Alex Browne in Phenomenal World:

On January 10, 2021, four days after the January 6 attack at the Capitol, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley—four of the six largest banks in the United States—suspended contributions to the Republican Party. The next day, the Chamber of Commerce declared that politicians who had voted against certifying the election would no longer receive its financial support. “The president’s conduct last week was absolutely unacceptable and completely inexcusable,” said Thomas Donahue, the Chamber’s CEO: “By his words and actions, he has undermined our democratic institutions and ideals.” Over 123 Fortune 500 firms—collectively accounting for a quarter of American GDP—eventually did the same.

American capital’s boycott against the Republican Party, signifying new heights of estrangement between organized business and what it saw as a dangerously anti-system conservative movement, lasted less than two months. By March, the Chamber had reversed course. “We do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” explained Ashlee Rich Stephenson, the Chamber’s senior political strategist. Citi and JPMorgan Chase resumed their donations to the GOP in June, once a bipartisan group of senators emerged to separate infrastructure spending from the administration’s proposals for a tax increase. In the 2022 primaries, Republican members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election still faced an average fundraising penalty of $100,000 from Fortune 500 PACs; this penalty dropped in the 2022 general election, and once again in the 2024 primaries. Within two years, organized business’s opposition to the Republican Party had disintegrated.

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Ammar Ali Jan in Sidecar:

Last week in Islamabad, a series of violent confrontations erupted between supporters of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the party of the jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and state security forces. Hundreds were injured as police and paramilitary rangers used bullets and tear gas to disperse the crowds. PTI’s chair, Gohar Khan, claimed that at least a dozen were killed. The brutal crackdown was facilitated by internet stoppages, roadblocks and mass arrests of PTI staffers and activists. These heavy-handed tactics have succeeded in clearing the streets, but they have also highlighted the growing instability of Pakistan’s hybrid regime, characterized by an amalgam of civilian administrators and military rulers. What are the causes and consequences of this legitimacy crisis? Is it a matter of conjunctural politics, or of long-term structural trends?

Since Pakistan’s first military coup in 1958, US backing for the army – seen as an essential counterweight to Soviet influence – has made the country’s political sphere hostile for democratic forces. By signing up to the infamous SEATO and CENTO agreements, the military brought Pakistan into America’s Cold War camp, making it a crucial subordinate power in South Asia. Since then, it has directly ruled the country on-and-off for more than thirty years.

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Virginia Postrel in Works in Progress:

Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise. Glamour is more than a synonym for fashion or celebrity, although these things can certainly be glamorous. So can a holiday resort, a city, or a career. The military can be glamorous, as can technology, science, or the religious life. It all depends on the audience. Glamour is a form of communication that, like humor, we recognize by its characteristic effect. Something is glamorous when it inspires a sense of projection and longing: if only . . .

Whatever its incarnation, glamour offers a promise of escape and transformation. It focuses deep, often unarticulated longings on an image or idea that makes them feel attainable. Both the longings – for wealth, happiness, security, comfort, recognition, adventure, love, tranquility, freedom, or respect – and the objects that represent them vary from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.

Joan Kron, a journalist and filmmaker born in 1928, recalls sitting on the floor as a little girl, cutting out pictures of ever more streamlined cars from newspaper ads. ‘I was fascinated with car design, these modern cars’, she says. ‘Industrial design was very much on our minds. It wasn’t just to look at. It was bringing us the future.’ Young Joan lived a short train ride from the famous 1939 New York World’s Fair, whose theme was The World of Tomorrow. She went again and again, never missing the Futurama exhibit. There, visitors zoomed across the imagined landscape of America in 1960, with smoothly flowing divided highways, skyscraper cities, high-tech farms, and charming suburbs. ‘This 1960 drama of highway and transportation progress’, the announcer proclaimed, ‘is but a symbol of future progress in every activity made possible by constant striving toward new and better horizons.’

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Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Lyric poets and mathematicians, by general agreement, do their best work young, while composers and conductors are evergreen, doing their best work, or more work of the same kind, as they age. Philosophers seem to be a more mixed bag: some shine early and some, like Wittgenstein, have distinct chapters of youth and middle age; Bertrand Russell went on tirelessly until he was almost a hundred. Yet surely few will surpass the record of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who is back, at ninety-two, with what may be the most ambitious work ever written by a major thinker at such an advanced age. The new book, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Belknap), though ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.

A hard thinker to pigeonhole, Taylor has long been a mainstay of Canada’s social-democratic left; he helped found the New Democratic Party, running for office several times in Quebec, though losing, inevitably, to the Liberal Party and the charismatic Pierre Trudeau. He’s also a Catholic and a singularly eloquent critic of individualism and secularism, those two pillars of modern liberalism. He worries about the modern conception of the self—what he has called “the punctual self”—which he takes to be rooted in Enlightenment thought, and about the primacy it accords to autonomy, reason, and individual rights. By wresting our identities away from a sense of community and common purpose, the new “atomist-instrumental” model was, he thinks, bound to produce our familiar modern alienation. We became estranged from a sense of belonging and meaning. We experienced the attenuation of the citizen-participation politics we need. We wanted to be alone, and now we are.

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Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

Anyway, in the video recording of The Cure performing A Forest for Dutch television in 1980 one encounters a version of The Cure that doesn’t quite jibe with later versions of the band. Robert Smith, in particular, has short spiky hair and looks nothing like the fully-coiffed gothic prince that he would soon become. He also looks annoyed or indifferent. And he has swapped instruments with Simon Gallup, the bassist for the band. Simon plays guitar in this live version. Robert Smith plucks away at the familiar bassline. Strange. Even stranger when one realizes that the strings on the bass are so slack there is no way they could be making any proper sound. And Robert Smith isn’t playing the notes correctly or in the right rhythm anyway.

That’s when it becomes clear that, as in many “live” music performances for television, the band isn’t really playing the music at all. They are just miming and lip-syncing over a recorded version.

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Nate Rogers at The Ringer:

There appear to be two types of drivers in North America these days: those who think about headlights only when one of theirs goes out, and those who fixate on them every time they drive at night. If you’re in the first camp, consider yourself lucky. Those in the second camp—aggravated by the excess glare produced in this new era of light-emitting diode headlights—are riled up enough that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives more consumer complaints about headlights than any other topic, several insiders told me.

It’s not just in the aggrieved drivers’ imaginations. Going by data compiled by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the past 10 years—although you probably don’t need convincing if you’ve been paying attention over that span. Something happened out there, and a zap of light causing you to grimace behind the wheel suddenly went from a rarity to a routine occurrence.

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Robert F. Barsky in The Conversation:

Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most famous and respected intellectuals, will be 96 years old on Dec. 7, 2024. For more than half a century, multitudes of people have read his works in a variety of languages, and many people have relied on his commentaries and interviews for insights about intellectual debates and current events.

Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023 that has severely limited his movement, impaired his speech and impeded his ability to travel. His birthday provides an occasion to consider the tremendous corpus of works that he created over the years and to reflect on the many ways that his texts and recordings still critically engage with contemporary discussions all across disciplines and realms.

Chomsky’s vast body of work includes scientific research focused on language, human nature and the mind, and political writings about U.S. imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Central America, the Vietnam War, coercive institutions, the media and the many ways in which people’s needs are subjugated in the interest of profit and control.

As a scholar of humanities and law, I’ve engaged with Chomsky’s work from an array of perspectives and authored a biography called “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent” and a book on Chomsky’s influence called “The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower.”

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Joe Moshenska at The Guardian:

What would you prefer: to be forgotten altogether or to be remembered only because you had been wickedly parodied, skewered, by a famous writer? Saul Bellow, for example, filled his novels with richly realised but cruel renditions of people close to him and lost many friends as a result. In Humboldt’s Gift he reinvented the poet Delmore Schwartz as the dissolute and volatile Von Humboldt Fleisher – but the novel is more widely read and admired than Schwartz’s poems. A posthumous insult or a helping hand out of oblivion?

The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is at no risk of being forgotten – he routinely appears on lists of the greatest philosophers of his or any age – but he is unusual in that the most famous summary of his thought is taken not from his own work but from the best-known parody of him: the figure of Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, who proclaims, in the face of a relentless series of indignities pointlessly suffered, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

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Tom Clynes in Scientific American:

Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth—which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams.Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.

“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.

Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status.

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Alan Levinovitz in Wired:

Jim and Louise Laidler lost their faith on a trip to Disneyland in 2002, while having breakfast in Goofy’s Kitchen.

The Laidlers are doctors, and their sons, Ben and David, had been diagnosed with autism. For several years, on the advice of doctors and parents, the Laidlers treated their children with a wide range of alternative medicine techniques designed to stem or even reverse autistic symptoms. They gave their boys regular supplements of vitamin B12, magnesium, and dimethylglycine. They kept David’s diet free of gluten and casein, heeding the advice of experts who warned that even the smallest bit of gluten would cause severe regression. They administered intravenous infusions of secretin, said to have astonishing therapeutic effects for a high percentage of autistic children.

Using substances known as chelating agents, the Laidlers also worked to rid Ben and David of heavy metals thought to be accumulated through vaccines and environmental pollutants. With a PhD in biology as well as his MD, Jim Laidler had become an expert on chelation, speaking nationally and internationally about it at conferences dedicated to autism and alternative approaches. But by the time the family took a trip to Disneyland, Jim was starting to doubt the attitude fostered at conferences like Defeat Autism Now!, where he first learned about chelation. He cringed when he heard of parents mortgaging their homes to pay for wildly expensive and unproven treatments. Alarms went off when parents and doctors would advocate dangerous protocols—hyper-dosing with vitamin A, using extreme forms of chelation. When he spoke out against them, a prominent conference organizer took him aside and warned him never to criticize anyone’s approach, no matter how crazy or dangerous it seemed.

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Dwight Garner at the NYT:

This book review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled “Love, Joe,” written by the downtown artist and writer Joe Brainard (1941-94) to friends including the poets John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and James Schuyler. Before we get to those letters, a historical wrong must be righted. Next year is the 55th anniversary of the publication of Brainard’s experimental memoir, “I Remember.” I hadn’t read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know.

This newspaper missed two opportunities to review “I Remember.” The first was when the book appeared in 1970. The second was when it anchored a 2012 omnibus called “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,” issued by the Library of America. So, let’s spend just a moment on it. It’s a small but real American classic. Each sentence in Brainard’s short, stream-of-consciousness memoir begins with the same words: “I remember.” The book, which chronicles his childhood in Oklahoma in the 1940s and ’50s and his later decades in New York City, dispenses small cubes of pleasure on every page. Its cumulative effect is sly but enormous.

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Stebbin’s Gulch

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Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

JULIEN CROCKETT: You dedicate Playing with Reality to the next generation, writing, “If play is the engine of creation, I cannot wait to see what new worlds you build.” A recurring theme in your book is the primacy of play and games to what it means to be human—that playing games is universal, an instinct. What makes games and play so important to understanding ourselves?

KELLY CLANCY: Play is something that predates humans. It’s fundamental to how animals engage in and understand the world. It’s how we test and figure out the rules of our environment, how social relationships work. Part of the idea to focus on play in the book was generated from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), where they go through different ancient societies and show not only how incredibly diverse they were—contrary to the idea that there is a monolithic trajectory from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist to industrial society—but also how incredibly playful all of these societies were. More recently, at events like Carnival in Renaissance Europe, people would put on costumes and participate in taboo things like gambling, having affairs, and drinking. There were all of these opportunities to release the strictures of society and try something new.

This is something that I think we’re missing in our current society but that maybe the internet is giving us—an opportunity to put on a new mask, a new personality, and to act in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily in our everyday interactions.

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Azeem Azhar at Exponential View:

I’m at DealBook Summit in NYC today and I just heard Sam Altman speak about his view on the next few years:

I expect that in 2025, we will have systems that people look at, even people who are sceptical of current progress, and say ‘Wow, I did not expect that’. Agents are the thing everyone is talking about for good reason. This idea that you can give an AI system a pretty complicated task, the kind of task you’d give to a very smart human, that takes a while to go off and do and use a bunch of tools and create something of value. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect next year. And that’s a huge deal. If that works as well as we hope it does, that can really transform things.

Agents have been on my roadmap for a while. Last year, I spoke about our billion agent future and invested in a couple of startups building agentic systems. In today’s post, we look at how we think we’ll go from AI assistants like ChatGPT to billions of agents supporting us in the background.

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