Iâve 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 Iâve 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.
âI believe in academic freedom. I think itâs 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. Thatâs the dumbest thing Iâve ever heard. But itâs 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.â
Harvard president Alan Garberâs letter is addressed to âMembers of the Harvard Community,â 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 mottoâVeritas, or truthâguides 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. âI would venture to remind you that tomorrowâs schedule includes Sirâs dental appointment at Brightsmile Dental Clinic from 2:15 pm to 3:00 pm. Madamâs 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.â (Via Simon Willison.)
Huzzah! And of course his post about it is brilliant. âWhat 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; Iâm learning a new landscape, a geography, this surface of a metabolic manifold of surprisingly few parameters really.â
I donât really care about this movie, but itâs wild to pair this oral history with the NYTâs 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 thatâs so pressurized. Making a movie like this, weâre talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars. Weâre talking about stars believing that it better work, because the next paycheck wonât be good if it doesnât. Richard Dreyfuss was not trying to be bad. Everybody believes theyâre doing the best thing for the movie and theyâre trying their very best. That doesnât mean that what theyâre 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 Dreyfussâs head â You can tell that story as much as you like, but itâs 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 âWhat About Bob?â 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 didnât throw it at anyone. If Iâd thrown it at Dreyfuss, Iâd have hit him.
Emphasis mine.
âSometimes 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.â (Via Kottke.)
âRight out of the gate, itâs 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 Kongâs press conferences. Reporter asks a gotcha question? Barrel. Someone wants to know what heâs doing about the price of eggs? Barrel. Softball from a friendly reporter? Barrel, barrel, barrel.â (Yep, thereâs 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: oneâs capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood â only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque â what we do to one another so grotesque â that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.
From Jillian Hessâs excellent Noted, a post on the path Picasso took to âLes Demoiselles dâAvignon.â
One need only look at Picassoâs notebooks to recognize the staggering amount of work that went into âLes Demoiselles.â 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.
âBecause 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.â
âKids books and cookbooks and other full-color titles will likely be rendered either unavailable (if theyâre 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. Whatâs more impossible than impossible? And thatâs assuming thereâs 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.â
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 peopleâs stories. Thereâs 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, Iâve always found that compelling. I did this project several years ago where I collected oral histories from workers who have jobs that didnât exist a generation ago. I felt like I was making an implicit argument. Anytime we publish oral histories, weâre making an implicit argument for the artistry of language, all our language. Itâs 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. Thereâs this flattening effect of the technology. Because itâs built to try to sound like this idea of the average human it then doesnât sound like any actual real human. The specificity of our experience is what makes it interesting to hear about one anotherâs 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.
âThis was not an easy battle. It came at a priceâa price youâll 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.â (Freedomâs just another word for nothing left to lose.)
Paul Krugman: âWhen 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 theyâre businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this? Next thing youâll be telling me that Trumpâs people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.â
Julian Lehr: âThe inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement for existing computing paradigms â but what if they complement them?â
Noah Smith: âOver the past two decades, Americans collectively convinced themselves that their economy â by many measures one of the top performers in the world, and indeed in all of human history â 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 weâre going to experience the consequences.â
Robin Sloan on Dean Ballâs essay, Where Are We Headed:
If Dean is a believerâââone who will state plainly, âMost of the thinking and doing in America will soon be done by machines, not peopleââthen at least he is a very interesting believer, writing with a density and quality thatâs provocative and truly useful.
For my part, (1) Iâm 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 CEOâs servile AI swarm, sounds pretty awful.
Paul Krugman: âThere canât be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because thereâs nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda.â
Heather Cox Richardson on Cory Bookerâs 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 administrationâs 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 Americansâ 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 âadministrative errorâ and now says it cannot get him back.
The Times quotes Bookerâs speech, where he calls out that motherfucker Strom Thurmond:
âTo 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,â Mr. Booker said. âIâm not here though because of his speech. Iâm here despite his speech. Iâm here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.â
Great post from Hillel Wayne, not only with a list of great gamer games for non-gamers, but also the rationale for each one on the list. Includes mini-explainers of good Sokoban-style games, cozy games, deduction games, and roguelike games.
The video game industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. In 2024, it produced almost half a trillion dollars in revenue, compared to the film industryâs âmereâ 90 billion. For all the money in it, it feels like gaming is a very niche pastime. It would surprise me if a friend has never watched a movie or listened to music, but itâs pretty normal for a friend to have never played a video game. The problem is that games are highly inaccessible.
âThe cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall.â
I wonât save you the click to see who wins, but Iâm with Nicholas Glastonbury on this one. âI had a feeling, when I first saw the shortlist, that these would be the Tournamentâs finalists, and boy, they did not disappoint. What beauty and what terror. Two ambitious books, two protagonists writing themselves into life. Metatexts, double consciousness, oneiric encounters, the deceptions of names, the trouble of kin, the evil rot at the heart of the American enterprise. But if I must choose (and they tell me I must), then for its propulsive acerbity, its acrobatics of language, its sheer humanity, I choose Martyr! In this time of martyrs, I revere the grace and glory of this book.â
âTo build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were âconnectedâ in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix. We used this dataset to identify promising examples and then confirmed or revised the relationships in those examples based on cross-checking with other sources, including WhoSampled.com, Spotify, and news media and academic scholarship.â (Everything is a remix.)
Greg Allen on the Jenny Holzer show at Glenstone, a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, MD. âThe terrible history and present that Holzer has aestheticized for urgent attention has been edited, collected, curated, realized, and exhibited in this singular context: a billionaireâs museum in an ongoing coup.â
âIâve been asking people how they define love,â Dacus said. âEverybodyâs answers are so interesting. My therapist had my favorite definition so farâthat love is the connective tissue between all of us thatâs easy to forget. I like that. Because it means itâs just there.â (Go listen to the new album. Itâs fantastic.)
Tim OâReilly brings the long view. âWhen thereâs a breakthrough that puts advanced computing power into the hands of a far larger group of people, yes, ordinary people can do things that were once the domain of highly trained specialists. But that same breakthrough also enables new kinds of services and demand for those services. It creates new sources of deep magic that only a few understand.â
âWithout expert intervention, the best these tools can do today is produce a somewhat functional mockup, where every future change beyond that risks destroying existing functionality.â
filtered for avoiding inauguration week
Itâs been a hell of a week. I canât stand looking at the news, and so Iâm deliberately pointing my attention elsewhere. Hereâs a Friday dump, a way to get things out of my head (and maybe into yours).
reading
Making my way through Neil Postmanâs Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I canât believe I havenât read before. // Also, Tess Guntyâs The Rabbit Hutch: âall the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday lifeâ (NYT). And because lately truth is more depressing than fiction, Rabbit Hutch is mirrored in the sex abuse scandal at Miss Hallâs. // Rosencrans Baldwin, Cinematic. âIn the dark, for ninety minutes, we let go of our inhibitions, and thatâs a powerful experienceâthough within that give and take, if someone cries, if people run from instinct, donât they deserve respect?â // Alex Nevala-Lee, Chimes at Midnight, about visiting the Clock of the Long Now. âArriving at the primary chamber, you see the brass and quartz enclosure that protects the calculation system, the escapement, and a pendulum that completes one swing every seven seconds. The clock face itself is eight feet across. At the center is the black globe of a star field, encircled by movable rings that indicate sunrise, sunset, and the phases of the moon.â Mindblowing. // Zach Vasquez on the Startling Empathy of David Lynch. âThe films of David Lynch are strange creatures, not unlike the strange creatures that often appear within them, and to focus only on the most ungainly of their appendages is to willfully ignore their equally beautiful qualities. Even in the darkest and most terrifying of Lynchâs films, there are moments of profound beauty and warmth.â // Matt Webb dowsing the collective unconscious.
watching / seeing
Twin Peaks. Binged Season 1 last week, am now slowly making my way through Season 2. Itâs as weird and awkward and shocking as you remember. Maybe more so, with time. Also, David Lynch: The Art Life, available for free right now on Criterion. Lynchâs tobacco-stained voice is soothing, and there should be volumes written about his hair. // Amy Sherald: American Sublime at SFMOMA. The âsmallerâ pieces are hung so their subjects are basically at eye level with you; the intimacy is entrancing. // Also spent a full hour watching Ragnar Kjartanssonâs nine-screen video installation The Visitors, which has been extended through September of this year. If youâre in the Bay Area, go. Even if youâve seen it before. Even if you saw it last week. Go again. // Every bucket in Kobe Bryantâs 81 point performance from 2006. Literally a supercut. // Every Frame a Painting, Where Do You Put the Camera? Greta Gerwig on Little Women: âI almost wanted the camera to start young, and get older â like the girls did.â (Via Kottke) // Nobody does OK Go like OK Go does OK Go.
listening
New Lucy Dacus. // Old Sugar. // Anything from Claire Rousay, it seems. // Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes talking attention. // Four Tet: Three. // Sydney Ross Mitchell: Pure Bliss Forever, esp Fast Cars and Faster Horses. (âHeaven has cigarettes and Coca-Cola, hotel beds and love to borrow, mmm hallelujah.â) // Bill Ryder-Jones: lechyd Da. // Kendrick, Reincarnated, like everyone.
In Scope of Work, Spencer Wright rides along with New York Times photographer Christopher Payne, on his visits to the MTAâs repair shops.
The factories he visits are complicated, complex, kludgy. Factories take knowledge away from craftspeople and turn it into bureaucracy and institutional anxiety. Factories pollute our waterways. Factories take razor-sharp lathe swarf and try to convince us itâs jewelry; factories enlist workers to help someone else fulfill their dreams. But then Christopher Payne comes in, and he crawls around for a few months, and he finds parts of the factory that we can be purely and unabashedly proud of. I donât think that Payneâs work is asking questions at all; heâs just taking something messy, and pointing a spotlight on the honorable parts.
Virginia Heffernan interviews congressman Hakeem Jeffries about January 6th, 2021.
Heffernan: So what moments stick out to you from that day?
Jeffries: The moment that probably crystallized that we were entering into a very different space was when a Nancy Pelosi, who was on the rostrum as the speaker, was suddenly and expeditiously removed and the sergeant at arms or someone from the sergeant at arms, the staff interrupted the debate and then says that the mob has breached the Capitol. Theyâre on the second floor. There are a few steps away from the House chamber. Be prepared to hit the ground and secure the gas masks that are underneath your seats. Iâll never forget those words because I never thought that I would hear them. And I didnât even know that there were gas masks underneath each seat in the House of Representatives.
Emphasis mine.
Four years on, the framing of January 6th that resonates with me is from Jason Kottke: âthis was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt.
Nick Cave, in todayâs Red Hand Files, answers the question âWhere is the hope? What is hope?â
So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperiled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope â the necessary driver of change â to inspire us to action.
Bartosz Ciechanowskiâs latest epic Moon explainer / simulator / playground makes it abundantly clear to me that I never could have done physics.
Elizabeth Spiers on the rage at the U.S. healthcare system, and the understandable desire to hold someone â anyone â accountable.
When youâre stuck in the pediatric oncology ward watching your child die because insurance thinks the doctorâs recommended treatment plan is too experimental, or when youâre watching someone you love experience unremitting pain that no one will treat or pay for, or you simply find yourself buried in mountains of paperwork and bills when youâre too sick to navigate it, who do you blame? Who can be held accountable? Everyone intuitively understands that there are individual people responsible for this state of affairs and no real mechanisms to prevent them from causing harm.
Om Malikâs post on the passing of tabla master Zakir Hussain is some wonderful blogging.
No matter how much you know, you can never stop learning and evolving. What a great lesson for everyone, including those who deem themselves experts. You are almost always the student, always part of the process, and part of the collective that leads to a better placeâŚ
If youâre looking for a way in to Hussainâs work, start with this Tiny Desk performance with Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer from 2010. Mindblowing joy.
Ev Williams on the launch of Mozi:
A lot has changed for me in the last couple years. I made a lot of new friendships and rebuilt old ones. I did a lot of growth and healing work. I now have a robust network of friends from coast to coast. Not because of an app, but because I prioritized relationships and invested the time.
I donât think technology is the answer to our most human needs. But it would be silly not to use the tools at our fingertips to serve those needs. I love seeing when I will be in the same place as people I care about via Mozi.
If weâre in each othersâ address books, Iâll see you on Mozi. ;)
Ben Thompsonâs long piece on Intel is a fantasic read, starting with the history of CISC v. RISC computing, moving on to the rise of mobile and why Intel lost that battle, through the companyâs current management and board struggles and ends with a call for the US government to save Intel in a Manhattan project to develop AGI.
If the U.S. is serious about AGI, then the true Manhattan Project â doing something that will be very expensive and not necessarily economically rational â is filling in the middle of the sandwich. Saving Intel, in other words.
Start with the fact that we know that leading AI model companies are interested in dedicated chips; OpenAI is reportedly working on its own chip with Broadcom, after flirting with the idea of building its own fabs. The latter isnât viable for a software company in a world where TSMC exists, but it is for the U.S. government if itâs serious about domestic capabilities continuing to exist. The same story applies to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
To that end, the U.S. government could fund an independent Intel foundry â spin out the product group along with the clueless board to Broadcom or Qualcomm or private equity â and provide price support for model builders to design and buy their chips there.
âŚ
This is all pretty fuzzy, to be clear. What does exist, however, is a need â domestically sourced and controlled AI, which must include chips â and a company, in Intel, that is best placed to meet that need, even as it needs a rescue. Intel lost its reason to exist, even as the U.S. needs it to exist more than ever; AI is the potential integration point to solve both problems at the same time.
Emphasis mine.
Sally Rooney, in conversation with Merve Emre in The Paris Review.
Iâm hesitant to get into my own psychology, but Iâm aware that for me, writing novels is a way of preventing or being in denial about the passing of time. The years I spent on this book passed, and I can never have them back, but I do have the book. Itâs like Iâve stored that time in a jar, like it can never quite get away from me, because itâs in there. There is a sense of pouring life into the novels and feeling like I get to live the lives of my characters. It does give me a doorway out of the world where time passes, as it does for all of us, into a world where I get to control the passing of time.
Via Kottke, emphasis mine.
Robin Sloanâs 2024 gift guide. In praise of freshness. In praise of intention. In praise of lineage. In praise of candor. In praise of invention. In praise of quality. In praise of danger. In praise of wonder. In praise of strangeness. In praise of propaganda. In praise of whompitude. In praise of utility. In praise of lightness. In praise of repair. In praise of warmth. In praise of doing it yourself.
Steven Johnson turns his latest book into an interactive detective game, as a way to illustrate whatâs possible when LLM context windows get bigger:
What youâve just experienced is an interactive adventure based on the text of my latest history book, The Infernal Machine. At its core, the game relies on three elements: the original text from my book; a large language model (in this case, Gemini Pro 1.5); and a 400-word prompt that I wrote giving the model instructions on how to host the game, based on the facts contained in the book itself. You could take any comparable narrative textâfiction or nonfictionâand create an equally sophisticated game in a matter of minutes, just by slightly altering the wording of the prompt.
âŚ
The fact that a machine now has the ability to transform linear narratives into immersive adventures has significant implications for both education and entertainment. Iâve generated a similar game just with the Wikipedia entry for the Cuban Missile Crisis. (You play as JFK trying to avoid nuclear war.)
Margaret Kilgallen: âMy hand will always be imperfect, because itâs human.â
Glorious.
Sparker, To love is to be inconvenienced.
I worry sometimes that we forget we are supposed to be inconvenienced by one another; thatâs what it means to live in a functioning society. Weâre meant to take turns bearing the burden so that others show up for us when we need it â and that means that we have to show up, even when we donât feel like it.
Maybe especially when we donât feel like it. ⌠Living in A Society means bumping up against other people who are different from you and learning how to get along well enough. Itâs messy. Itâs inconvenient. It means weâve got to give each other a lot of grace when our ideas for how to achieve a common goal donât totally align. It means we have to look within ourselves and ask if we are putting our own comfort above someone elseâs right to live.
Emailâs been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it.
This is me posting to a thing that is 100% absolutely not my Substack.
Oliver Burkeman, author of the self-help productivity philosophy book Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, in his newsletter today:
I donât need these peopleâs psychodramas in my head anymore. The closest thing to a political point I want to make is that Iâve dedicated far too much brain-space, in recent years, to marinating in the psyches of the angry, cynical and damaged men currently ascendant in our politics â which is basically what youâre doing when you spend time on Twitter, idly surf online media, or consume most TV news. Iâm not talking about people in general here. Weâve lots of work ahead to try to understand how large swathes of the population â people like us, in so many ways, who love their kids, and so on â could embrace viewpoints we find so bewilderingly abhorrent. And weâre going to have to be willing to accept the possibility that some of the failings might be, at least partly, on us. But these tasks wonât be aided in any way by remaining addicted to the feuds and fragile egos of the demagogues at the top, or their hangers-on in the commentariat, and the shocking things they say for attention and money. We canât ignore the deep societal problems that have fueled their rise. But we absolutely can choose to excise from our lives all their distracting psychodramas, their whiny podium speeches, social media bloviating and related bullshit (which includes, by the way, the output of many of those building media empires by railing against them, too).
Emphasis his. Also mine.
Craig Mod votes from Japan.
I slammed my ballot down and shoved it into an EMS international airmail envelope and gleefully paid thirty fregginâ bucks or so to get that sucker to my utterly blue state knowing damn well that that vote wonât tip the scales in any meaningful way. And yet. And yet â AND. YET. â I wanna be on that ledger. Goddamn, you bet I want to be on that ledger. What else is there but the ledger in a moment like this? Pull the lever, cast your tiny pebble into it all and hope things add up. De minimis? Hell no. At the very least, youâll be present on the cosmic scale, a little number at the end of a bigger number â one that wouldnât have been quite as big without you. Thatâs not nothing, and when your grandkids asked what you did right now â in this mythic time of madness and infinite resources all seemingly used in the wrong ways, facing the wrong directions, directed at the wrong people â you can at least say you were present, doing the smallest of things you could in whatever way you could. Tick.
In this mythic time of madnessâŚtick. Tick. Tick.
Rosencrans Baldwin sits on a Los Angeles street corner, practicing sixty minutes of focus aerobics. Traffic, planes, stoplights, graffiti, people walking by clutching things.
So many folks also openly clutch their phones. At least seventy-five percent of the women during the hour, and maybe a quarter of the men. Question: do you also find it silly to call our smartphones âphonesâ or âcell phones,â when thatâs hardly their use anymore?
Maybe we need to invent a word for slot machine/anxiety-induction device. Or just call them drugs.
Iâll go with drugs.
Ben Thompson dissects Netflixâs earnings reports in todayâs update, and I absolutely loved this chart, plotting revenue against content cash flow.
For many years Netflixâs investment in content growth tracked its revenue growth; as you can see on this chart, though, the key switchover happened around 2018, when Netflixâs content costs stabilized at around $4 billion per quarter. And, guess what happens when you keep costs steady but revenue continues to grow? You get expanding margins, and you start to look a bit more like a tech company.
Thompson goes on to compare and contrast Netflixâs âpay up front for contentâ model with YouTube (and Spotifyâs) model, where content costs are directly connected to revenue.
YouTube has much more theoretical upside for creators: a hit video can generate millions of dollars on its own. That payout, though, is much less certain; that means the smartest approach is contant production, both to increase the chances of a breakout and also to build up a presence in usersâ algorithms that delivers a baseline amount of viewing. That can make for compelling content, to be sure, but Netflix is right that its not really suited for more highly produced high cost offerings.
You can, if you squint, see the classic Internet barbell concept here: on one hand you have a large platform [Netflix] that, thanks to its large user base, can provide funding with a fixed upside to creators; on the other you have a large platform [YouTube] that, thanks to its astronomically large userbase, can provide huge variance in outcomes. One wonders how much room there is in the long run for something in the middle, i.e. the old Hollywood model, where creators could make ambitious projects with a lot of funding and still get a share of the upside. On one hand the companies stuck in the middle need these models, because they need to produce content at a somewhat lower cost; on the other hand, if they keep giving away upside they may never grow big enough to overcome the distribution advantages Netflix has by getting to scale first.
Ezra Klein makes the argument that what is wrong with Donald Trump is his complete lack of inhibition. Itâs a long essay, and I encourage you to listen instead of read, because the audio clips interspersed are reliably jaw-dropping. Kleinâs conclusion â that this disinhibition is incredibly dangerous because heâs planning on removing all the checks on his power â is spot on, and terrifying.
This bit really hit; emphasis mine.
Over the years, I have interviewed I donât know how many politicians. Talking to them is different from talking to anyone else. Itâs why I donât just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama â the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.
The politicians we sense to be inauthentic â itâs often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldnât say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.
But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I canât be without fear, if I canât be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?
It is Trumpâs absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trumpâs absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician â the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him â the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes â canât pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isnât his views on immigration, though they are part of it. Itâs the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.
Even if itâs real itâs fake, courtesy of Charlie Warzel.
The images of Trumpâs McDonaldâs stuntâin which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterdayâare uncanny. Thereâs Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonaldâs kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. ⌠In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence. Computers, at least for now, cannot quite capture the crushing surreality and maddening absurdity of modern electoral politics.