Learning That The Stars Grow Old

by Mary Hrovat

Globular star cluster NGC 6558 as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen

When I was 17, I took an introductory course in physical geology at a community college. I was enchanted by the descriptions of the physical processes that created land forms, and also by the vocabulary: eskers and drumlins, barchan dunes, columnar basalt. I like to know how things form and what they’re called. My strongest memory of this class, though, centers on the final lecture. The professor put Earth and its landforms and minerals in a larger context. He told us about the life cycles of stars, which have produced most of the elements on Earth.

The central fact of the lecture was that the mass of a star is a key characteristic determining how long it exists and what happens as it ages. Stars are formed when gravity causes a portion of a gas cloud to collapse until its internal pressure, and thus its temperature, are high enough for nuclear fusion to begin. The energy released when, for example, two hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium supports the mass of the star against the pull of gravity. A star’s life unfolds as a story of the equilibrium (or loss of equilibrium) between these two forces pulling inward and pushing outward. As one fuel source is depleted (for example, as hydrogen is converted to helium) other types of fusion occur in the core of the star using the new fuel source (and creating increasingly heavier elements). At the same time, hydrogen continues to fuse in a shell surrounding the core. Mature stars may have shells dominated by various elements undergoing different fusion reactions, although the available reactions depend on the mass of the star.

The professor probably described stars according to their type. I don’t remember if he mentioned the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, although it seems likely that he would have. The HR diagram plots the luminosity of stars (the amount of light they emit) versus their temperature. When stars are plotted this way, most of them fall on a curve called the Main Sequence, which runs from hot blue stars to cool red stars along the sequence O-B-A-F-G-K-M. (In some HR diagrams, the stellar type or color is plotted on the horizontal axis as a proxy for temperature.) Stars remain on the Main Sequence as long as the gravitational and thermal forces are in equilibrium. The larger and hotter a star is, the shorter its time on the Main Sequence, because hotter stars consume their fuel more rapidly.

As they age and leave the Main Sequence, stars undergo different processes depending on their size. The universe is still too young for the very smallest stars to have exhausted their fuel, so they’re still on the Main Sequence. Stars with masses ranging from slightly less than that of the sun to 10 times the mass of the sun go through a red giant phase, ultimately undergoing core collapse and forming dense white dwarfs. Larger stars have more complicated end-of-life scenarios, typically exploding in supernovae and leaving behind superdense neutron stars or black holes. Some elements are created only in supernova explosions. Read more »

What Natural Intelligence Looks Like

by Scott Samuelson

Jusepe de Ribera. Touch. c. 1615, oil on canvas. Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. Check out the enlarged image here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jos%C3%A9_de_Ribera_018.jpg

When we conjure up what thinking looks like, what tends to leap to mind is an a-ha lightbulb or a brow-furrowed chin scratch—or the sculpture The Thinker. While there’s something deservedly iconic about how Rodin depicts a powerful body redirecting its energies inward, I think that the most insightful depictions of thinking in the history of art are found in the work of Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), a.k.a. José de Ribera or Lo Spagnoletto (The Little Spaniard). In a time when we’re alternatively fascinated and horrified by what artificial intelligence can do, even to the point of wondering whether AIs can think or be treated like people, it’s worth asking some great Baroque paintings to remind us of what natural intelligence is.

Early in his artistic career, Ribera went to Rome and painted a series on the senses. Only four of the original five paintings survive (we suffer Hearing loss). Touch, the most interesting of the remaining paintings, depicting a blind man feeling the face of a sculpture, launches a crucial theme throughout Ribera’s work.

Let’s try to imagine Ribera in the process of making this painting. He looks at live models, probably at an actual blind man. He studies prints, sketches, fusses with his paints, maybe takes a walk. He sleeps on it. He chats with a friend and lights on an approach: a blind man exploring a sculpture by feeling it. He hurries back to his studio and begins to paint. He notices more about his subject, makes a mistake, fixes it. He holds up a jar of paint—no, that one would be better. Somewhere in this process, I imagine, it dawns on him that he’s doing the same thing as the blind man. (Maybe this is why he decides to put the painting on the table—though the painting is also a powerful visual reminder for us that there are always limits to our engagement with the world.)

Regardless of what actually went through Ribera’s head, the point I’m trying to make has been illustrated—both figuratively and literally—by a contemporary artist. In the 1990s Claude Heath was sick of the ideas of beauty that governed his artistic work. So, he lit on the idea of drawing a plaster cast of his brother’s head—blindfolded. Using small pieces of Blu-tack for orientation, one stuck into the top of the cast, one into his piece of paper, he felt the head’s contours with his left hand and drew corresponding lines with his right. “I tried not to draw what I know, but what I feel . . . I created a triangle, if you like, between me, the object, and the drawing . . . It was a bit of a transcription.” He didn’t look at what he was doing until he was finished. By liberating himself from ideas of beauty, he made beautiful drawings. Read more »

Monday, February 10, 2025

Marxists, Marxists Everywhere

by Richard Farr

The show must go on. And on, and on.

If we could dig up Karl right now, he might be tempted to look at all the current drama in D.C. and say: “Red Scare Theatre repeats itself, but the first umpteen times it’s tragedy and then eventually it’s farce.” That’s not quite right though, because this kind of perennial crowd-pleaser always did have a strong element of farce — and the show that recently opened on Pennsylvania Avenue may evolve into something even more tragic than the others. Still, it’s important to record the fact that Trust Us, We’ll Save You From the Communists is getting a revival, and perhaps even more important to note how farcical it is. 

Skipping over the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s, let’s take a moment to recall that in the 1940s this type of theatre had an especially good run at “The House,” that grand old venue for popular schlock on Capitol Hill. Especially fondly remembered are Lenin is Coming for Your Children, Your Mother Is A Trotskyist, and Only Balding Rich White Men Can Save You. Classic American Theatre of the Absurd — but gradually it became too screwball for its own good. Even box office receipts for Reds Under Your Bed dwindled at last. The era ended not so much because it was all nonsense as because leading man Joey “Senator” McFraud kept tripping over the flag he used as a costume and exposed to public view the fact that underneath he was both naked and shockingly ugly. 

Yet American Conservative Theater never quite forgot that it was money in the bank to describe anyone mildly uncomfortable with haute-bourgeois authoritarian class warfare as a radical leftist traitor. This is why stock commedia dell’arte characters evolved, notably the hilariously incompetent extremist “Hillary Clinton” — red beret, bandoliers jangling against the pearls, teeth full of baby parts and hands covered in the blood of innocent entrepreneurs, shrieking about the immolation of all that true patriots hold sacred from a podium at Goldman Sachs. 

Now the lights have been lit again, the handbills are printed, and a new show, a new apotheosis of the Absurd, is upon us. Most exciting of all perhaps, we learned recently that it will star one of the greatest melodramatists and over-actors of his generation, Russell “Nutter” Vought. Read more »

Newcomb’s Paradox Revisited

by John Allen Paulos

Despite the fact that Newcomb’s paradox was discovered in 1960, I’ve been prompted to discuss it now for three reasons, the first being its inherent interest and counterintuitive conclusions. The two other factors are topical. One is a scheme put forth by Elon Musk in which he offered a small prize to people who publicly approved of the free speech and gun rights clauses in the Constitution. Doing so, he announced, would register them and make them eligible for a daily giveaway of a million dollars provided by him (an almost homeopathic fraction of his 400 billion dollar fortune). The other topic is the rapid rise in AI’s abilities, especially in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Soon enough it will be able, somewhat reliably, to predict our behaviors, at least in some contexts.

With this prologue, let me get to Newcomb’s paradox, which is a puzzle that suggests that the rational thing to do in some situations results in an outcome much worse than doing what doesn’t make sense.

As mentioned, it was first reported in 1960 by William Newcomb, a physicist at the University of California, but it was developed and popularized by the philosopher Robert Nozick in 1969.

The puzzle involves an assumed entity of some sort – a visitor from an advanced civilization, a robot with access to lightning fast computers, an all-knowing network of AI enhanced neural agents, whatever – that has the financial backing of a multi-billionaire. This billionaire claims that his ultra-sapient agent can predict with good accuracy which of two specific alternatives presented to a person he or she will choose. The billionaire further announces a sort of online lottery to demonstrate the agent’s abilities.

He explains that the agent’s assessment of people will utilize two types of boxes. Boxes of type A are transparent and all contain $1,000, whereas boxes of type B are opaque and contain either $0 or $1,000,000, the cash prizes provided by the billionaire, of course. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

First Communion

Three bells rung thrice boys kneeling,
a candle at the altar burning,
god’s portrait on the ceiling,
priest lifts a holy wafer,
do mythic circles make us safer?

Priest bowing priest turning,
golden chalice drunk dry,
should I laugh or should I cry,
once more, with feeling:
a greenhorn skater on the ice,
a mythic dance can be appealing
Jim Culleny
1/15/13
 

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Sunday, February 9, 2025

Can Love Last? A (mostly) encouraging story about the fate of romance over time

by Gary Borjesson

Note: Since it is February, and since the world can surely use more love, I offer this as a little Valentine’s gift, dedicated to romantic love. Its inspiration is Stephen Mitchell’s book, Can Love Last? This is not a book review but an invitation to reflect on romantic love, with Mitchell as our guide.

The urn with the lovers that inspired John Keats’ famous poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, which beautifully captures the split between wanting and having.

In my early twenties I fell in love with a woman who couldn’t color inside the lines. Brilliant, sensitive, and adventurous, but unreliable, addicted, and self-destructive. Around that time I was also in love with an amazing woman who was healthier and more reliable, if also (like me) less dangerously exciting. I felt conflicted: Should I embrace a more romantic and adventurous life, or choose something safer and more sustainable? My gut told me that choosing adventure in this case would end in heartbreak and bad habits. My heart was split between wanting safety and wanting danger. My head didn’t know what to think.

Many of us face a similar bind, whether to choose safety or adventure. Whether to plan ahead or live more spontaneously and passionately. Whether to hit the open road or put down roots. In his fascinating and wise book, Can Love Last? the fate of romance over time, psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell addresses this bind, and offers a way through. The way begins by recognizing that romantic love is actually constituted through the tension between “the ordinary and transcendent, safety and adventure, the familiar and the novel, that runs through human experience.”

So, how do we make true love? In Mitchell’s grand vision, it’s not about siding with passion or security, it’s about about bringing them into the living conversation that is romantic love. In the final chapter of Can Love Last Mitchell sums up his argument

deeper more authentic commitments in love entail not a devotion to stasis but a dedication to process in the face of uncertainty. Genuine passion, in contrast to its degraded forms, is not split off from a longing for security and predictability, but is in a continual dialectical relationship with that longing.

Mitchell’s way of putting it would have appealed to my 22-year-old self, who would soon be going off to grad school in philosophy. Back then, however, I didn’t have the maturity or self-awareness to put this wisdom into practice—even if I could have appreciated the theory. Nevertheless, for those who want to make love that lasts, Mitchell’s book offers insight and inspiration. Many practical suggestions can also be gleaned. Read more »

The Voices In My Head

by Barry Goldman

Following the news makes me feel sick. Not following the news makes me feel guilty. This conflict has been going on in my head for years, but recently it has become painfully acute. I don’t make any progress, I just go round and round. I’ve given the voices in my head the names of the two imaginary friends I had when I was a toddler, and I’ve transcribed some of their dialogue below.

Bearky:                   If we don’t stay informed and keep up with the outrages and stay engaged, the theo-plutocrats win.

Berry-Derry:       Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. They already won. They control the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. They own Twitter and Facebook and the Washington Post and the LA Times and Fox and talk radio. Whether you follow the news or not makes no difference at all except that it makes you miserable. How does your being miserable help anything?

Bearky:                  It doesn’t help, exactly. But it makes it help possible. If I don’t stay engaged, if I check out and just keep bees – because I’m a rich old man and I can – then help is not even possible. They want me to give up and let them control everything. If I retreat into my own protective bubble and just read novels, they can do whatever they want.

Berry-Derry:       And if you don’t? If you read every Substack and every blog post and email, and listen to every podcast, what difference will that make?

Bearky:                  I don’t know. But I do know it’s important to resist evil. And I know, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Berry-Derry:       Yeah, right. But as far as the actual world is concerned, watching internet commentators and reading blog posts IS doing nothing. It’s sitting quietly in front of a screen. It doesn’t DO anything. You want to know what the enemy wants? He wants you to sit in front of your screen being mad at the world until you get tired and go to bed.

Bearky:                  So what do you think we should do, go to protest marches and demonstrations? I hate everything about protest marches.

Berry-Derry:       Well, it’s a collective action problem, right? If everybody does it, if there’s a general strike and it shuts down the country for a few weeks, the government has to respond. But if it’s just a few thousand hippies marching around chanting slogans, no one cares. The government can ignore them or arrest them as it sees fit. Read more »

Friday, February 7, 2025

Inside the CIA’s Decades-Long Climate “Spy” Campaign

by Rachel Santarsiero

For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization best known for its espionage and secret missions—has been spying on climate change. Well, maybe not spying. Not at first, at least.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA conducted a top-secret US program using satellite imagery to capture images of Soviet military installations. The program, codenamed CORONA, dramatically improved U.S. knowledge of Soviet and other nations’ capabilities and activities, and allowed the U.S. to catalog Soviet air defense and anti-ballistic missile sites, nuclear weapons related facilities, submarine bases, IRBM sites, airbases—as well as Chinese and other national military facilities. In total, the CORONA mission, along with sister programs ARGON and LANYARD, yielded almost a million images of the Soviet Union and other areas of the world.

While these satellites were capturing images of Soviet bases, however, they were unknowingly spying on something else: climate change.

Because satellites typically orbit on north-south paths, their sensors can capture the vast majority of the Earth’s surface as the planet turns over the course of a 24 hour period, cataloging sweeping Arctic and Antarctic images. Over the twelve years that CORONA was in operation, the satellite captured approximately 850,000 static images of retreating polar ice, ecosystems’ extent and structures, species’ populations and habitats, and human pressures on the environment.

Due to their highly classified nature, these images weren’t readily available for public and scientific use. In the early 1990s At the urging of first Senator and then Vice President Al Gore for the CIA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to consider releasing environmental information gleaned from classified data, the CIA established the Environmental Task Force (ETF) to review the classified reconnaissance CORONA satellite imagery and determine whether or not “classified information could help on particular scientific questions.” According to a 1996 speech by former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, the ETF found that data collected by the Intelligence Community (IC) could fill critical gaps for the environmental science community and could be studied outside of the spy community without revealing “sources and methods.” Read more »

Women in Jazz: Sheila Jordan, Age 96, Drops a New Album

by Dick Edelstein

A message from Spotify on my phone this morning announced that jazz singer Sheila Jordan had just dropped a track from her forthcoming album. A musician of very long experience among the inner circle of bebop jazz stars—iconic players, most of whom are no longer with us—she is an iconic figure herself, still playing and recording regularly with outstanding musicians. You may wonder why she is not better known.

It’s complicated. Although few women have made a big reputation in jazz, we can think of several well-known vocalists who earned enduring reputations, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. Like Jordan, they all launched their careers in the mid-20th century. Perhaps because of extreme poverty in her early life and the need for a steady income after the birth of her daughter in 1955, Jordan kept her day job until she was nearly 60, combining her work in an advertising agency with her career as a singer, recording artist and teacher. In one interview, she makes the point that it was easier for her to sing what she wanted if she did not have to rely on her income as an artist.

In 1962, after a decade of intense involvement in the New York bebop scene, Jordan recorded her first album on the renowned Blue Note label, a great recording in the original version and the remastered 1995 release. She did not record again under her own name until 1977 but since then has recorded over thirty albums and has appeared as a featured vocalist on dozens more, working with distinguished musicians like saxophonist Archie Shepp, trumpeter Don Cherry, and avant-garde vocalist Carla Bley. Jordan’s close association with the avant-garde partly accounts for her relative obscurity since the audience for this sub-genre is pretty small in comparison to its artistic allure. Read more »

Life After Tinder: What I Learned From 10 Years Of Online Dating

by Eric Schenck

My 2024 ends with a ceremony of sorts. On December 31st, I’m sitting in a hotel in Salt Lake City an hour before midnight. I’m looking at my phone and I have it opened to Tinder. 

For almost a decade, I’ve used the dating app off and on. There are hundreds of matches. Some I’ve talked to. Most I haven’t.

I’ve deactivated Tinder before. But this time I’m going to really give it a go and erase my account. I try to go through each profile. My plan is to manually delete each one. That will force me to give each match just a little bit of my time, if only a few seconds. 

This doesn’t last. Five minutes into it I figure: 

What’s the point?

Trying to give some kind of attention to hundreds of people I’ve never met is absurd. It’s also disrespectful to myself. If time is what life is made out of, I am, quite literally, handing it over to people that will never mean anything to me.

Fuck that. 

I delete my account, erase the app from my phone, and get ready to watch New Years fireworks from my hotel window.

Real life is calling. Read more »

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Handke and Camus on a Mother’s Death

by Derek Neal

I read the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and immediately thought of Camus’ The Stranger. Here is how Handke begins:

The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.”

My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks….

In The Stranger, Camus also begins with the notice of a mother’s death by way of print media:

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

One gets the feeling from Handke that after Camus, one can only write of a mother’s death in the shadow of Camus, that one either follows Camus or rebels against him, yet his presence is always there, undeniable. This goes in the opposite direction as well. When I read Handke’s account of his mother’s death, it led me to reconsider the beguiling opening of Camus’ novel. On some readings, Meursault has seemed indifferent to me at the beginning of The Stranger—how could someone not know whether such an important event happened this day or the day before? Yet reading Handke makes me see things differently. In Handke’s account, I see the decision to depersonalize the story as a way of coping with a terrible reality; relaying the information from the newspaper is not heartless, but the only way to dull the horror of an inexplicable event. It takes something boundless and sets limits on it, creating an official account upon which all can agree. Meursault’s decision to tell the reader about the telegram is similar. He begins by recounting his own version of events and is immediately destabilized; his inability to remember if the death occurred one day or another is not indifference but a loss of lucidity as he is overwhelmed. He then takes comfort in the objective, totalizing nature of the telegram, only to question it again after (“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”) This is the conflict of The Stranger which plays out over the course of the novel—the meaningless, impersonal, social world represented by the telegram versus Meursault’s own subjective experience of reality, which goes beyond the limits of language. Read more »

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

The Climate Change Policy Problem

by Thomas R. Wells

Many environmentalists find the climate change policy problem baffling. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is extremely clear (and has been known for over a century). Evidence that human activities are releasing greenhouse gases in dangerously disruptive quantities is also very clear and well-established, as is the obvious conclusion that humanity has to stop doing this. Moreover, the economic costs of transforming the global economy to run on non climate-destabilising energy sources, while substantial, are quite affordable.

Of course there are myriad important sub-questions to investigate about climate change, the answers to which are still contested by the relevant expert groups of scientists (like how all the extra heat being absorbed by the world is distributed geographically, and its precise impact on different weather systems). However, basically, the science is clear. Moreover, more or less all the world’s governments accept the scientific definition of the problem and the solution. And yet the solution remains unimplemented.

So, why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about a huge problem? Read more »

Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos

by Philip Graham

A conversation between Christine Sneed and Philip Graham

Since 2010 Christine Sneed, winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (among other awards), has published six acclaimed books: the story collections Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight, and the novels Little Known Facts, Paris, He Said, and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. With each new book Sneed has expanded her impressive range of vision, combining cultural insight with the everyday strangeness of her fictional characters.

Having explored in her novels the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanics of craft and inspiration in the art world, or the corrosive effects of Hollywood fame on an actor and his family, Sneed has recently set her sights on the contradictions of American capitalism. Please Be Advised is a deliciously droll novel (told entirely through the surprisingly illuminating lens of interoffice memos) that takes the reader on a journey through successive rings of corporate hell.

Philip Graham: Pleased Be Advised stunned me when I first began reading it—the novel is a wild and hilarious romp that’s entirely presented through the office memos of a struggling company named Quest Industries, which makes “collapsable office products” of dubious utility. Your earlier work, both short stories and novels, are quieter, even contemplative, and incisive in their paring away of your characters’ illusions and presentations of self. Those memos of Please Be Advised are laugh-out-loud funny on nearly every page. And yet, as I read further, I remembered that your earlier novels also made use of various documents to arrive at a deeper level: an artist’s sketchbook, a secret diary, obituaries, a character’s attempted memoir.

Christine Sneed: Hybrid forms have long been of interest to me as both a reader and a writer. When I started writing seriously in the early 1990s, it was poetry, not fiction, that I was attempting to put on the page. I did try to write a few short stories too, but it was clear I wasn’t ready—as with acting, the artifice must not be visible in fiction-writing, and everything I initially wrote was awkward and mannered. The compression and playfulness of a poem seemed both a challenge and an invitation. The short lines I was working with and the sensory imagery and concrete detail helped me focus on language, and as I got a little older and read more widely, I started to write fiction with more confidence. This was after earning my MFA in poetry. By that time, I had a better sense of how to create a character that seemed real and was not simply my surrogate.

The playfulness of hybrid and found forms like the memo or the resume or diary entry offer a chance for me to return, I suppose, to the compression of a poem. When I was writing Please Be Advised, it was great fun to begin every new memo, and to write in a different character’s voice. It was a bit like writing comedic prose poetry. Read more »

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Your Doctor Is Like Shakespeare (And That’s A Problem)

by Kyle Munkittrick

When I think about AI, I think about poor Queen Elizabeth.

Imagine being her: you have access to Shakespeare — in his prime! You get to see a private showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the height of the players’ skill and the Bard’s craft. And then… that’s it. You’ve hit the entertainment ceiling for the month. Bored? Your other options include plays by not Shakespeare, your jester, and watching animals fight to the death.

Shakespeare and his audiences were limited not by his genius but by physics. One stage, one performance, one audience at a time. Even at their peak his plays probably reached fewer people in his entire lifetime than a mediocre TikTok does before lunch.

Today we have an embarrassment of entertainment. I’m not saying Dune – Part 2 or Succession or Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour are the same as Shakespeare, but I am going to make the bold claim that they are, in fact, better than bear-baiting. My second, and perhaps bolder claim, is that AI is going to let ‘knowledge workers’ scale like entertainers can today.

Consider this tweet from Amanda Askell, the “philosopher & ethicist trying to make AI be good at Anthropic AI”:

If you can have a single AI employee, you can have thousands of AI employees. And yet the mental model for human-level AI assistants is often “I have a personal helper” rather than “I am now the CEO of a relatively large company”.

Askell is correct (she very often is, especially when you disagree with her). “I am going to be a CEO” is the mental model we should have, but it isn’t the mental model most of us have. Our mental models for human-level AI don’t quite work. There are lots of very practical predictions out there about what scaled intelligence means. I aim to make weirder ones. Read more »

What Was So Great About America Again?

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »