John Whitfield at Aeon Magazine:

It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.

In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known. This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.

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Aaron Horvath in The Hedgehog Review:

In 2017, the MIT Media Lab launched MyGoodness, an online game billed as a way to teach players to “maximize the impact of [their] charitable donations.”¹ The game’s premise is simple. In each of ten rounds, you’re given one hundred dollars and asked to choose between two charities, each representing a different mix of characteristics. In one round, for instance, Charity A provides clean water to thirty-six adult women in South Asia and Charity B provides nutritious meals to twenty-eight senior men in Eastern Europe. In another round, Charity A provides medication to thirty-one girls in Southern Africa and Charity B provides medication to one boy—a family member of yours—in North America. The options are endearingly illustrated. Nutritious meals are depicted as bowls of rice, medication is depicted as a first-aid kit, and beneficiaries are depicted as yellow potato-like people wearing tattered clothes and forlorn expressions. When you pick a charity, the chosen potato people smile and throw their arms aloft as confetti fills the air. You’ve just saved their lives. The others aren’t so lucky. While their counterparts celebrate, the ones you’ve passed over turn blue and fall off the screen dead because of your decision.

For all its cartoonish simplicity, MyGoodness adamantly positions charity as a series of rational calculations with life-and-death consequences. To be an effective giver, the site explains, your contributions should “result in saving the maximum possible number of lives.” You should research your options and let dispassionate analysis guide your open wallet. You shouldn’t let biases like geographic proximity or personal relationships steer your largess.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Evolution was a “training process” selecting for reproductive success. But humans’ goals don’t entirely center around reproducing. We sort of want reproduction itself (many people want to have children on a deep level). But we also correlates of reproduction, both direct (eg having sex), indirect (dating, getting married), and counterproductive (porn, masturbation). Other drives are even less direct, aimed at targets that aren’t related to reproduction at all but which in practice caused us to reproduce more (hunger, self-preservation, social status, career success). On the fringe, we have fake correlates of the indirect correlates – some people spend their whole lives trying to build a really good coin collection; others get addicted to heroin.

In the same way, a coding AI’s motivational structure will be a scattershot collection of goals – weakly centered around answering questions and completing tasks, but only in the same way that human goals are weakly centered around sex.

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Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

One afternoon in the early 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, leapt into a room in Private Eye’s Soho offices. His mission was to liberate the magazine’s editor, Richard Ingrams, from a tiresome interview with Daily Mail hack Lynda-Lee Potter. “Mr Ingrosse, sir,” said Ali, posing as an Indian guru, “Time for meditation. Please remove all clothes.”

It’s a terrible shame Potter is dead because I’d love to have heard her side of the story. Did she, as Ali reports, nearly faint before making her excuses and leaving? Was she taken in by the ruse that concluded with Ingrams and Ali giggling over pastries in the nearby Maison Bertaux? Or did she, as seems more likely, immediately recognise Britain’s foremost Lahore-born, Oxford-educated Trotskyist intellectual, after whom the Rolling Stones reportedly named their song Street Fighting Man – if only from his fabulous moustache? We will never know.

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Stopping by Woods

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Laura Kipnis in The New Republic:

In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and semi-clerical, which he associates with Henry James, and the exuberant, open-air lowlife embodied in Walt Whitman. Between them, James and Whitman represent the distinction between “life conceived as a discipline” and “life conceived as an opportunity.” Knowingly or not, Lili Anolik’s dual biography, Didion & Babitz, endeavors to revive Rahv’s opposition, this time for the ladies. Her protagonists, Joan Didion and the lesser-known writer-party girl Eve Babitz, met in Los Angeles in 1967, and were friends for perhaps seven years with, according to Anolik, lasting effects on American letters and culture.

In Anolik’s update on the Rahvian opposites, Didion was manufactured and careerist, as deliberate a creation as a character in one of her books, leading a life of dull industry while leeching off Babitz’s vitality. The exuberant Eve, who never passed up a drug, a bed partner, or an adventure, couldn’t be bothered with reputation.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

OpenAI’s new o3 artificial intelligence model has achieved a breakthrough high score on a prestigious AI reasoning test called the ARC Challenge, inspiring some AI fans to speculate that o3 has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). But even as ARC Challenge organisers described o3’s achievement as a major milestone, they also cautioned that it has not won the competition’s grand prize – and it is only one step on the path towards AGI, a term for hypothetical future AI with human-like intelligence.

The o3 model is the latest in a line of AI releases that follow on from the large language models powering ChatGPT. “This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models,” said François Chollet, an engineer at Google and the main creator of the ARC Challenge, in a blog post.

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Nick Marx & Matt Sienkiewicz at The Conversation:

While Jimmy Kimmel cries and Jon Stewart rants, the right wing in the U.S. has successfully depicted itself as the new home for free speech and cutting edge comedy. We explored this development in our book, “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them.”

The right has become a home for comedians not by making political arguments through jokes, but by positing that there are funnier things to do than to argue.

Liberal comedy and political satire have stuck to the same formula of Stewart’s “The Daily Show” for much of the 21st century.

It goes something like this: A sarcastic, eloquent host uses meticulously researched data to describe a pressing social issue, and then delivers a punchline directed at right-wing hypocrisy. The resultant pairing of righteous laughter and anger has been repeated by “The Colbert Report,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” among other comedy programs.

These satirical shows filled the void left by an increasingly profit-driven news media. However, they have come to prioritize political preaching at the expense of laughs.

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Jake Maynard at the Paris Review:

A twelve-hour opening shift and I dripped snot on the first customer’s debit card. But that’s Christmas tree season. Other than the barrel fire, there’s no place to get warm, so I wore fleece thermals with jeans on top, pockets full of pine needles already. Plus a hoodie and a blanket-lined denim trucker jacket that passes for hip. Ty doesn’t wear a coat, just three Carhartt hoodies on top of each other. Jack wears a knee-length puffer jacket from Goodwill. Brian wears a hoodie with the hood cinched tight around his face and his beard poking out. He looks the most like an elf. He also looks the most like Santa. Kids like to bring up one or the other. Sometimes we try to wear gloves, but they get caked in sap.

People are always asking why landscapers and construction workers are selling Christmas trees. The short answer is that trees are heavy and construction workers are strong, and that winter is cold and we’re mostly cool with that.

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Claire Harman at Literary Review:

‘A Letter is a joy of Earth –/It is denied the Gods’, Emily Dickinson wrote in 1885, a year before she died, aged fifty-five, at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was a joy she indulged freely. This monumental new edition of her correspondence contains 1,304 items, including all the previously published letters, further uncollected material and some two hundred ‘letter-poems’. Still, all this represents just a fraction of Dickinson’s total correspondence. 

Dickinson, famously, published only ten poems during her life, though some nine hundred more were found among her effects after her death, bound into small, homemade booklets. Writing wasn’t a secret activity; her family were aware and supportive of it, as was the journalist Samuel Bowles, whom Dickinson met at her brother’s house, and the influential critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her correspondence with him started when she sent him four poems after reading an article he had published in the Atlantic Monthly).

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Will Leitch in The Washington Post:

Bob Dylan is so inherently unclassifiable that, when the great filmmaker Todd Haynes made a purposefully disjointed and elliptical film about the songwriter, he had to cast six actors to play Dylan, including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and an 11-year-old. There would seem to be no greater fool’s errand than to try to plug Dylan into a conventional or pop star biopic, the sort of straightforward narrative that in recent years has won Oscar nominations for Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. There is nothing normal about Bob Dylan; how could you possibly make a normal movie about him? He is so unknowable that he has been mistaken for a vagrant by four generations in a row now.

“A Complete Unknown,” the new biopic of Dylan directed by James Mangold, turns Dylan’s stubborn insistence on hiding in plain sight, the impossibility of ever truly understanding him, into the film’s central tension. It’s a movie about a main character who keeps trying to run away from his own movie.

Most Dylan fans I know — a club that very much claims me as a member — have been dreading the movie since it was first announced, particularly when they learned that Timothée Chalamet, the elfish man in all those perfume ads in the corner of your browser windows, would be portraying him. But I am delighted to let everyone know that our fears were unfounded. The movie, and Chalamet’s devoted and truthful portrayal of Dylan, has constructed itself with a deliberate hole at its center. To paraphrase Haynes’s movie title, he’s not here. It’s as true to Dylan as if he were to play the part himself.

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Alison Abbott in Nature:

Andrew Cassy had spent his working life in a telecommunications research department until a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2010 pushed him into early retirement. Curious about his illness, which he came to think of as an engineering problem, he decided to volunteer for clinical trials. “I had time, something of value that I could give to the process of understanding the disease and finding good treatments,” he says.

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Kate Mackenzie and Lara Merling in The Polycrisis:

The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in other G7 countries—including in France, Japan, and Canada—is now more uncertain than ever.

Amid speculation about how the second Trump term will play out, the question of trade measures is occupying headlines. It is expected that the quantum of tariffs will certainly increase under the incoming administration, and that they will be more assertively weaponized. The extent to which they will represent a break with the Biden era, however, is less clear.

Biden in 2021: “Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers.” (Source: White House)

It’s well known that the Biden administration left the majority of Trump’s trade-war tariffs intact. In fact, revenue collected from tariffs grew under Biden’s watch—particularly on Chinese goods[…]

It is hard to predict how Trump will move ahead with his proposals, which include 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imports and 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canadian and Mexican imports. Appointments of people like Scott Bessent do suggest some strategic crafting of new and increased tariffs, but what will be their effects be, and how will they be managed?

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Ingrid Robeyns over at Crooked Timber:

Should those who care about climate change worry less about whether food is locally sourced or comes wrapped in plastic? Should they worry less about rising rates of energy consumption, and more about changing their diets? In Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie tries to dissolve such quandaries by arguing that many people make decisions like these on the basis of poor information, which makes them ineffective in addressing climate change and ecological crises.

According to Ritchie, data scientist at Oxford University, environmentalists typically worry about the wrong things. There are indeed some things that are more harmful than environmentalists often presume, such as picking fights with people who have slightly different ideas of the best climate-friendly solutions. But when it comes to most of our decisions about climate action, we should be worrying less, not more. And crucially, we should not fall prey to doomism that tells us that humanity cannot be saved. In Not the End of the World, Ritchie sets herself the task of showing that, while the problems of climate change and other ecological crises are serious and urgent, there has been more progress in solving them than we are inclined to think.

For Ritchie, this becomes obvious if one considers the data. Take deforestation: worries about losing the ‘lungs of the earth’ abound, but looking at the data of the last century, forests have actually made a comeback in rich countries, she argues. The data, Ritchie claims, tell us that we can be the first generation that will reach sustainability. The pathway to sustainability is clear if we look at the data on the ecological crises that we face.

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Yussef Robinson and Herman Mark Schwartz in American Affairs:

That we stand in the midst of a geoeconomic and geopolitical inflection point is increasingly clear, but as Walter Benjamin said, the angel of history always looks backwards. Not being angels, we lean on our asset management expertise to take the riskier path of looking forward and sketching some possible scenarios for the post-inflection future. Doing so requires outlining growth waves in capitalist economies, first generally, and then specifically for the information and communications technology (ICT) plus biotech 1.0 growth wave to understand how an internal process of decay exhausted that wave, creating the forces generating the current inflection point. This clears the way to look at a potential new package of general-purpose technologies, why those technologies and organizational formats look like solutions to current problems, and how they might get married to emerging forms of corporate and social organization. We end with three scenarios for the future. Place your bets.

Joseph Schumpeter famously argued (and contemporary neo-Schumpe­t­erians like Carlota Perez maintain) that orthodox economics gets things wrong by focusing on equilibrium models (as in the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models most macroeconomics deploys) and on exchange rather than on production. Instead, Schumpeterians view capitalism as a dynamic process that never attains equilibrium. More­over, revolutions in produc­tive technologies that create eras of relatively fast growth and then stagnation characterize capitalism more so than equilibrium. These technologies emerge as a package of investment-driven changes to how things are made, moved, and marketed.

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