. There were characteristic police traits in free societies throughout the world for what may have been only an historical moment.”

Chart from Wolfgang Streeck’s 2011 “Crises of Democratic Capitalism” (essential reading still)

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.

Is Heathcliff White?

“The discussion is surprisingly old,” says Sally Shuttleworth, a professor of English at Oxford. The idea that Heathcliff might be of African descent first entered academic discussion in the 1950s and gained momentum as postcolonial studies became more popular in the ’80s and ’90s. Scholars have argued that the proximity of Liverpool — one of the biggest slave ports at the time in which Wuthering Heights is set — to the Brontës’ home in Haworth cannot be overlooked.

Even so, Shuttleworth says the public’s belief that Heathcliff is a Black character has “become a truism that’s trotted out now without much examination.” Arnold’s film seems to have a long tail in the collective consciousness, supported by Caryl Phillips’s 2015 novelistic reimaging of Heathcliff as Mr. Earnshaw’s love child with a formerly enslaved Black woman from the West Indies. But, says Corinne Fowler, honorary professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, “the name Heathcliff serves as a forename and a surname — that would be exactly as people’s names were recorded on plantation records.”

The Crisis Whisperer

Yet for all that, and despite being motivated occasionally by what he calls “an energy of wanting to put the world to rights”, Tooze is not generally regarded as an eager controversialist. (Last year, Krugman sounded delighted to see “the normally calm Tooze come across as a bit angry” in one of his Chartbook posts.) In person as in his work, Tooze prizes connection and synthesis, a tendency that helps explain why he is equally at home, and equally welcome, talking to activists in South Africa, or senators in Washington, or development economists in the West Bank, or financial executives in London, or Chinese Communist party officials in Beijing, or finance ministers in Berlin.

It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn’t waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had “failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration”. Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order – something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference – had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he’d written a few months earlier, Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming “to ensure by any means necessary” – including strong-arming allies – “that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge”.

Against Doom: On Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

A few years ago, I attended a Christmastime service at an Orthodox church in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was beautiful and the clergy welcoming and gracious. The icons decorating the church’s interior were indeed evocative, and the long, slender candles parishioners placed in sand added to the atmosphere. As I was walking back home I encountered a young man who had been there too, and explained that he was a convert. “In Orthodox Christianity,” he gushed, his eyes widening, “it’s like the Enlightenment never existed.”

Cool story, bro. While I know there are sincere Orthodox converts who are gentle, believing people (a girlfriend who cuts my hair is one of them), there does seem to be a contingent of dudes who find their way into this denomination in order to justify reactionary politics. What’s ironic about these types, especially in America, is that it never occurs to them to pay homage to the First Amendment with its guarantee of religious freedom (a product of the Enlightenment) — the very condition on which their license to worship rests.

From the socials:

The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. [Archive link for the paywalled.]

Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.

Wolfgang Streeck reflects on American violence:

Does Trump represent a new kind of fascism?

To put it bluntly: there is hardly anything new about it, except that the fig leaf has been dropped. And not all violence is ‘fascist’; let’s not waste the concept. The US has always been astonishingly prone to violence, both domestically and internationally. For them, the post-war period began with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Korea, Vietnam (no one knows anymore why millions of people were wiped out with napalm there), and since 1990, there has not been a single day when the US hasn’t been waging war somewhere in the world. They currently maintain approximately 750 military bases spread across the globe. It is true that Trump has unleashed the violent potential of American society internally by inciting half of the population against the other. But his brand of civil war falls far short of the slavery and Indian wars of the 19th century, nor is he responsible for the extraordinarily vast and cruel prison system; that is the work of his predecessors.

From HackerNoon, “The Fatal Math Error Killing Every AI Architecture - Including The New Ones”

Imagine you’re trying to organize your massive music library. You could throw all your songs into one giant folder and hope your computer can tell the difference between “Stairway to Heaven” and “Highway to Hell” based on… vibes? That’s basically what JEPA and the new AI architectures are doing.

Here’s the problem: these systems live in what mathematicians call “Euclidean space”, basically a flat, infinite spreadsheet where everything is a bunch of numbers floating around. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong.

Science Fiction as a Science Driver

In “The science fiction science method,” Rahwan and company tackle the problem of anticipating and regulating future technologies, mentioning the so-called Collingridge dilemma: “When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.”

Resolving the Collingridge dilemma is important, Rahwan and company argue. People might be more accepting of genetically modified food now if their concerns had been discussed before the foods were introduced in the 1990s. Likewise, some of the adverse effects of social media on mental health and political discourse might have been foreseen. In fact, researchers at Facebook did evaluate the psychological effects of contagious peer pressure—but only 8 years after the company opened its platform to all users over the age of 13.

Happy Superbowl Sunday:

The Harlem Globetrotters turn 100 this year:

From the socials:

AI creep: Ariana Grande has grown a sixth finger for the cover of Japanese VOGUE

For the cinephiles: