For your friends who ask “what was the point of No Kings?” you can send them Paul Krugman’s answer, where he talks through the logic of comparing crowd sizes.
Is counting attendance in rival rallies just an exercise in one-upmanship?
No. Right now crowd sizes matter a lot because competitive authoritarianism rests largely on self-fulfilling expectations.
What do I mean by this? While there is a cadre of Trumpist true believers who will obey the Leader under any circumstances, most of those doing the dirty work of undermining democracy and the rule of law are cowards and opportunists. They’re willing to participate in the destruction of America as we know it because they believe that many others will do the same. As a result, they believe that they are unlikely to face any personal consequences for their actions and may even be rewarded for their lawbreaking.
And what of those who oppose Trumpism? While there are heroes willing to take a stand against tyranny whatever the personal cost, most anti-Trumpists are reluctant to stick their necks out unless they believe that they are part of a widespread resistance that will grant them some measure of safety in numbers.
In other words, the victory or defeat of competitive authoritarianism will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win. If Trump looks unstoppable, resistance will wither away and democracy will be lost. On the other hand, if he appears weak and stymied, resistance will grow and — just maybe — American democracy will survive.
So what we saw on Saturday was more than just the juxtaposition of a poorly attended parade that was supposed to glorify the Leader against massive, enthusiastic protests. We also saw a body blow to Trump’s image of invincibility and a demonstration that millions of Americans are willing to stand up for democracy.
Matt Webb: “I don’t have an Apple Vision Pro (I’ve done the Apple Store demo and have Opinions) but I am so tempted to acquire one entirely for the purpose of sitting in cafes wearing it for hours, yelling on zoom.”
I’m a bit behind on this, but I can not get enough of the interview of Andor show runner and Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy by Ross Douthat in the Times. Gilroy just takes him to task, over and over, zero fucks given.
Douthat: Is “Andor” a left-wing show? Because this is something that I’ve said a couple of times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example, as a conservative columnist, of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I’ve had friends, especially on the right, come back to me and say: Oh, you know what, it’s not left wing or right wing; it’s just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you’ve made a left-wing work of art. What do you think?
Gilroy: I never think about it that way. I never think about it that way. It was never ——
Douthat: [Scoffs.]
Gilroy: I mean, I never do. I don’t ——
Douthat: But it’s a story, but it’s a political story about revolutionary ——
Gilroy: Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?
Douthat: No, I don’t. But I don’t think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism.
…
Gilroy: You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive? Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.
…
Douthat: I love “Michael Clayton.” And I would, again, describe it as kind of a left-wing movie.
Gilroy: I’m going to really push back against “left-wing” on that picture. I don’t understand at all what is left or right about poisoning people with a pesticide and lying about it. I don’t think anybody on the right wants to be — let’s keep my politics out of it, but I can’t see myself ever, in any iteration of myself, identifying with the corporation that has been fighting a class-action suit for poisoning people.
Leave it to Greg Allen to sort of break my brain by pointing to this print that Jenny Holzer made for Hauser & Wirth as a fundraiser for Earth Day. “[The] unabashed etsy calligraphy has really grown on me, and makes me want to see ‘Live Love Laugh’ carved into an exotic granite bench.” Same. (More from me on Holzer here, and here.)
Riccardo Mori goes deep into Liquid Glass:
In Leopard — but also in other versions of Mac OS that came before and after, at least until the Big Sur redesign — the Finder window structure and hierarchy is well defined and self-evident: the main chrome is the area above and below the window’s contents, represented by the title bar, the toolbar below it, and then the status bar at the bottom of the window. The chrome clearly frames the Finder window. Then, inside, we have the sidebar on the left, and the folder contents on the right; it’s more or less the same structure as a Web browser. The folder contents are the Web page, the sidebar shows a lists of places (or bookmarks if you like), the status bar on the bottom works in a similar fashion as a browser’s status bar. It’s a clear representation of what is content versus what are controls. Content and controls don’t bleed into each other’s territory.
But in the world of Alan Dye, it’s all content inside roundrects with thin bezels, and controls hover above it in quasi-borderless states, options become little treasures hidden behind ‘More…’ icons (the circle with three dots in it), panels and windows get deconstructed like those ‘designer dishes’ you see in fancy restaurants.
Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: “The federal government spends far more on immigration enforcement than on preventing violent crime, terrorism, tax fraud or indeed all of these combined.”
Almost half of the murders in the United States go unsolved (42.5% in 2023). So how about devoting some of the $167 billion extra in the BBB bill to say expand the COPS program and hire more police, deter more crime and to use Conor Friedersdorf’s slogan, solve all murders. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that $20 billion annually could fund roughly 150 k additional officers, a ~22 % increase, deterring some ~2 400 murders, ~90 k violent crimes, and ~260 k property crimes each year. Seems like a better deal.
Via The Morning News.
Apple sherlocked Sherlock with Spotlight and now Spotlight is sherlocking Raycast. Time is a flat circle.
Heather Cox Richardson continues to amaze with her writing of history in near real-time.
Flatbed train cars carrying tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.
…
There is no doubt that as their other initiatives have stalled and popular opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state. But in making Los Angeles their flashpoint, they chose a poor place to demonstrate dominance. Unlike a smaller, Republican-dominated city whose people might side with the administration, Los Angeles is a huge, multicultural city that the federal government does not have the personnel to subdue.
Trump stumbled as he climbed the stairs to Air Force One tonight.
Les Orchard outlines his workflow for building with AI tools (writing a spec, asking the bot to write a plan for implementation, iterating bit by bit).
I’m seeing that agentic coding doesn’t foster flow state immersion. And, honestly? That might be perfect for my ADHD brain. Instead of needing those long, uninterrupted blocks of deep focus, I could context-switch between planning, watching the AI work, and reviewing results. Turns out the “zone” might be overrated when you have a bot for a coding partner.
Two new album recommendations for your weekend listening pleasure. Both of them dropped today, and both of them are reminding me that I’m old.
- Addison, by Addison Rae. I spend basically zero time on TikTok so am oblivious to the origin story, but on first (and second, and third) listen this is some of the best pop that I’ve heard in years. I haven’t had the “whoa, this feels new” feeling this album tingles since Folklore.
- Anthems: A Celebration of Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People features covers of the originals by Toro y Moi, The Weather Station, Hovvdy, Maggie Rogers + Sylvan Esso, Middle Kids, and more. If you’re of a certain age this will push your nostalgia buttons while sounding fresh as hell.
Jam in your earbuds and get outside – these will make you feel better about the world, at least for a bit.
Mike Monteiro argues that late stage capitalism has destroyed the liberal arts, and bemoans the downstream impact that’s having on the life decisions young people are making.
Am I telling you not to go to college? No. Yes. Maybe? I am telling you that decisions are no longer as cheap as they used to be—and should be, honestly. We need 20 year olds to have the freedom to try things, the freedom to explore, the freedom to end up having careers that they couldn’t have imagined at 20. Life requires a certain amount of curiosity and exploration. Life is an open world game. It rewards you for exploring. And capitalism cannot fucking stand that. It wants you on rails. Capitalism wants you to earn the living that life has already granted you.
I’m the parent of two twenty-somethings, with plenty of advantages in the world, and I know they are feeling this pressure, this conflict.
Jon Caramanica in the New York Times, following up on her announcement last week re purchasing her masters.
Declining to revisit “Reputation” underscores both the limits of technology to recreate a work of tactile art, and also honors its divisive-at-the-time rawness. “Reputation” was an argument that artists should take attacks personally, and then use them as fuel. It almost sounds like the product of a dare — take Swift, one of the most careful songwriters of her era, and expose her to some of the most scabrous production in pop, so defiant that it forces her to adjust her vocal approach and tone.
Jason Snell: “Yes, app developers can add AI functionality to their apps today, but it would be a lot easier and more economical if they could rely on an Apple-approved set of models that run entirely for free.” I would be pleasantly surprised if Apple did this (since it would actually deliver value to users, developers, and Apple) but at this point have zero confidence it will actually happen. It just makes too much sense.
Leah Reich on the current state of social media, why we’re pouring our hearts and souls into Chat GPT: it listens.
We’ve spent all these years online sharing into the void, waiting for people to respond. Even in private spaces like Snapchat stories or text, there’s no guarantee someone will get back to you, let alone tell you what you need to hear. We’re so overloaded with messages, content, and information that it’s hard to pay attention to the important stuff, but all this connection hasn’t lessened our need or desire to connect more deeply. In other words, it’s almost as if we’ve been primed.
This reminds me of D. Graham Burnett’s piece in The New Yorker, Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence, where he assigned students in his Attention and Modernity course the task of engaging ChatGPT in a conversation on the history of attention. Excuse this long excerpt, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this passage since I read it back in April. Emphasis mine:
But nothing quite prepared me for office hours the following Monday, when a thoughtful young woman named Jordan dropped by; she’d been up late with her roommates, turning over the experience of the assignment, and wanted to talk.
For her, the exchange with the machine had felt like an existential watershed. She was struggling to put it into words. “It was something about the purity of the thinking,” she said. It was as if she had glimpsed a new kind of thought-feeling.
She’s an exceptionally bright student. I’d taught her before, and I knew her to be quick and diligent. So what, exactly, did she mean?
She wasn’t sure, really. It had to do with the fact that the machine . . . wasn’t a person. And that meant she didn’t feel responsible for it in any way. And that, she said, felt . . . profoundly liberating.
We sat in silence.
She had said what she meant, and I was slowly seeing into her insight.
Like more young women than young men, she paid close attention to those around her—their moods, needs, unspoken cues. I have a daughter who’s configured similarly, and that has helped me to see beyond my own reflexive tendency to privilege analytic abstraction over human situations.
What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—for her, for me—with widening implications for all of us.
“And it was so patient,” she said. “I was asking it about the history of attention, but five minutes in I realized: I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever. It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”
She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the absolute center of ethical life. But the sad thing is that we aren’t very good at this. The machines make it look easy.
M.G. Siegler, with a perfect URL slug (/apple-you-cowards/) on Apple declining to participate in John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live for the first time in ten years:
Can Apple really be that thin-skinned? Again, yes. While similar “bans” were never as explicit as the one around the Gizmodo one (which was undoubtedly dictated from Steve Jobs himself), anyone who has covered Apple knows there have always been less explicit bans – never really talked about, and more simply chalked up to the “sin of omission”, that is, simply choosing not to play ball with anyone too critical of the company.
I bought a ticket for the first time because (a) will be nice to see some friends and (b) this one promises to be interesting, assuming John books some spicy guests. And he absolutely should.
I’ve been following the Flow State blog for the past couple years; every day they feature an artist and deliver “two hours of music that’s perfect for working (no vocals).” If you’re in a musical rut, give them a follow. Today they highlighted the Chicago quartet Third Coast Percussion. I was lucky enough to see them perform at Zakir Hussain’s celebration of life at Grace Cathedral back in February…and they absolutely blew my mind. Earlier this year Third Coast released a performance of Philip Glass’ Aguas de Amazonia, recorded on unusual percussion instruments including PVC pipe, a glass marimba, and almglocken (tuned cowbells!). Give it a listen; it’s great.
A cover of Lyle Lovett’s classic from Kieran Hebden and William Tyler; 11 minutes and 18 seconds of gorgeous evolution for your listening pleasure.
Kyle Chayka:
For journalists and commentators now, especially those of any public notoriety, there’s an identikit new career package. It goes something like this. Loudly quit or get pushed out of your job in traditional media institutions, whether newspapers, television, or even a website. Argue that your voice has been ignored, neglected, silenced, and held back from its true potential of reaching audiences who hunger for truth and connection — it may be true or it may be an exaggeration. Start a series of direct-broadcast channels for yourself — newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel — and then use your preexisting social-media accounts to promote them. Then, broadcast yourself incessantly, your face, your voice, your thoughts, as if you are a 24/7 cable news channel of one. Go on television, if you can, with your Substack publication in your chyron, otherwise, livestream on YouTube or Instagram or Substack. Importantly, collab with anyone who has more followers than you. Cross-post on their newsletter, appear on their video podcast, or get into a public fight that benefits both parties. Finally, you will have developed your digital clique, the bellicose band of paying subs who sustain your livelihood and pay attention to your sponsorships.
Stomach churning; empahsis mine. But! The upside: a very good use of the word “identikit.”
identikit, adjective
very similar in appearance, in a way that is boring and has no character
Jeff leads Wilco (duh, you probably already knew that), Spencer is Jeff’s son and Waxahatchee’s drummer.
Dara Weyna: Question for Spencer: Is it a full circle kind of moment to be drumming in a band that’s on tour with your Wilco family? It’s always so fun to see you and Sammy on stage with your Dad, but this must feel different somehow, I’d imagine. It’s a beautiful thing to witness the many collaborations, connections and relationships that Wilco makes and fosters and something’s tells me you’re a big part of that.
ST:It does feel great, and I feel like the luckiest human being in the world that we’re doing this.
JT: Awwww.
ST: And that I get to see Wilco every night, and …
JT: Oh, brother.
ST: Honestly, it’s true! The weirdest part about it is being in a group that’s even compatible with a Wilco support slot. That’s really exciting to me. I love playing with Katie, it’s such a great group of people that we’re getting to do this with. Anything more well-spoken that I have to say about it is leaving my mind because a Mountain Dew ad is on the TV. But it feels really great. The coolest part is that I feel proud. Sometimes friends from a different part of your life get to see your other friends or your family, or visit you at work or something. You see it through their eyes, and sometimes that doesn’t feel good. But I feel really relieved, though not surprised, that the whole Waxahatchee band seems to sincerely love Wilco as a band, and love them as a touring group.
JT: As an operation.
ST:As an operation that does this thing that we do. And that makes me feel really good. And even if they weren’t expressing any of their admiration, or anything like that, I know just from that feeling of seeing yourself through your friends’ eyes, or seeing your family through their eyes, I’d already be feeling proud and not embarrassed. And I’m very glad that that’s the case. And I know it sounds like I’m saying it because I’m sitting across from my dad, but I’m not.
Emphasis mine.
Great combination of New Consumer’s research (“Almost one in five US consumers — 17% — say they’ve used an Apple Watch in the past week,” and “Men and women report using an Apple Watch in nearly identical proportions. Trump and Harris voters, too”), Frommer’s personal observations of wearing ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜ for the last 10 years, and some analysis:
In its first decade, I’d say the Apple Watch has proven both that there is a mass market for these things and that they, so far, aren’t revolutionary devices. The Watch makes the iPhone better, and therefore strengthens Apple’s ecosystem (and platform lock-in). But its magic feels limited. … There are no Watch-native messaging platforms, network effects, nor unicorns. The iPhone (and cloud) is still where innovation is most potent. Most of the best Watch tools are built into the operating system (notifications, Apple Pay, “Live Activity” trackers, watch face widgets) or are simple extensions of iPhone apps (buttons, remote controls).
I recently took mine off, powered it down and put it away in a drawer. I had just one screen too many in my life, and the one that tapped my wrist had to go.
“The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.”
Props to the (well-named) band Surprise Privilege:
A rally Tuesday at San Francisco State University drew hundreds of supporters and protesters of [Turning Point Director] Charlie Kirk, who was speaking on campus. But across the street, a punk show in a grassy roundabout drew a similar-size crowd, including many who came over after heckling the right-wing personality.
“This song goes out to them,” singer Joey S. said, pointing to the Kirk supporters. “It’s called ‘Fuck You.’”
Especially Isamu Noguchi‘s magestic frieze “News” at the entrance to the Associated Prests building.
A telephone, a typewriter, a camera. But the subject of the sculpture isn’t any of these individual products or technologies. It’s the employment of these technologies by humans to create new things, to report and distribute stories about the world. The story is a story about technology, but here, technology is fundamentally a human endeavor. It is humans who give technology meaning and direction, and humans’ directed use of technology which Radio City celebrates. This humanist perspective on technology is simultaneously irreverent, principled, and agency-asserting.
Emphasis mine.
Rosencrans Baldwin attends the US launch of World.
I do see one more famous person, and it’s the mystery guest: musician Anderson Paak, who is presumably being paid handsomely to perform at the event as his alter ego, DJ Pee Wee. Which means he’s wearing his alter ego’s costume of a black bob wig, sequined jacket and sunglasses, so I kind of see him and kind of don’t. The people dance. The people sing. I don’t see a single Covid mask. I am encouraged to get my iris scanned, but I do not get my iris scanned. I am offered and refuse a free Orb Mini, their new product, smartphone-shaped, which World hopes people will use to scan their friends and neighbors and welcome them, secure in their humanity, to this Brave New Reality. And on low couches, I notice a quartet of attractive men and women sitting with their legs and arms draped over one another, one of them a semi-famous start-up CEO (wearing stretchy pants with cargo pockets), and I’m left wondering if they’re maybe a polyamorous quartet, sequestered in this warehouse amid doomsday clocks, protected by their wealth, free to fuck away the final days before an autonomous car picks them up and drives them to some bunker while the rest of us are out here dating robots.
I hate this timeline.
Levine remains a national treasure:
One theory of crypto, popular among venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs, is something like “crypto will be the way that people verify identity online and distinguish themselves from AI.” Another theory of crypto is “you get some tokens and the number goes up.” Now the two theories can work together.
Robin Sloan has a new zine available for purchase.
This is a three-color Risograph print on 11″ × 17″ paper. The poster side bears a design & exhortation that are, as of this writing, indecipherable to the frontier AI models from Google, Anthropic, & OpenAI.
…
This zine is playful & also serious. Playful, because I had so much fun thinking through the cat & mouse of these strategies. Serious, because AI’s compounding capability really does pose a profound, unsettling new challenge to artists of every kind — commercial or academic, aspiring or professional, digital or analog.
This is epochally weird stuff, & anything could happen in the decade ahead. The value & values of art are never static; reconsideration sweeps in like rain. The Secret Playbook isn’t about defense (though there is some defense in here) but rather about where to go next. It’s a map towards higher ground.
Dave Itzkoff covers a different kind of Imperial ship, complete with gorgeous photos by Max Miechowski of Kyle Soller and Denise Gough.
But behind the scenes, Gough said, she was wary of any story line in which Karn’s rescue of Meero led them to a conventional romance, and she expressed this to Gilroy: “I was like: ‘So, what, she just gets saved by a bloke? Is that what we’re going to do?’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Seriously, you think that’s the story I’m going to tell?’”
Evan Goldfine listened to all of Bach, and blogged the experience. “The more I listen and play, the deeper I feel, and my writing becomes stronger — a beautiful feedback loop. Music writing and art criticism should try to convey the depth and richness of what’s at hand, pointing to what can be uncovered by anyone who is open to exploring.” (Via The Browser.)
The art of the deal, indeed.
This U.S.-backed plan echoes almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort in exchange for helping Trump win the White House. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight.
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Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country will not recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea. In this determination, he speaks for the global rules-based order the U.S. helped to create after World War II. Recognition of the right of a country to invade another and seize its territory undermines a key article of the United Nations, which says that members won’t threaten or attack any country’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are standing behind those principles, saying today in a statement from Macron’s office that they reject Russian territorial gains under the U.S. plan. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans,” the statement said.
But Trump himself seems eager to rewrite the world order. In addition to his own threats against Greenland, Canada, and Panama, in a post today on his social media site he echoed Putin’s 2024 statement blaming Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms. Today, Trump said Zelensky’s refusal to recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea was “inflammatory,” and he pressured Zelensky to accept the deal.
Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Joseph Goldstein over the past year or so; his Insight Hour podcast is an ongoing series of dharma talks. This discussion with Dan Harris and Sam Harris on the Eightfold Path is one of the better introductions to Buddhism I’ve listened to. Sam can grate on me (I churned from the Waking Up app), but Joseph is a treasure and this is a lovely, lovely conversation.
“I believe in academic freedom. I think it’s crucial for all of our institutions to handle our own business the way they want to and they should not be shaken down and told what to teach, what to say by our government. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But it’s kind of par for the course right now, so yes this is me supporting Harvard. Way to go, way to stand up to the bully.”
Harvard president Alan Garber’s letter is addressed to “Members of the Harvard Community,” and tonight it feels like that community is much bigger than the list of people who went to Harvard, teach at Harvard or work at Harvard.
Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.
Love this. “I would venture to remind you that tomorrow’s schedule includes Sir’s dental appointment at Brightsmile Dental Clinic from 2:15 pm to 3:00 pm. Madam’s research presentation is scheduled for Thursday afternoon at the University Biology Department, and both young Master Lucas and Miss Emma will require packed luncheons for their school field trip on Friday.” (Via Simon Willison.)
Huzzah! And of course his post about it is brilliant. “What an experience to experience my body as pure system, this kind of metabolic system which is just astounding and fascinating, and has so many nuances and edges; I’m learning a new landscape, a geography, this surface of a metabolic manifold of surprisingly few parameters really.”
I don’t really care about this movie, but it’s wild to pair this oral history with the NYT’s Interview with Bill Murray.
Frank Oz, who directed What About Bob, on the challenges on set:
Look, every set has a culture and a dynamic of its own, and there I have had difficulties. Those bad situations are cracking me up because they show our frailty as human beings and our imperfections … the egos and the fears, the insecurities when you get in a crucible that’s so pressurized. Making a movie like this, we’re talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars. We’re talking about stars believing that it better work, because the next paycheck won’t be good if it doesn’t. Richard Dreyfuss was not trying to be bad. Everybody believes they’re doing the best thing for the movie and they’re trying their very best. That doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is the best for the movie, but they honestly believe it.
Murray, in the Times:
You describe wanting to bring lightness, but there are a handful of rough stories about you on set. Winging a glass ashtray at Richard Dreyfuss’s head — You can tell that story as much as you like, but it’s never going to be true. I did fire a glass, but I threw it at the ceiling. We were in a townhouse on the set of “What About Bob?” and I did not fire it at anyone. I threw it up in a far corner of the townhouse, assuming it might break upon contact with the ceiling and the walls, but I didn’t throw it at anyone. If I’d thrown it at Dreyfuss, I’d have hit him.
Emphasis mine.
“Sometimes it feels like the pandemic. But that was better, in a lot of ways. Because we were all together in it, at least at first. Singing for health staff and staying home and whispering sweet nothings to our collective sourdough starter. But then we stopped singing and we politicized staying safe and we stopped feeding our sourdough starters and now the ghosts of those sourdough starters are really fucking pissed at us.” (Via Kottke.)
“Right out of the gate, it’s been barrel, barrel, barrel, all day, every day. Some barrels even dip themselves in oil, combust, and then mosey around looking for trouble. Same with President Donkey Kong’s press conferences. Reporter asks a gotcha question? Barrel. Someone wants to know what he’s doing about the price of eggs? Barrel. Softball from a friendly reporter? Barrel, barrel, barrel.” (Yep, there’s a horse in the hospital.)
Just finished. A difficult read; highly recommended.
The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood – only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque – what we do to one another so grotesque – that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.
From Jillian Hess’s excellent Noted, a post on the path Picasso took to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
One need only look at Picasso’s notebooks to recognize the staggering amount of work that went into “Les Demoiselles.” He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks with his attempts to represent the women. It was with this painting that he introduced the world to what would become known as cubism.
“Because the $20 gap between my manufacturing cost and my sale price flows to Americans, American companies and other American entities: to the Amazon warehouse workers and delivery people I help fund through my Amazon seller fees; to Peter, my U.S. Postal Service parcel carrier; to software platforms, like Google, Intuit and ShipStation, which I use to run my business; to the freelance designer working with me on a new product; to the lawyers who protect my patents and trademarks; to my advertising and marketing partners; to the coffers of the U.S. Treasury, New York State and New York City; and, hopefully in the end, also to me and my family. It seems an awful waste to torch $20 of domestic economic activity to get at $5 more.”
“Kids books and cookbooks and other full-color titles will likely be rendered either unavailable (if they’re printed outside the US, say in China or Mexico) or unaffordable (if publishers decide to print them here instead). International mail order, even across the border to Canada, will be financially ruinous for sellers and buyers. Even domestically printed paperbacks will likely see a price hike as imported paper is slammed by import surcharges. Publishers will take fewer risks on new authors, and print fewer copies. The industry already operates on impossibly thin margins. What’s more impossible than impossible? And that’s assuming there’s anyone actually able to buy new releases. For many people, books are considered a luxury, which means they buy fewer of them in a recession.”
Vara wrote the wonderful novel The Immortal King Rao, and her new book of essays, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, comes out next week.
I love talking to people. I love knowing people’s stories. There’s so much richness in the way all of us tell stories, not just those of us who are employed as writers. In my work as a journalist, I’ve always found that compelling. I did this project several years ago where I collected oral histories from workers who have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago. I felt like I was making an implicit argument. Anytime we publish oral histories, we’re making an implicit argument for the artistry of language, all our language. It’s not just those of us who are employed as writers who can tell stories, and I love that.
The way LLMs function is sort of the opposite. There’s this flattening effect of the technology. Because it’s built to try to sound like this idea of the average human it then doesn’t sound like any actual real human. The specificity of our experience is what makes it interesting to hear about one another’s experiences. People are nuts. I could not dream up, and an LLM could not dream up, all the interesting ways that people answered those questions.
“This was not an easy battle. It came at a price—a price you’ll all be paying, based on a random assortment of numbers we pulled from thin air. We accomplished this great feat the way we always have: by just making it all up.” (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.)
Paul Krugman: “When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this? Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.”
Julian Lehr: “The inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement for existing computing paradigms – but what if they complement them?”
Noah Smith: “Over the past two decades, Americans collectively convinced themselves that their economy — by many measures one of the top performers in the world, and indeed in all of human history — was fundamentally broken and needed major changes. This line of thinking, popular on both the right and the left, did succeed in identifying some problems with the existing American system. But it massively blew those problems out of proportion, and brought way too much ideology into the debate. Now we’re going to experience the consequences.”
Robin Sloan on Dean Ball’s essay, Where Are We Headed:
If Dean is a believer — one who will state plainly, “Most of the thinking and doing in America will soon be done by machines, not people”—then at least he is a very interesting believer, writing with a density and quality that’s provocative and truly useful.
For my part, (1) I’m not sure any of this is really going to function outside of the magic circle of SAAS companies building software for SAAS companies, and (2) the prospect of working in this kind of firm, one of the outnumbered humans toiling alongside the CEO’s servile AI swarm, sounds pretty awful.
Paul Krugman: “There can’t be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because there’s nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda.”
Heather Cox Richardson on Cory Booker’s epic speech on the floor of the Senate:
Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of ‘administrative error’ and now says it cannot get him back.
The Times quotes Booker’s speech, where he calls out that motherfucker Strom Thurmond:
“To hate him is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand,” Mr. Booker said. “I’m not here though because of his speech. I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”