First, reading. I read 71 books in 2025, which is about average. I read slightly more non-fiction than fiction, which is unusual. Only 9 of the 71 were translated, which might actually be a result of reading more non-fiction— a lot of those books were about Native American history and US federal policy, and, unsurprisingly, most of that is written in English by American authors. I also read only one book of poetry and no essays, which is also unusual. The complete list of books is here.

My movie watching was also, I think, fairly in line with the last few years. I watched 120 feature films and 6 shorts. 34 of these were in a language other than English, and 28 were animated. The one thing that seemed surprising is that I watched only 13 documentaries. Most (109) were films I was watching for the first time. A complete list of the films is here.

One thing I am pleased about in 2025 is that I listened to a lot more music. Partly out of news exhaustion, I listened to a lot fewer podcasts, which started to feel more and more like part of the noise. I don’t know if this was a particularly good year for music, or just that I was paying more attention, but I have a pretty long list of favorites. One very nice surprise was that there were two new Aesop Rock albums this year; I don’t think either is quite as good as his previous release, but both are still excellent. I haven’t identified any particular patterns in these releases, though they skew electronic and instrumental.

These are in no particular order. There are also three releases from the year that, for whatever reason, are not on Bandcamp: Moor Mother’s orchestral reworking of her 2019 album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes; Hildur Guðnadottir’s Where to From, and Rosalìa’s LUX (which is on literally every best-of-the-year list I’ve seen). All three of those are also on Spotify and other streaming services.

I also tried to keep a running list of individual songs from the year, though I wasn’t especially consistent about that. There’s quite a bit of overlap with the album list above, but also a fair amount of variation.

I did also listen to a lot of older music as well. For a broader overview, I find LastFM’s wrap-up more useful than Spotify’s, mainly because it includes things I own rather than streamed. You can see that here.

And that’s it. Obviously I could say more about lots of these things, but if I wait to do that I will never post this. Hope everybody’s 2026 is off to a good start.

Anyway. I have quite a backlog, so I’m going to say very little (for me) about each of these.

First, here is a list of my favorite albums from 2024. I know it’s very late for this kind of thing, but it’s not like music goes out of date.

“Writing in Pictures,” by Chris Ware

Chris Ware profiles the author and illustrator Richard Scarry, getting at what is so fascinating and magical about his work. The piece also offers a brief glimpse into mid-century children’s book publishing, which turns out to offer yet another example of how America has benefitted from offering refuge to people who need it— which of course does not offer any kind of lesson about anything going on today.

“The Future is Too Easy“, by David Roth

A visit to the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, occasions a discussion of the gap between the fantastic promises made about AI, especially by people who run the companies who have staked billions of dollars on it, and the reality of using it. I wouldn’t be quite a critical is Roth is, but I still think he has a point. Much like blockchain a few years ago, the fact that people hope to use the technology to get very, very rich generates a fog of speculation and hype that makes it hard to see where we actually are, much less where we might go. The piece is also a great piece of writing, and very funny.

At this moment, there is just not much positive public-facing utility or appeal to much that AI does—it’s a way to automate various online annoyances; a low-effort homework-evasion tool; a way to make different kinds of stuff, all of which suck, at industrial scale and with industrial-scale externalities. Its most practical use-case remains Doing Crimes.

“Is it Okay?“, by Robin Sloan

And speaking of AI: This is a thoughtful consideration of its development and consequences, that doesn’t simply flow into the usual well-worn channels. Sloan takes seriously the possibility that AI might have profound and important benefits for humanity, and weighs that against the likely very serious damage it will do (and is doing) to the arts and humanities. I think he also usefully sets aside some of the debates that are very heated right now, but also likely to get sorted out in some way (for better or for worse) fairly soon— like issues of copyright— to focus on the core question of what we want from a technology that is genuinely, radically new.

“In Search of the South Pacific Fugitive Who Crowned Himself King“, by Sean Williams

And speaking of Doing Crimes: Noah Musingku has made millions (maybe?) from a weird pseudo-religious Ponzi scheme, but also declared himself the king of Bougainville, a neglected bit of Papua New Guinea (itself a largely neglected bit of the world), whose people do in fact seek independence but perhaps not exactly on his terms. It’s a weird and confusing story, and it’s likely that the confusion is at least partly strategic, since the fact that it is hard to explain concisely what is going on makes it harder to figure out what could or should be done about it. It seems pretty clear that this guy should not be the king of anything, but not at all clear that the best thing for Bougainville would be for the PNG government to take control. Meanwhile, weirdness flourishes in the interstices of state authority.

Last year, I watched several Buster Keaton films for the first time, have read and really enjoyed Dana Steven’s book Camera Man, about Keaton and the way the movie industry developed around him. Despite being nearly a hundred years old, there are some stunts in his movies— in particular, one in Sherlock Junior, where Keaton appears to jump into and through the torso of another person— that still seemed like magic tricks. This video shows you how some of them were done, as well as some from other films of the same era. If you haven’t seen Sherlock Junior or other films of Keaton, though, you might want to watch them first, since this might spoil the magic a little.

“100 Years Ago Recording Studios Got a New Tool: Microphones“, by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

And speaking of changing media technology: So much of how we experience music now is built on microphones that it’s hard to imagine anything before them, but there was a relatively short period after the invention of the phonograph, but before the use of microphones, when recordings were made without them. (Radio necessarily made use of them before this). I’m a little obsessed with the concept of affordances, which are the uses that a particular design or technology “offers” or presents to the user, and this is a good example. Microphones didn’t simply make it easier to do things people were already doing, but made possible whole new styles of singing, since you no longer had to be as loud as possible; that was also challenging for performers who had developed their style around the older technology. As people got used to them and as they became more sophisticated, microphones also allowed for new kinds of effects and manipulation of sounds, again opening up many new possibilities.

Directly related: this short piece describes some of the devices created by Japanese companies like Roland changed the sound of music in countless ways.

“The Ghosts in the Machine,” by Liz Pelly

I use Spotify; I use it quite a bit. I am admitting that upfront, because this article provides yet another example of how Spotify has, in fact, been generally quite bad for the artists who provide the content from which they make money. In this case, the story is that the company is increasingly commissioning music to fit a certain mood for its vibe-based playlists, replacing the work of “real” artists in genres like jazz and ambient with music by “fake” ones. I put those terms in quotation marks because a lot of the music in both categories is made by the same people, who churn out more generic material as a way to earn a living. This is occasioned by the fact that people increasingly look for music to serve as background, and don’t really pay attention to it; Spotify quite rationally decided that it was not worth paying real royalties to artists for music that people were only half listening to. But of course that much cheaper music is going to replace more and more of the songs on those kinds of playlists, resulting in fewer opportunities for serious artists in those genres to get their work heard by anyone.

“They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War“, by Andy Greenberg

Why are McDonald’s ice cream machines broken so much of the time? Part of the answer is simply that they are very complicated— in particular, they can pasteurize ingredients over night, so that the machine doesn’t need to be cleaned every day— and so there are more things that can go wrong. But part of it is also that the company that makes them, Taylor, has made it impossible for the people who own and operate the machines to figure out what is wrong with them, by burying diagnostic information in impenetrable error codes or making it accessible only through a “precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses,” which is not documented in the machines’ manual. Not surprisingly, restaurant owners and employees— not to mention customers— find this frustrating. So when a couple of entrepreneurs created a device, called Kytch, that could provide access to this information, many were interested. Taylor, predictably, was less so.

“The Napalm Girl Standard,” by Som-Mai Nguyen

The famous “Napalm Girl” photo (actually titled “The Terror of War”) has become an emblem of the Vietnam war, and everything that was wrong with it. It is also a frequent flashpoint for debates about freedom of speech, non-consensual imagery, and even child pornography. Its publication or display is usually justified in terms of its “historical significance,” but as Nguyen points out, that’s a slippery label; it implies that the value of an image is in how it gets used over time, rather than in what it depicts, which could in theory defend a lot of things that shouldn’t be defended.

“The Coyote Next Door,” by Betsy Mason

This is actually more broadly about various kinds of animals that thrive in and around human settlements (collectively called synanthropes, though she doesn’t use this word). Urban environments not only provide some species with a ready supply of food; the challenges and variety they present may actually make them smarter and more able to solve problems. Studying these animals and these effects can help us to better understand intelligence and cognition more generally. It also helps us understand how to better coexist with them, since their ability to flourish in urban environments means that it is often very hard, if not impossible, to remove them.

“The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan,” by Marcin Wichary

This is a story about a particular font, but it’s also the story of how hard Wichary had to work to discover it’s origins and history. It’s a great example of how knowledge can vanish just because it doesn’t occur to anybody that certain things are worth recording. The font or typeface that Wichary calls Gorton was designed for a pantograph engraving machine, which means it was intended to be carved into materials like metal or plastic, rather than printed on them. That places certain constraints on the design (or did, in the early 20th century), and it also means that it was both intended and used mainly in non-decorative, functional situations, where durability and legibility were the priority. It is absolutely everywhere— as soon as you see it, you will know you have been seeing it your whole life— but the actual design of the letters was probably almost an accident. Certainly, nobody at the George Gorton Machine Company in Racine, WI seems to have thought to name it or try to copyright it. The history gets more complex, as Gorton turns out to be derived from an older typeface created by an English maker of camera lenses to engrave the outsides of their lenses; it was licensed and slightly altered by Gorton in the US, while the original continued to be used elsewhere in the British empire, like Australia, leading to whole families of cognate versions as both were further copied and altered. A fascinating little pocket history, exhaustively researched and beautifully illustrated.

I’ll stop there, since that’s probably too much for anybody to read anyway. I hope that the next update will come much sooner.

“Miss Piggy Has a Mother”, by Neil McShane Wulfhart

This is a short profile of Bonnie Erickson, who designed Miss Piggy, as well as Statler and Waldorf (the critics who give Fozzie a hard time), Zoot (the saxophone player in The Electric Mayhem), and many sports mascots, including the Philly Phanatic. There isn’t a whole lot of detail here, but it’s a start; as a major part of Jim Henson’s operation for many years, she should be better known.

“The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet”, by Ferris Jabr

Ferris Jabr is a nature and science writer whose work I’ve been following for a while; his article on beauty and the theory of evolution is one that I still think about all the time, and he has a really good piece on forests and mycelial networks, as well. So, I was excited to see that he has a new book, called Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. This piece is an excerpt from the book, focusing on science’s increasing awareness of the quantity and variety of microbes living under the earths surface, including miles beneath, where it was long assumed that life was impossible.

More broadly, though, here and in the book Jabr is interrogating a dichotomy that we generally take for granted: there are living things, and then there are the non-living environments in which those things live— environments shaped by geologic forces, by weather, and so on. One of his points is that living things can create those forces, or alter them, reshaping their environment. There is no foreground or background; “The history of life on Earth is the his­tory of life’s remaking Earth.” The planet was, in a very real way, terraformed over millennia by trillions of living things. For instance, most of the continental surface of the earth is made of granite, which may have been created out of basalt (a much more common mineral), in part by bacteria dissolving the basalt to extract nutrients. Literally, the ground on which we stand is a by-product of biological processes. Obviously, human beings, in living on that ground, are also constantly reshaping and reconfiguring it.

Jabr links all of this with the Gaia hypothesis to suggest that, given the complex interlinking of all of these systems, maybe it makes sense to think of the earth, as a whole, as a living thing— and that if our definitions of life seem to exclude such an understanding, then maybe the problem is with those definitions. There’s another excerpt from the book in The Guardian, focusing on plankton, which doesn’t explicitly mention this idea, but does describe the way that these organisms (the label “plankton” includes many different kinds of living things) circulate in a kind of global respiratory system, capturing and releasing carbon and thereby helping to regulate earth’s climate. (Needless to say, climate change has all kinds of implications for that way those processes work).

I’m not 100% sold on this idea, but he makes a compelling case; if nothing else, thinking of the planet as a living thing might make us treat it with more care, and give more thought to the ramifications of the things we do.

“The Thin Purple Line”, by Jasper Craven

This is a fascinating piece about private security guard firms, like Allied Universal, who sell the “optics of security” more than anything else. Craven’s focus is on how their massive growth reflects increasing feelings of anxiety and insecurity among Americans, despite crime rates that have fallen more or less continuously for a almost three decades.

For a decade, researchers at Chapman University have conducted annual surveys tracing the growing prevalence of anxiety in America. Their data suggests a cascading effect in which tangible concerns, such as those about polluted drinking water or government corruption, prime the mind for more remote ones about, say, illegal immigration or large volcanic eruptions. And Americans’ fear of crime is particularly disconnected from reality. Gallup’s most recent annual crime survey found that 40 percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone at night near their homes, the figure marking a thirty-year high that runs counter to plunging violent-crime rates.

The prevalence of private security reflects these perceptions, but statistically it is inevitable that a number of the guards themselves will share it, as well. It seems likely, in fact, that the job would appeal to people who feel both alarmed and powerless, since it gives them the ability to “do something” about the problems they (think they) see. Craven’s training instructor seems to fit this description:

He wore a sweat-wicking gunmetal-gray shirt, black combat boots, and brown cargo pants. Knives peeked out from two pants pockets, and a Leatherman sat on his belt next to a small, swinging bottle of hand sanitizer. There was also a first aid kit strapped to his leg under his pants, or so he said. Rodriguez was prepared for bad things and convinced the worst was soon to come. “I have two to three flashlights on me at any one time,” he said. “And I take about forty vitamins a day.”

Reading this, I was reminded of Mike Rugnetta’s excellent two-part series on the idea of the “tactical,”as in “tactical gear.” You should definitely read the whole thing, which is fascinating, but one part in particular has stuck with me since I first read it. It is the discussion of a series of posts on something called GlockTalk by a mall security guard; in particular, one post in which he addresses (apparently) people mocking his level of…concern about his personal security (typos sic):

I do not understand the “joke” or the “Rambo.” I am in a high-risk job. It is not the Mall of America, but Ill tell you what its no podunk mall either.I am a responsible citizen who has made the choice to carry at all times. I defend others. If something happens at the Mall then I would be the hero, not those of you who are making fun of me for no reason. Yes Im not a Green Beret but guess what neither are you and unlike you I have to face unruly shoppers every day.My REAL problem is that, like any LEO, I have enemies because of my job. They may have access to high-powered rifles. My job starts and ends at the same time every day. Although I use four rotating routes to drive to and from work, I am still vulnerable during the walk to and from my car. This is the time that I load up on the trauma plates because I DO NOT WANT TO BE SHOT DEAD!Also, someone said that my Tac Team doesn’t get training. Not true. We meet at the range every night and shoot 400 rounds each through weapons that closely resemble our duty setup. We also practice unarmed combat. I am a Master of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls. I don’t think any of you are working as hard as I am to be prepared. I asked a serious question about tactical armor and I wanted a serious response. If you want to laugh at somebody, try laughing at the sheep out there who go to the mall unarmed trusting in me to stand guiard over their lives like a God

(LEO, btw, is “law enforcement officer,” which this person definitively is not.)

It is hard not to find this ridiculous, but it is just as obviously troubling. This is a person with not only a vastly inflated sense of his job’s importance, but who is going to work everyday both heavily armed and very, very anxious— a dangerous combination. Despite his assurances that his “tac team” is well-trained, a person in his position will receive very little formal training, and is not publicly accountable for their actions to anything like the degree that police officers are (as inadequate as that often proves to be). His response to the claims about training seems to be that he is equipped and prepared to use force, but that is really missing the point. I’m not worried that he isn’t ready to draw his weapon; I’m worried that he is.

Private security guards are, in general, poorly paid, poorly trained, and poorly supervised. “The job is notoriously low-paying and physically taxing, contributing to an annual industry turnover rate that has been estimated to be as high as 600 percent,” which if nothing else means that few people will accrue much experience or expertise. At the same time, “average annual wages nationwide remain low, at around $40,000, even as some guards are stationed in hot spots, leading to a slight but steady increase in physical threats, injuries, and deaths across the profession.” This means that the job is probably going to be filled either by people who are desperate for income, or by paranoid fantasists like the author of the above post.

There’s a lot more here, of course, including a description of “one occasion in which a police car was stationed on the [Verrazzano] bridge manned, in its driver’s seat, by a mop wearing a hat.” The main point, though, is that private security guards, if only because of the lack of training and meaningful authority, are really part of a “security theatre,” selling the illusion of safety that they cannot provide, because no one can. As Craven puts it, “We were not guardians against fear but expressions of it, human markers placed in uneasy environments, providing permission for society to ignore the underlying issues that make them that way.”

And, speaking of performative actions: Leigh Claire La Berge’s “The Contingency Contingent” describes her work for a consulting firm, hired by the accounting company Arthur Andersen (later infamous for their role in the Enron scandal) to help companies prepare for problems created by the Y2K bug. There are already so many layers there: the fact that the company for which she is doing the work is not actually the company that employs here; the fact that the former company would later be known primarily for its failures of oversight; the fact that the work itself is intended to deal with a problem that, as we now know, didn’t really exist. On top of all of that, it becomes clear to her pretty quickly that the work does not actually address this hypothetical problem in any meaningful sense, and probably isn’t meant to.

THE ANDERSEN POSITION was that “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.” One could not know the magnitude of the technical problems we would face on January 1, 2000, with complete certainty until that revelatory day arrived, and so 1/1/2000 functioned as a kind of horizon of contingency: would we all be launched, Back to the Future–like, into a new stone age, or would a few rest-area vending machines conk out and everyone get on with it? To contend with this range of possible futures, we focused on the past. Instead of fixing things with the hope that they would function later, we would document the anti-Y2K efforts the Conglomerate had already undertaken, necessarily more knowable than those events not yet in existence. We would not, for legal reasons, promise things to come; we would certify that things that had already transpired had been appropriately recorded.

The real concern, it seems, is actually to avoid future legal liability; to show that Andersen and its various clients had taken reasonable steps to anticipate possible problems— or, failing that, that Andersen had advised its clients to do so, in specific ways, and thereby absolved itself of responsibility. (A lot of that involves sending those client companies questionnaires about what steps they have taken; those questionnaires rarely received a response). After a meeting ostensibly summarizing the team’s efforts to that point, an Andersen executive tells them:

“When January first of the year 2000 hits and a floodgate of Y2K lawsuits descends, and [we’re] being sued by everyone, and the firms who aren’t suing us, we’re suing, the indemnification issues, the claims of fiduciary responsibility and accusations of abandonment thereof. What are we going to need? Proof. They’re going to want to know what we did and how we did it. So that’s what this Council is concerned with, proof, paper, documentation. And that’s why our battle plan is simple: keep documenting, team.”

There’s nothing there about the actual harms that might affect people or property following any system failures resulting from the bug, or how those harms might be avoided or mitigated. It is about assuring that Arthur Andersen and its clients will be able to avoid blame for those harms, whatever they might be. They will be equipped with reams of spreadsheets documenting the fact that they did what they could— even though, by their own estimation, what could be done was nothing. What is needed is a performance of vigilance, of diligence— highlighting the irony of the fact that the company instigating all of this will, only a couple of years later, collapse as a result of its failure to perform “due diligence” in its auditing of other companies, leading to massive financial losses for investors in those companies.

I also have to emphasize that this is really just a great piece of writing, worth reading for that reason alone.

“The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It”, by Vince Beiser

I post a lot of stuff here about the environment, and one theme that has emerged for me from all of that is that any time many millions or billions of people all want to do the same thing at the same time, it will cause problems. It doesn’t matter what that thing is; coordinated or simultaneous action at that scale is, pretty much by definition, unsustainable in the long term. The move toward electrification as a way of ending fossil fuel use is a good example. On one level, this is obviously a good idea; burning fossil fuels is driving climate change, and on a more immediate timescale it pollutes the air and harms human health. On the other hand, though, the speed and scale at which we are now trying to make this shift will have, and is having, its own consequences. One of those is the soaring demand for copper, which has led Goldman Sachs to declare it “the new oil” (though it must be said that the list of things that have been “the new oil” in recent years is a long one). Unsurprisingly, one of those consequences is that prices for copper are much higher— high enough to make it worth taking by force, in some cases, as in South Africa, where armed gangs out to steal copper have made working at power plants a very dangerous job.

Even without such dangers, though, mining is always destructive, and copper mining has done its share, leaving “colossal pits full of toxic waste and has fouled enormous swaths of land and waterways”; Beiser describes one mine, in Chile, as “swathed in dust and smoke like an industrial suburb of Mordor.” (Trains carrying copper from that mine are also robbed regularly). Conditions for workers are dangerous and grueling in the best cases, and the wealth that mining generates rarely trickles down to those who will bear the brunt of the environmental and health consequences. Moreover,

The risk of more disasters is in some ways getting worse, because most of the world’s richest and most easily accessed copper deposits have by now been mined. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” says Scott Dunbar, a Canadian former mining engineer. The quality of the remaining ore in many major mines—that is, the percentage of metal within the rock—is falling fast. That means ever larger tracts of land have to be torn up to extract the same amount of copper, generating ever larger amounts of waste.

(This point made me think of this excellent Geoff Manaugh essay on gold mining, as well, which describes how gold “is now more often mined as particles, not blocks or even nuggets. Like glitter, it is scattered throughout the rocks around it.”.)

This is an excerpt from Beiser’s forthcoming book, so it really only scratches the surface. As he points out, though, this is only one of the material problems that will have to be solved if a global electrification is going to be achieved. Lithium, for instance, presents just as many concerns.

“Revolution in the Air: How Laughing Gas Changed the World”, by Mark Miodownik”

This is about nitrous oxide and its use as an anesthetic, among other things, but it’s also about anesthesia generally, which is a topic that highlights the non-linearity of historical change. One might expect the story to be: surgery and other medical procedures hurt; we don’t like pain, so we look for ways to avoid or reduce it; it takes a while to find the right substances and safe ways to administer them, but eventually we did and everything was better. In fact, there was resistance to the idea of anesthesia from doctors due to “a belief among western surgeons that pain might be important to the success of the surgery. They thought it might be required for nature’s healing powers to be triggered.” A bit later, when the obstetrician John Simpson gave chloroform to women in labor to ease their pain (without, it must be said, any idea of what was a safe dosage), he encountered outrage from a “mostly male medical establishment [who] argued that alleviating the pain of childbirth was morally wrong, and that God had ordained that women should suffer while giving birth.” (Side note: could there be any clearer illustration of the power of patriarchy than medical authorities telling their patients— and their wives—that it was right for them to suffer in a way that they themselves would never need to?)

And then, laughing gas, specifically, was initially tested not as a way to reduce pain, but as a possible cure for diseases like tuberculosis; believing that all disease resulted from “bad air,” scientists hoped that breathing different gases might cure them. The discovery of its anesthetic properties was a happy accident— a hilarious accident, in fact.

This is also a story with some unexpected connections. Samuel Colt helped to fund the development of his famous revolver by staging laughing gas shows, in which, in essence, members of the audience came on stage and inhaled the gas, and then other members laughed at their behavior. (Colt pretended to be a doctor while he did this, and apparently people saw this is a reasonable business for a medical practitioner to be in). Later, the person who had the idea of selling liquid nitrous oxide in canisters, making it much easier to handle and administer, was George Poe, and cousin of Edgar Allen; he also helped to pioneer the use of face masks to administer gases to patients.

This also turns out to be an except from forthcoming book.

“When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica”, by Pradyumna Prasad and Jordan Schneider

If you’re my age or a little older, you probably have a vague awareness of the RAND corporation as the shadowy center of various conspiracy theories, and maybe not very much else. It was, and is, a think tank, originally funded primarily by the US Air Force to do basic research with a military focus. It had a much larger impact than that might suggest, though; the first paragraph of the piece gives you a good sense:

Between 1945 and 1960, RAND operated as the world’s most productive research organization. Initially envisioned as a research arm of the Air Force, RAND made century-defining breakthroughs both in basic science and applied strategic analysis. Its members helped define U.S. nuclear strategy, conceptualized satellites, pioneered systems analysis, and developed the earliest reports on defense economics. They also revolutionized much of STEM: RAND scholars developed the basics of game theory, linear programming, and Monte Carlo methods. They helped conceptualize generalized artificial intelligence, developed the basics for packet switching (which enables data transmission across networks), and built one of the world’s first computers.

Prasad and Schneider’s starting premise, though, is that RAND, while still around and still successful, has much less of a fundamental impact on the world than it used to. Their point is to explain why it was what it was, and why it stopped being that.

Basically, the explanation is that, when it started, RAND had the money to hire the very best and brightest, created an interdisciplinary environment that encouraged collaboration and vociferous debate, and then let its scientists pursue their own agendas, more or less without interference. It accommodated eccentrics, and brought people in on whatever terms they would accept:

The top end of RAND talent was (and would become) full of past (and future) Nobel winners, and [mathematician John Davis] Williams worked around many constraints — and eccentricities — to bring them on. For instance, RAND signed a contract with John von Neumann to produce a general theory of war, to be completed during a small slice of his time: that spent shaving. For his shaving thoughts, von Neumann received $200 a month, an average salary at the time.

RAND was, in this way, very much a product of the Cold War, when there was money and support for nearly anything that could be justified in terms of national security. Once budget concerns and changing politics led to more scrutiny and less tolerance for open-ended inquiry, the organization became more cautious, more conservative (in the literal rather than the partisan sense), and needed to cater to a wider range of clients; all of that undermined the processes that had worked so well in the past.

The thing that gets me about this story is that we know this is how it works; the story of Bell Labs, for instance, follows a very similar trajectory. So, in a somewhat different way, does the story of the early days of companies like Google. Innovation can occasionally be directed from the top, but this is much less reliable than putting a bunch of smart and curious people together and letting them do their thing. Why that lesson seems never quite to penetrate, I don’t know.

“The World’s Most Popular 3D-Printed Gun Was Designed by an Aspiring Terrorist”, by Rajan Basra.

This is a shortish piece about the FGC semiautomatic, a 3D-printed gun that has become very popular among terrorists, drug cartels, and Neo-Nazis— as well as anti-junta militias in Myanmar. It was created by someone calling himself JStark1809, in reference to Major General John Stark, who fought in the American Revolution and coined the motto “live free or die.” That probably gives you a sense of where these people are coming from; it’s a little like that mall security guard, in terms of the inflated sense of his own position and tendency to self-aggrandize. Clearly, I can’t write about this with anything approaching objectivity, so you should probably read the piece for yourself. The real headline is that Basra seems to have figured out who JStark1809 is— or was, since it seems that he is dead.

I’ll wrap things up there. I hope you find at least a few of these as interesting as I did.

Video: “Larry Bell: Glass”

Larry Bell is an artist who’s worked in lots of media, but is best known for works in glass. Part of the light and space movement that came out of Southern California in the 1960s, Bell manipulates the optical qualities of glass— color, obviously, but also opacity and reflectivity— to create all kinds of different effects. To do this, he uses a high-vacuum chamber to vaporize metals and other materials that coat the glass. He got started with all of this sort of accidentally; we was initially buying treated glass, but, in addition to being expensive, that made him dependent on what other people were willing and able to make for him. So, he got his own tank and began learning how to use it.

It had the ability to pump down to 1/100th of one micron of air. At those low pressures, it allows us to evaporate metals at high temperatures so that they keep their natural crystalline structure and coat surfaces as a thin film that provides optical qualities. It’s possible to change those optical qualities by both layering various films together and doing the plating in various reactive gases that change the molecular structure of the material. I first started using aluminum and silicon monoxide, which is one atom of oxygen short of being quartz. The materials became very important to me because I could manipulate them to interfere with light at various wavelengths and get color out them.

(Bell also uses this technique, called vacuum deposition, to make works on paper that he calls “vapor drawings”.)

I’m really interested in the actual process by which art is made— what an artist’s day is actually like, how objects get from conception to realization. In this case, the process is really complex, dependent on technology and equipment; it’s also very literally experimental, since Bell doesn’t quite know what effects particular combinations of minerals or additives will have until the material comes out of the tank. Decades of trial and error have led him to discover all kinds of possibilities, and obviously he has more control over the process now, but the work still comes out of an interplay between unpredictability and intention.

Next, some music: “Phoneglow”, by Burial and Kode9

A split 12″ from one of my favorite artists and the head of one of the most interesting electronic labels. The Burial track is a departure from his recent, more ambient work, and hearkens back to Untrue— to my mind, one of the best records of the last 20 years.

“World in a Box,” by Shannon Mattern

Any good history of an everyday object— like a cardboard box— is actually using that object as a focal point for understanding something vastly more complicated. If we remember that the “everydayness” of a thing is not inherent or obvious, but rather something that needs to be explained, then we can see why this is the case. What has to happen for the corrugated cardboard box to become ubiquitous enough to seem boring? A huge variety of people, material resources, infrastructure, and economic forces must be brought into alignment to make it so that the material can be produced in sufficient quantities, shaped and printed to fit countless specific uses, and moved efficiently around the world— and cheaply enough that the boxes themselves become disposable. This is an astonishing act of human energy and coordination, one that in turn makes possible all kinds of other such acts. The box developed in response to specific economic and cultural conditions, and then went on to reshape those conditions through the affordances it generated; any object that becomes this common is, I think, going to do both of those things, by definition.

“Spreadsheet Superstars”, by David Pierce

Speaking of something that seems boring: competitive Excel spreadsheets?

Essentially, the competitors here are working to solve puzzles; presented with specific scenarios, they have to use the spreadsheet to, for instance. calculate the best use of resources. The first problem in the article

is a puzzle called “Potions Master,” and it goes roughly like this: You’re training to be a potions master in Excelburg, but you’re terrible at it. You have a number of ingredients, each of which has a certain number of associated points; your goal is to get the most points in each potion before it explodes, which it does based on how much of a white ingredient you’ve added.

As he points out, you don’t actually need a spreadsheet to figure this out; what the spreadsheet can really help to do is create a system for solving similar kinds of problems, so that you can change the starting inputs (in this case, the point values of the potions) and get the new answer. As one competitor says, the players “who win are usually the people who build a system that will eventually answer all the questions.” So, it’s a race to build puzzle-solving frameworks.

The hook for the piece is that some of the people involved in this competition want to turn it into a spectator sport— something that, like championship poker games, other people will watch. This seems, on its face, like a hard sell, but then the tournament in the article is being broadcast on ESPN, so who knows? This raises some interesting questions about the difference between a game and a sport— when does the one become the other? Is a sport simply a game that people want to watch others play?

The piece also contains a nice capsule history of the spreadsheet, which is much shorter than I would have guessed. Pretty much in response to the growing availability of computers, they were invented to make repetitive calculations unnecessary; that proved to be so useful, for so many different kinds of tasks, that spreadsheets are “maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream.” Pierce also draws an interesting parallel between the spreadsheets and more recent developments:

Looking back, there’s a surprising resemblance between the way we talked about spreadsheets in the ’80s and the way we talk about artificial intelligence now. The same worries about automating people out of jobs; the same questions about whether we could really trust the computers to do all this complicated work so quickly. In fact, in the 1980s, spreadsheet programs were the AI bots of their day. “The aim is to knock some sense into otherwise mindless computers,” The New York Times’ David Sanger wrote in 1985, “getting them to understand — and perform automatically — the tasks that individual users struggle each day not to forget.”

In so many ways, though, the spreadsheet trajectory is the best-case scenario for an AI future. Where current AI tools like ChatGPT try to abstract away the inner workings and underlying data and simply offer you the world through a text box, spreadsheets do the opposite: they promise an ever greater level of control and understanding of the world around you. The people who work on Excel and other spreadsheet tools are perpetually trying to make them easier to use while also giving power users more ways to tinker. If you want to create something with AI, you just type in a prompt and hope for the best. A spreadsheet artist, on the other hand — and there really is such a thing — can paint their creation one cell at a time. The goal isn’t just getting an answer. It’s understanding all the inputs that allowed us to arrive there.

The converse of that, though, is that spreadsheets make plain exactly how easy it is to reduce so much of modern life to a bunch of numbers and formulas in a spreadsheet. Give me some numbers, and my Excel file will predict when you’re going to die. Dating spreadsheets have become normal in a world where romance is about swipes and statistics. Have a hard decision to make? I have a decision-matrix spreadsheet for you! In a spreadsheet world, everything is comparable, reducible to some base figure that eventually explains everything if only you know how to ask. Spreadsheets promise the world isn’t actually complicated — you just have to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or bleak or both, but it’s certainly big business.

That might sound like a stretch, but, as with the cardboard box, when something appears that, first, meets a widespread need, and, second, becomes so widespread that it alters the way people do all kinds of apparently unrelated kinds of things, it’s inevitably going to have consequences for society and culture more broadly.

“Chiroptera” by Thomas Bangalter

This is one of the rare occasions— actually almost the only one I can think of— where an algorithmic recommendation suggested something to me that 1) I was actually interested in seeing, and 2) I didn’t already know about. This is a performance with music by Thomas Bangalter, who was one half of Daft Punk, and choreographed by JR. It is not actually very new— the performance is from November 2023— but I just discovered it. Mesmerizing to watch. There’s a little more information about it on Jalet’s website.

“The Club of Cape-Wearing Activists Who Helped Elect Lincoln—and Spark the Civil War”, by Jon Grinspan

This is about a militant Republican group called the “Wide-Awakes” who formed in the run-up to the American Civil War. Spurred by people agitating against the influence of the “Slave Power” on American politics, they took to the streets, initially, to protect Republican and anti-slavery speakers and demonstrators, who were often attacked. They wore a costume that was originally designed to help to keep the oil from torches from staining clothes, but became a kind of uniform for groups of militant Republicans— mostly young, working-class men— who eventually numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

The name “wide-awake” was already in use prior to these groups, “used for anyone who was standing up for themselves. It fit with Republican rhetoric about an aggrieved majority finally pushing back.” It was alsoused by the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movement from a decade earlier, and, for at least some of the new Wide-Awake groups, that connection was deliberate: they saw the Democrats not only as beholden to the “slave power” in the country, but also as “welcoming the pope’s Irish Catholic foot soldiers,” who would similarly undermine democracy and “steal the political birthright from the North’s growing, Protestant, native-born majority.”

There is no defense for this bigotry, and Republican leaders such as William Seward were working to clear such xenophobia from their ranks. But the youths who formed the Wide Awakes linked it all in their minds, building a new movement to fight what they saw as multiple conspiracies against democracy.

Although Grinspan is clear that these pre-Civil War groups were “not simply fighting an earlier battle in what may feel to us like a perpetual culture war that continues to this day” the echoes are hard to ignore.

“The Cloud Under the Sea”, by Josh Dzieza

I wrote last year about another article about undersea cables, but I continue to be fascinated by the fact that the whole mass of social, cultural, and economic activity and communication that is the internet is so entirely dependent on such a mundane piece of infrastructure. This piece takes a different angle, looking at the ships and crews that repair the cables when they are damaged— which happens all the time. “On average, [cable breaks] happen every other day, about 200 times a year.” The process for fixing them has changed little in the 150 years since Cyrus Field set out to repair the transatlantic cable he had laid down in the 1850s.

There have been some refinements: ships now hold steady using automated dynamic positioning systems rather than churning paddle wheels in opposite directions, and Field’s pronged anchor has spawned a medieval-looking arsenal of grapnels — long chains called “rennies,” diamond-shaped “flat fish,” spring-loaded six-blade “son of sammys,” three-ton detrenchers with seven-foot blades for digging through marine muck — but at its core, cable repair is still a matter of a ship dragging a big hook along the ocean floor.

This is despite the fact that the repair is quite a delicate operation, requiring precision and care. Cables are many miles long, weighing many tons, but are under very high tension, and must be brought to the surface very carefully. The process of joining lengths of cable together, in turn, “demands hunched, jeweler-like focus as they seek perfect precision — not in a seismically isolated clean room but in the belly of a rocking ship.” As Dzieza puts it, “In the family tree of professions, submarine cable work occupies a lonely branch somewhere between heavy construction and neurosurgery.”

It is also done by a very small number of people: “There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet.” That means that when a major problem occurs— as when seven of the twelve cables connecting Japan were broken following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami— there is a small handful of people who are responsible for putting the internet back together.

That earthquake is the focal point of the article, which helps to clarify what is at stake in the maintenance of these cables. The quake— and, more specifically, the undersea landslide that followed it— both threatened to cut Japan connection to the rest of the world, and made that connection dramatically more necessary. The repair boat crews had to work very quickly, and in dangerous conditions (among other things, the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant had irradiated the ocean along the coast). The deepest repair needed after the quake was at a depth of over 20,000 feet, and materials had to be used carefully; if the ship in the article “used too much on their first repair, it would take six months to manufacture and deliver enough new cable to fix the remaining faults.”

More generally, there are all kinds of reasons that cable networks are at risk. One is a familiar problem: ore interest in building than in maintenance. In recent years, as companies like Google have invested in cloud infrastructure, the number of cables has increased a lot, but the number of repair ships has not. International tensions, like China’s claims in the South China Sea or conflict in the Red Sea region, complicate and increase the risks of repairs. One of the most common causes of cable breaks— fishing ships— are venturing into ever-deeper waters in pursuit of declining fish populations. And recruiting new people to work on the ships is difficult— most people don’t know the job exists, and even the people who do it didn’t exactly train for it, specifically. But the work is only getting more important, as we become more reliant on network infrastructure that to work, all the time, at faster and faster speeds.

Side note: this piece, like the one about Excel, has some really nice, distinctive web design.

“Inside Mexico’s Anti-Avocado Militias”, by Alexander Sammon

This is also kind of a follow-up, since I posted several months ago about the the growing role of Mexican drug cartels in the production of avocados. That, of course, means violence for areas where avocados are grown; in addition, the increasing demand (mainly in the US) has driven the clear-cutting of forests and water usage (since avocados are a very thirsty crop). This piece, though, is about a town that organized to resist this expansion, becoming an autonomous community with its own police force dedicated to preventing avocado cultivation.

Thirteen years ago, the town’s residents prevented corrupt officials and a local cartel from illegally cutting down native forests to make way for the crop. A group of locals took loggers hostage while others incinerated their trucks. Soon, townspeople had kicked out the police and local government, cancelled elections, and locked down the whole area. A revolutionary experiment was under way. Months later, Cherán reopened with an entirely new state apparatus in place. Political parties were banned, and a governing council had been elected; a reforestation campaign was undertaken to replenish the barren hills; a military force was chartered to protect the trees and the town’s water supply; some of the country’s most advanced water filtration and recycling programmes were created. And the avocado was outlawed. Citing the Mexican constitution, which guarantees Indigenous communities the right to autonomy, Cherán petitioned the state for independence. In 2014, the courts recognised the municipality, and it now receives millions of dollars a year in state funding. Today, it is an independent zone where the purples and yellows of the Purépecha flag, representing the Indigenous nation in the region, is as common as the Mexican standard. What started as a public safety initiative has become a radical oddity, a small arcadia governed by militant environmentalism in the heart of avocado country.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this transformation has had its own problems; similar autodefensa groups spring up in the wake of Chéran’s success, but some of them were infiltrated by the cartels, or even became something pretty much like a cartel themselves as they turned to selling drugs in order to raise funds. Still, the example offers a model for giving communities a measure of control in the face of global economic forces that would otherwise simply run them over.

“Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life, by Carl Zimmer

I’ve been interested in chaos theory, and later complexity theory, since reading Jurassic Park and, even more, The Lost World in high school. The more you learn about complexity, the more of the world it seems to explain; to me, in my scientific ignorance, it seems like the magic key that links everything together, from information science to biology to weather systems.

Viral infections produce lots of what are called “incomplete” viruses, which don’t have all of the genetic information of the regular virus. Rather than simply being duds, as one might expect, these incomplete viruses can actually exploit other, complete version of the virus, using their “machinery” to insert the incomplete virus’s DNA into a host cell, for instance. For many years, this led to incomplete versus being known as “cheaters,” who took advantage of their more complete brethren. However, more recent research suggests that they may actually be assisting the complete viruses, in various ways. For instance, in some cases incomplete viruses seem to trigger a stronger immune response— which sounds like a bad thing, but it keeps the virus from overwhelming and killing its host, giving it a longer time to reproduce and spread. So, what initially looked like cheating or exploitation is actually a form of cooperation, and scientists think there may be lots of other ways in which viruses cooperate, as well as compete.

What this has to do with complexity theory is that one of the things that often characterizes complex systems is that their pieces interact— they respond to one another, in various ways. It is (often) this interaction and response that generates the complexity. With just a handful of actions and a handful of possible responses to those actions, outcomes can vary wildly, in ways that are totally unpredictable if you look at the behavior of the units in isolation.

In a more straightforward way, this work shows how some of the simplest organisms we know about— so simple that there is disagreement about whether viruses should be considered alive— have far more complex behavior and relationships than one would expect. Understanding those complexities may give us new ways of controlling, or at least living with, viruses.

That’s it for this time. I’ll have a new crop in the next month or two.

Starting, as I did last time, with some music:

“The Collective,” by Kim Gordon

This is very definitely not what I, at least, would have expected from a Kim Gordon solo album; at the same time, as soon as she opens her mouth there is no way it could be anyone else.

“All Life Long,” by Kali Malone

Probably about as far as one could get, sonically, from the Kim Gordon record, this one is made up of beautiful, minimal vocal, brass, and organ pieces.

Not a music recommendation per se, but perhaps leading to some discoveries is “How Reggaeton Became the Sound of Global Pop”, By Bethonie Butler, Luis Velarde, Artur Galocha and Leslie Shapiro. I love a good music genealogy. Tracing the influence of a song, or a sound, or—as in this case— a beat always feels to me like a decoding, opening music up to be understood in a different way. The idea that one song in the right place at the right time can pull together genres and traditions in a way that inspires a global phenomenon still seems sort of magical. Anyway, even if all that sounds a little mystical for you, you should still read (and listen to) this; unless you’ve been following developments in Latin music since the 1980s really closely, you will probably learn a lot.

“‘It’s a Silent Fire’: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis”, by Gary Baum and Carolyn Giardina

I recently read Dana Stevens’s excellent Camera Man, about how the life and work of Buster Keaton reflected and intersected with the culture of his time (that description doesn’t at all do it justice, you should read it). One shocking fact, at least to me, in the book was that seventy-five percent of all the films of the silent era are lost (105). I knew it was a lot, and I knew generally why— flammable nitrate film stock combined with no sense of movies as something worth preserving— but I had no idea it was such a large proportion.

This is, presumably, a fairly well-known fact among people working in film today, so it is pretty startling to read about how much film and television made more recently is also in danger of being lost, this time because of the careless handling and storage of data. For indie filmmakers, in particular, file formats and backups are a much lower priority than finding distribution and earning enough from their work to eat, but even big studios and production companies have startlingly lax procedures for backing up data, and making sure that file formats and storage media are up to date.

“Thomas Heatherwick: The Architect of Our Neoliberal Hell”, by Andrew Russeth, and “The Global Danger of Boring Buildings”, by Bob Reddick.

I was very struck by the contrast between these two takes on the work of the architect and designer Thomas Heatherwick, and his recent book Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. Heatherwick is probably best known, at least in the U.S., for designing Vessel, the remarkable building/sculpture that is the showpiece of the Hudson Yards development in New York. Russeth sees this as a kind of city-scale Instagram wall— pure novelty without lasting significance— and puts much of Heatherwick’s other work in the same category. He therefore dismisses the book, which argues for the importance of more interesting, less boring building design, as trivial and oblivious to the economic dimensions of trying to build as Heatherwick suggests. But he doesn’t say anything at all about the focus of Reddick’s interview with Heatherwick, which is that boring buildings get torn down sooner because people have no attachment to them, and this is bad for the environment because construction is a major contributor to carbon emissions, among other things. Building things that people will like and care about, then, isn’t merely an aesthetic matter. I tend to share Russeth’s view of things like the Vessel (though I do still want to go through it, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit), but I think the idea that aesthetics are necessary consideration if we’re hoping to build more sustainably is at least interesting.

The work of Koen Olthuis exemplifies another way of trying to build for the future. “A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities that Float on Water”, by Kyle Chayka, describes some of these projects, and some of the obstacles to making the approach more widespread. A starkly different approach, and really different mentality, is described in “Doomsday Design: The Reality of Disaster Preparedness in America”, by Sarah Archer.

“Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain”, by Kate Wagner

This article got a lot of attention for a very bad reason, which is that Road and Track magazine pulled it from their website very soon after publishing it, with only a vague explanation from the editor, long after the fact. That’s really too bad; on the one hand, it creates the impression that the magazine pulled the article under pressure from powerful companies afraid that it made them look bad— though the ones mentioned in the piece deny doing this, or even knowing that the piece had been published. On the other hand, it’s just a very good piece of writing, which, yes, is critical of Formula One racing and the thick atmosphere of money and entitlement that surrounds it, but also manages to beautifully communicate what it is that people love about it. So, yes, she describes people in the stands wearing “outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body,” but also how the cars evoke the “technological sublime,” each representing “a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic.” Describing the race itself, she says,

The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could—eventually, through its iterative processes—sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles

One mark of a great piece of journalism is that it can show you why people care about something, even if you don’t. Wagner manages to do that, even as she remains clear-eyed about what kinds of compromises are inevitably involved in bringing together the vast resources that F1 is built on. That is an achievement, and precisely the kind of thing that a magazine should want to publish.

And, another piece about a journalist invited into a realm where she doesn’t quite belong: “An Age of Hyperabundance”, by Laura Preston. At the end of last year, I posted about Preston’s earlier N+1 piece, HUMAN_FALLBACK, about a job she had supplementing the responses of a chatbot on a real estate company’s website. That article apparently got enough buzz for her to be invited to a conversational AI conference as the “honorary contrarian speaker.” This is, as she is painfully aware, an awkward and deeply compromised position; she is there as a critic, but it is unlikely that she would be invited if the organizers really expected her to say anything that would challenge what they are doing in any serious way, as opposed to making the industry look like it is taking the concerns of its critics seriously. And, indeed, she realizes well before her presentation that her chosen subject— algorithmic bias— is a problem that the attendees will in fact be very comfortable with her calling out: they’ve heard it before, and they have responses ready. More fundamentally, perhaps, it’s a problem that is solvable within existing approaches to AI, since what is needed is just more data, a better training corpus. Preston’s growing sense through the course of the conference that her only moves are bad ones mirrors the way I think a lot of us feel about the development of AI in general.

Also about AI, but from a very different angle, is “8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story”, by Steven Levy, which describes the creation of the so-called “Transformers Paper,” a description of a new way of approaching artificial intelligence that is right at the center of all the recent advances, including ChatGPT—notably, the “T” in ChatGPT stands for “transformer.” (You can read the actual paper here). Basically, it gets the system to pay attention to more of the context of a statement, making it much more accurate in interpreting any given word or phrase. Put in that (certainly over-simplified) way, it sounds obvious, but, for one thing, it more or less rejected the previously-dominant kind of AI model, and for another, it requires significant parallel processing power, at a level that had only recently become available at a reasonable cost. In any case, the new approached worked better than previous ones, and was more efficient, pretty much right out of the box. That Google is widely seen as having fallen behind in AI development may be due largely to the fact that, despite the paper being written by Google employees, the company was much slower to adopt this approach than Open AI or Microsoft.

A little less directly related is “The End of the Mr. Beast Era”, by Patricia Hernandez. Full disclosure: I have never watched one of Mr. Beast’s videos. My general impression of his popularity, from that admitted remove, is that it sounds like there are far worse things that people could be paying attention to online— and far worse ways that a wealthy YouTube celebrity could dispose of his money— but also that it is not something I have much interest in actually watching. According to Hernandez, Mr. Beast’s dominance is due to a large extent to his relentless tailoring of content to algorithm; she also suggests that this is ultimately unsustainable, both for him as an individual and for YouTube as a platform.

“The Last Days of Mezcal”, by Rowan Jacobsen

A big spike in the popularity of mezcal, especially in US, has created new pressure to increase production, but mezcal has long been made by small, family operations that cannot easily be scaled up.
It is made from agave, a desert plant that blooms only once, and then dies, and it can take several years, depending on the variety, to mature to the point where it can be used to make mezcal. To make more of it, you either have to harvest the plants before they are really ready, or adulterate it with other sources of sugar (as is often done with tequila, also made from agave).

It’s a good example of the incompatibility between industrial production and an artisanal product— and really, between that scale of production and nature, more generally. It’s also an example of how, when it comes to the environment, you can’t mess with anything without messing with everything. There is a whole ecosystem dependent on agave, which feeds bats which then scatter its seeds. To over-harvest it will undermine that ecosystem, with effects that are both hard to predict and, on another level, entirely predictable.

Indeed, I have to say that it would be nice to read a story about the natural world that doesn’t include a warning that whatever it describes may soon disappear. Sadly, “The Eider Keepers”, by Devon Frederickson, is not that story, but it does also exemplify the real possibility of human beings living within the world, rather than in opposition to it. Again, scale is a problem here; the model of producing eiderdown described here is not something that you could have millions— or even hundreds— of people doing. Still, though; just the idea of people seeing themselves as in cooperation with the natural world, rather than trying to control it, is refreshing.

On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps, is “Should We Change Species to Save Them?”, by Emily Anthes, which is about just how much control we can and should try to have. There are more and more species around the world in decline— some with such small numbers that even if you can put them in a protected area and get them to breed, the danger of inbreeding makes viable offspring less and less likely. So, some conservationists advocate “genetic rescue”— crossbreeding the most endangered species with closely related animals to add “fresh DNA to the breeding pool.” This is, not surprisingly, controversial, since it violates the basic idea of conservation as interfering with species as little as possible, but advocates say that more interference is better than letting a species die out altogether.

In addition to the narrower risks of doing this— spreading disease between populations or creating a new, invasive sub-species— it seems to me that this idea introduces a Ship of Theseus problem. At what point have you simply transformed the species, rather than changed it? When has the species actually disappeared, as a result of your efforts?

And, finally, this collection of root system drawings, illustrating the underground root structures of different kinds of plants, is amazing in the level of detail, and the care that obviously went into producing them.

Saisei, by DJ Krush

DJ Krush’s Kakusei, which came out during my first year of college, is a record that I came to appreciate very gradually; only in retrospect have I realized how big an influence on my taste it has been. I haven’t kept close track of him since, but I like this new record a lot.

“Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand”, by David A. Taylor

This is not the first thing I’ve read about sand mining and trafficking— I don’t think it’s even the first thing I’ve posted here about it— but I still find it weirdly fascinating. All the stories have the same hook, which is: “How can something as mundane and seemingly infinite as sand be valuable enough to steal?” The thing is, it doesn’t get less surprising— it really just doesn’t seem like something that would ever be worth the trouble. But sand is essential for making concrete, and concrete has become probably the most-used construction material in the world, fueling new building in China, in particular, over the last couple of decades. And not just any sand will do; wind-eroded sand grains are too round, so you need sand from rivers or coastlines (and rivers are preferable). So, one of the great ironies in all this is that countries like Dubai or Saudi Arabia, which are mostly sandy desert, have to import sand for all the building they have been doing. High demand and declining supply mean, of course, that prices go up, and that has spurred illegal sand mining all over the world— although one problem is also that laws are often quite unclear about who can gather sand where.

Luis Fernando Ramadon, a federal police specialist in Brazil who studies extractive industries, estimates that the global illegal sand trade ranges from $200 billion to $350 billion a year—more than illegal logging, gold mining and fishing combined. Buyers rarely check the provenance of sand; legal and black market sand look identical. Illegal mining rarely draws heat from law enforcement because it looks like legitimate mining—trucks, backhoes and shovels—there’s no property owner lodging complaints, and officials may be profiting. For crime syndicates, it’s easy money.

This has significant political and environmental impacts in the places where the sand is mined. In particular, dredging rivers for sand can dramatically change the way they behave, preventing them from refilling groundwater and making serious floods more likely. But the issue gets little attention— perhaps in part because, again, the idea of sand as a valuable resource and focus of crime just doesn’t register as a real possibility.

And if you need a place to wash all that sand off (how’s that for a segue?), you’re in luck: car washes are proliferating at an unprecedented rate in the U.S., where “More car washes were built in the last decade than all the preceding years combined.” Numbers have grown so fast that some towns have passed moratoria on new ones, noting that car washes do “not provide a lot of jobs for the community, and they take up a lot of space.” “Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes?”, by Patrick Sisson, tries to explain the trend. The explanation is actually fairly straightforward: people have gotten less inclined to wash their cars (or do other kinds of maintenance) themselves, so there’s just more demand, and the growth of subscription models (where you pay a monthly fee rather than per wash) have made revenue streams more reliable. At the same time, automation has reduced labor costs, and consolidation in the sector has increased economies of scale. That’s led to lots of outside investment, including from private equity, which has driven the expansion. The piece also includes a nice brief history of the car wash, which has been around almost as long as cars themselves.

“Ireland Memory Machines”, by Jessica Traynor

I’ve had a vague idea for a while now for a research project of some kind about the various kinds of “centers” that have proliferated, mostly at the edges of urban areas, over the last 20 years of so: data centers, “fulfillment” centers, intermodal facilities— the components of what have been called the “logistics landscape”. Ireland has become one of the most prominent locations for data centers, in particular, in part because of its temperate climate and in part because of its very low corporate tax rates. This sounds like, and is often presented as, a significant benefit for Ireland, since it puts them at the center of major developments in technology and prompts investment by the companies in charge of those developments. Not surprisingly, though, things are more complicated in practice. This piece neatly sums up the relationship that the country has with the big technology companies that (mostly) build and manage these data centers:

Since the 1960s, IDA Ireland, Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency has had a policy of aiming to attract international investment through low corporate tax rates, starting with an initial rate of zero percent. Ireland has long been home to tech companies: IBM and Ericsson offices opened in the 1950s, and factories owned by Dell, Intel, HP and Microsoft followed in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of these operations was hardware. The pivot to software development coincided with the boom years of the early 2000s, when Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger.” Google’s European headquarters opened in Dublin in 2004, and since then, the country has become home to 16 of the 20 largest global tech companies. In the nine years between the 1999 Eircom shares scandal and the 2008 Irish banking scandal that exposed the country’s citizens to massive debt, Ireland enjoyed a period of rapid economic growth. Even as it struggled to exit recession in the 2010s, Ireland’s continued policy of low corporate taxation encouraged the growth of big tech in the country. The result is that Ireland’s economy is heavily dependent on tech companies, with low corporate taxes meaning that these companies contribute little to the Irish exchequer — and, by extension, to the Irish citizen left heavily indebted by the recession.

Trainer also links these issues to the problems that stem from our dependence on these centers, and on digital technology, for the preservation of history and collective memory. “The cloud” is marketed as making data, and therefore the record of history, much more secure, safe, or permanent, but it also creates new vulnerabilities.

And so all that material floating around in the cloud — which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens — is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon. And even then, these files will degrade, deteriorate and become obsolete. Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.

Moreover, the vast and growing energy demands of data centers mean there may be an unavoidable trade-off between the permanent retention of a society’s data and the survival of that society.

Other European countries, such as the Netherlands, are halting their development of data centers. Singapore imposed a three-year moratorium from 2019 to 2022, and is now seeking applications within new parameters to ensure sustainability. Unless Ireland figures out a way to surge forward with its slow development of renewables, these data centers seem impossible to sustain. One potential solution is to look more carefully at what data we retain, and why. We must weigh the short-term financial benefits of seemingly infinite data retention against the long-term threat of climate crisis.

And what are we doing with all of that data, anyway?

“The Tyranny of the Algorithm” and “Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet” are both excerpts from Kyle Chayka’s recent book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. The first piece is about the aesthetic convergence around the world of places like coffee shops, which have increasingly come to reflect not local tastes or norms but a kind of global standard driven by what is popular on social media— which of course is deeply shaped by the algorithms that determine what people actually see on social media.

The elements of style turned out to be less important than the fundamental homogeneity, which became more and more entrenched. The signs changed, evolving one step at a time over the years, but the sameness stayed the same. It was this sameness that was off-putting, rather than this or that element of the style itself. Homogeneity in a diverse world is uncanny. There could be a disappointment with finding the expected aesthetic in yet another place, as well as a sense of intrusion, that the influence of digital platforms was extending somewhere that it had not previously.

This culminates in the creation of features designed specifically for presentation on Instagram, etc., — which is to say, designed to appeal visually to people not at the coffee shop (or whatever), and to bring in customers with the promise of helping them make their own social media “content” more algorithm-friendly.

Instagram walls or experiences attracted visitors to a locale and kept them engaged by giving them an activity to perform with their phones, like a restaurant providing colouring books for kids.

Harsh, but not wrong.

At the same time, there is growing pressure on businesses to market themselves through the same channels. Chayka notes that “Simply existing as a coffee shop isn’t enough; the business has to cultivate a parallel existence on the internet, which is a separate skill set entirely.” Of course, advertising has always been distinct from the business being advertised, and being good at the one doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at the other. What’s different here, I think, is the constancy, the unrelenting need to generate a continuous stream of “content” simply to avoid getting buried by algorithms that dictate what people see and what they don’t. And the way to do that is to tailor yourself to what those algorithms reward and prioritize.

The second piece is about how the internet, and the experience of being online, has changed as algorithmic feeds have come to dominate what we see and how we see it.

It’s easy to be nostalgic for the way things were when you were a teenager. I grew up online, but time inevitably moved on, and younger generations have become the prime demographic for a new wave of technology. As the writer Max Read recently posited in the Times, perhaps millennials have simply aged out of the Internet. Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us all.

I’ve definitely felt that, a sort of systemic resistance to the unexpected, or the difficult to categorize. The way certain things I watch on YouTube or listen to on Spotify trigger a wave of recommendations, but others seem to have no impact. Recommendation algorithms give weight to what has already been seen and engaged with, making it that much more likely that the undiscovered will stay that way.

On a related note, “Against Trendbait”, by Rebecca Jennings, describes how more and more people are deliberately trying to coin new terms on TikTok in the hopes of going viral and getting views. The internet has long been a source of new words, both names for new technology and new slang. This is one of the best things about it. But trying to force that, to simply plant a new word into the collective consciousness, is much more like the kind of crude cultural terraforming I associate with big corporations and their marketing departments than the ineffable organic processes that usually characterize linguistic change.

And now for an example of the good internet: A few weeks ago, I went to a program at the University of Chicago, screening a couple of Chinese comedies, one from the 1950s and another from the 1970s. I was quite surprised at how good both films actually were— a lot of writing about Chinese cinema tends to treat everything between the late 1930s and the mid-1980s as pure propaganda, of historical but not artistic interest. Anyway, in one of the films— The Young Generation, also known as Bus Number Three, I noticed a poster on the wall in one scene that I was curious about. I got home and started googling, certain I would never find the exact one but thinking I might find something interesting anyway. To my great surprise, I actually found the one I was looking for very quickly, but the search led me to chineseposters.net, which is an amazing site. There are hundreds of posters, categorized by theme, artist, or time period, with lots of accompanying text to explain what you’re looking at. An amazing resource, apparently built for no reason other than to make them available to people.

Finally, Teju Cole has a new book of photographs and (very) short stories, called Pharmakon, and it is gorgeous.

Books:

I read 85 books in 2023— more than average for me, and well over the goal I set, which was 60. I can’t really say why that happened; it didn’t feel like I was dedicating more time to reading, or reading shorter/easier books, or anything else that would explain it, but there it is.

Most of my reading was fiction— 54 books— and the greater part of that was novels— 41 books. Here is a more complete breakdown:

Most of these books were originally written in English, with 11 having been translated— that’s a number I’d definitely like to be higher.

My favorite books read this year were, in no particular order:

The Guest Lecture, by Martin Riker
An Immense World, by Ed Yong
Trust, by Hernan Diaz
Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century, by Kate Molleson
The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez
Affinities, by Brian Dillon
Relentless Melt, by Jeremy Bushnell

Movies:

2023 was definitely a year of movies for me. This one I can explain more readily: we had an elderly cat with health problems who wanted to spend a lot of time sitting in my lap on the couch, and I was not going to argue. I spent a a lot of that time watching movies. I watched 144 films in 2023, including 132 feature-length movies and 12 shorts. (Distinguishing between those two is sometimes a little arbitrary). Forty-five films were in a language other than English. (I counted the language I saw it in—for instance, we saw the dubbed version of The Boy and the Heron, so I counted that as being in English, even though it is a Japanese movie).

Most of these (121) were new to me, and the majority (127) were live action— although I did see a lot of interesting animated films, thanks to this list.

Favorites from the year:

Showing Up, dir. Kelly Reichardt
You Hurt My Feelings, dir. Nicole Holofcener
The Boy and the Heron, dir. Hayao Miyazaki
Asteroid City, dir. Wes Anderson
Unrest, dir. Cyril Schäublin

Music:

And here are my favorite albums of 2023:

No real surprises here, since I’ve posted most of these already, and they are mostly artists I’ve been a fan of for a while.

I also recommend Tom Whitwell’s annual list of 52 things he learned this year, and this list of facts published in stories in The New York Times this year.

That’s it. Hope everyone has the best year available to them.

“How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco”, by Lauren Smiley

It’s not hard to understand why people in a city where crime, homelessness, public drug use, and other urban problems are rapidly increasing would want video evidence, whether to show the police or simply to prove that the things they describe are real. But pervasive surveillance has its own consequences, which aren’t necessarily predictable.

Which is to say: Anything “caught” on camera is actually, on some level, set loose—often into realms scarcely envisioned by whoever filmed it…Video may seem like a means of control, but it can just as easily unleash chaos.

“Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures”, by Scott Huler

A couple of years ago when staying in a hotel, we came across a competitive pogo-stick-riding event on TV. People on very tall pogo sticks (the ones used in competition are much larger than the ones people might have had at home) bounced around a kind of obstacle course, using steps and ramps and things to do flips and other tricks. It was pretty impressive, but the thing that really struck me about it was the sense that this is a thing— that there were clearly established standards and lingo and key players already firmly in place, and a community of people formed around this activity that I didn’t know existed.

This article is a little like that. I’ve seen miniature rooms before— I’ve been through the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, which are mentioned here, many times. But I guess I thought of them as mainly for museums, as a method of illustrating different historical periods; I hadn’t given much thought to people making them for fun, although in retrospect it is not really surprising. I’d certainly never thought about miniaturist conventions or gallery shows, all of which exist and are growing in popularity. Anyway, the piece describes the work of masters and more casual hobbyists alike, and there are lots of great pictures of their work, which is meticulous and varied, running the gamut from historically precise gothic houses to grimy club bathrooms…and Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator.

“Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art”, by Anna Wiener

I’m a big fan of Holly Herndon’s music, but even if it’s not your thing, she is someone worth paying attention to for the way she (and her husband, Matt Dryhurst) are thinking about the impact of artificial intelligence on artists. Rather than simply rejecting it, they have embraced the possibilities it presents, while trying to build new tools and platforms for artists to make use of it while also being fairly compensated. This piece is sort of a brief profile, but mainly a look at some of the ways they are doing this.

“The Hoffman Wobble”, by Ben Lerner

This is difficult to describe; it is (apparently) a mostly fictional account of someone trying to alter Wikipedia entries to counter certain ideological ways of framing news stories. It is based, to some extent, on something that Ben Lerner did in the past, but the specific facts are entirely, or almost entirely, made up. It is impossible to be sure about any of this, which the the point; the piece constantly and explicitly undermines its own credibility. It is also, in some ways, the best analysis I have read of how the way that information circulates online is corrosive of truth and trust and certainty.

For in the information wars, the culture wars, isn’t it fiction all the way down? To say you “believe” a particular fact is to signal membership in a tribe, to dispute the “facts” about, say, there being a video of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin drinking the blood of a child whose face they then skin and take turns wearing as a mask is to bring the wrong weapon to the fight.

I also wanted to include some articles and things that I missed from earlier in the year. Sometimes, these are things I meant to post about and somehow forgot; in other cases, there things that for whatever reason are only coming to my attention now.

First, the producer JLin apparently released a new EP back in September, featuring work from her collaboration with the ensemble Third Coast Percussion. That’s a combination that makes a lot of sense, since the drums are always one of the best things about her work.

“ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, by Ted Chiang

This is an analogy that may make no sense at first glance, but once Chiang explains it, you realize both how perfect it is, and how revealing. It explains, though not in a technical sense, why large language models like ChatGPT make the kinds of mistakes they do, and why they so often “hallucinate” or fabricate information: in essence, they are providing a compressed reproduction of the information they were originally trained on. The analogy also, counterintuitively, explains part of what seems so remarkable, almost magical, about these systems: that they seem to have some kind of understanding.

I think there’s a simpler explanation. Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

Early Computer Art in the 50s and 60s, by Amy Goodchild

Exactly what it says on the tin, this is a fascinating overview of the earliest efforts to use computers to make art. While, as you’d probably guess, these artists were certainly working with more limited technology than people today, the limits aren’t necessarily— or at least no only— the ones you’d expect. It’s not just a matter of memory and processing power; it’s also that early computers simply lacked the tools for input and output that we are now used to. Instead of of moving a mouse to draw a line, which immediately appears on a screen, these artists were entering code, and then waiting at a plotter to see what that code got translated into, visually. One result of this is that a lot of these people were interested in computers or math or engineering first, and from there ended up investigating how they might be used to make art; many of them worked at places like Bell Labs. Similarly, early pioneers in electronic music, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, were effectively doing electrical engineering as much as composing. The first synthesizers didn’t look like pianos, but like a bunch of knobs and wires soldered together on a board; fundamentally, they were just oscillators producing a current, and then a bunch of circuits and resistors to modulate that current or introduce overtones before it was translated by a speaker into audible sound. (Really, that is still what a synthesizer is; all of those elements are now just packaged in ways that make them look more like “regular” musical instruments). Goodchild describes one of the artists saying that

while we can use the computer to simulate traditional artistic methods, it is more interesting to use the computer in entirely new ways, developing its own aesthetic language instead of using it to simulate physical media.

The thing is that for a lot of the early artists, this was really the only option. The technology could simulate traditional methods poorly, if at all, so using them at all meant coming up with new ways of doing things. That in turn meant that the results would also look like something new and different.

It’s also striking that these artists, and the people around them, were having debates about automation and creativity that are more or less the same ones we’re having today around ChatGPT and other generative AI systems. At what point does using a machine to alter or facilitate the making of art shade into letting the machine make the art for you? Is following an algorithm incompatible with being creative?

“Hyperdimensional Computing Reimagines Artificial Intelligence”, by Anil Ananthaswamy

I often encounter articles about new or developing technologies that I don’t really understand, but still feel like I see why the idea is new or exciting. Essentially, the idea here is that if you want the kinds of artificial neural networks that systems like ChatGPT are based on to recognize or process more kinds of inputs, you have to make them more complex, and more complexity means more expense, power consumption, and potential points of failure. Hyperscale computing allows you to record and categorize more kinds of inputs without increasing the complexity of the system in the same direct way, by categorizing concepts as strings of numbers representing points in a multidimensional space. This is probably a bad analogy for any number of reasons, but I’m thinking of what they’re describing here as a little like the difference between bitmap/raster graphics and vector graphics, the latter of which can store a much more precise record of an image, despite creating much smaller files that are less prone to error and easier to manipulate. The promise is artificial intelligence that is much more efficient; I guess whether that is good or bad in the long run remains an open question. It would also be much more transparent, eliminating, or at least reducing, the so-called “black box” problem that plagues current AI systems— and that is very definitely a good thing.

“The Internet is for 12-Year-Olds”, by Max Read

I don’t know if I entirely buy the premise here, but it does make a lot of things make more sense.

Because the audience online so wildly over-samples 12-year-olds relative to the population, and because all social platforms work like highly competitive marketplaces, you are constantly being disciplined into creating content that is essentially, though not explicitly, for 12-year-olds.

And that’s it for now. I’ll be doing some kind of end-of-year wrap-up shortly, with my own best-of-year lists. Hope everyone has a happy holiday season.

First, a few of recent albums that I’m excited about:

Bolted, by Forest Swords

One of my favorite artists of recent years, with his first new album in quite a while.

Integrated Tech Solutions, by Aesop Rock

If you like rap that makes you want to sit down with a lyric sheet, this is your guy. At the same time, he sounds like he’s having more fun here than he has in a while, and the production is excellent. “Kyanite Toothpick” is one of my songs of the year.

Death is Home, by Aisha Devi

I feel like Aisha Devi is just slightly too weird to make real hits. Like, couldn’t “Prophet Club” here almost be a Weeknd track?

And Ash, by Emptyset

These guys are nowhere near making real hits, unless you mean literally striking objects together, very very hard.

And now for things to read:

“The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet”, by Stephen Shankland

I’m fascinated by infrastructure, in general— the vast, complicated networks and systems that provide the most basic and essential goods and services, but which, if they are working properly, we almost never think about. For just about anyone likely to be reading this, internet connectivity is something we think about only when it is unexpectedly absent or inadequate. But obviously, moving vast quantities of information of all kinds all over the world involves a lot of complex bits of technology working together, so really its surprising how often we are able to take it for granted. This is about the undersea cables that carry international internet traffic, and are an essential piece of that system. Cables are also an example of how the internet relies on a weird cobbling together of the new and the old:

And yet subsea cables are low-tech, too, coated in tar and unspooled by ships employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. SubCom, a subsea-cable maker based in New Jersey, evolved from a rope manufacturer with a factory next to a deep-water port for easy loading onto ships.

In the same way that, even today, 90 percent of all global cargo is transported in gigantic, slow-moving ships, 99 percent of intercontinental internet traffic passes through these glorified garden hoses. Apparently a cable somewhere in the world gets cut every three days, though, which seems alarming, except that it means that the network is robust enough to keep working most of the time anyway. And the process of laying them is still pretty fraught. Sometimes weather and other factors require changing the order in which sections of cable are laid, which in turn may require transferring it from one shop to another. At SubCom, according to the company’s CEO, there is “one guy in particular that’s just a savant at this,” but he “has to be able to solve it with his hand with string first, because we found the computer modeling never works.” So, the most advanced technologies in the world rely on one guy, playing with string. There are at least 552 such cables, which is a lot…but also not very many, really? For all the data that is moving around, and for how much we have come to rely on our ability to do that?

There are trends both toward and away from centralization when it comes to these cables. On the one hand, the majority of the traffic they carry— two-thirds and growing— comes from a few very large “hyperscale” companies, like Google and Facebook. Moreover, as many of the companies, like AT&T, that used to lay cables have moved away from the business, those hyperscalers are increasingly laying the cables themselves, meaning the own both the infrastructure and the data traveling through it. On the other hand, where undersea connections used to be limited to a handful of major urban areas, they are increasingly linking more remote, less populated areas, like “the west coast of Greenland, the volcanic island of St. Helena west of Africa, the southern tip of Chile, Pacific island nations, the 8,000-person town of Sitka, Alaska.” This means that more of the world has access to the internet, but that access is increasingly mediated by and handful of very large and powerful companies.

There’s a lot more here, including details about the structure of the cables themselves— how it varies with different ocean conditions, and how it has evolved with the transition from copper wire to fiber optics— how they are laid down and repaired, and their position in international conflicts.

Related: this interactive from the Washington Post about the digging of a massive new tunnel to help keep waste water out of the Potomac River during storms, similar to Chicago’s Deep Tunnel project.

Also related: this issue of the newsletter Construction Physics provides a really clear, concise history of the U.S. electrical grid. (That’s part one of four; here is part 2, part 3, and part 4.

The biggest source of electricity globally in 2022 was coal, still.

And also related: Deb Chachra, an engineering professor at Olin College, has a new book out called How Infrastructure Works, which I haven’t read yet but which, based on the shorter pieces that have already come out of it, is going to be great.

“How a Tiny Mexican Border City Built a Budget Dental Empire”

I often think that magazines are doing their writers a disservice with this kind of headline, which sometimes ends up promising a larger or more complicated story than is actually there. In this case, the town built its “empire” by having well-qualified dentists offering services at a fraction of US prices; there really isn’t anything especially surprising about it. What’s more interesting to me is the question of why this obvious demand isn’t getting met in the U.S. Some of the people traveling to Los Algodones to get care might be able to afford U.S. prices and just want to save money, but a larger portion are people who can pay something for dental work, but not as much as they would have to at home. That is a demand the market isn’t meeting, so why? Do regulations keep prices higher, or is it a lack of dentists, or what?

“The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes”, by Lane Brown

The basic problem with Rotten Tomatoes seems really obvious: every review is coded as positive or negative, even when the author’s opinion is really mixed; there’s no room for nuance or qualification. As the filmmaker Paul Schrader says here:

I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off…To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.

On the other hand, the virtue of the site— such as it is— is also obvious: it provides a simple, clear, up or down verdict on a movie. In a time when going to the theatre has gotten pretty expensive, and there are effectively infinite options for things to watch at home, people want some assurance that a film is worth it. That has led to Rotten Tomatoes having an outsized influence on the fate of a film, leading studios and production companies to try to game the system. For example:

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Here’s how. When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It’s a film publicist’s job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie’s review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales.

All of which, to me, suggests that nobody should pay any attention to Rotten Tomatoes at all, but clearly I am in the minority on this. The site has taken steps to try to remedy some of these problems, but I still think the main problem is inherent in the design.

Speaking of movies: Martin Scorsese made a list on Letterboxd of “companion films” to his own movies— essentially, films that are linked with his own in some way in his own mind. Really interesting, and many, many that I have not seen.

And speaking of things rotting (I know): In the Himalayas, a parasitic fungus that infects the caterpillars of the ghost moth is valued in Chinese medicine, and competition among sellers is fierce. Attempts to cultivate it in captivity have thus far been unsuccessful; the author’s research explains why.

“What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us About Grief”, by Teju Cole

If Teju Cole has a new piece out, odds are that I am going to post it here. His work makes the strongest possible case that art is important and necessary, not simply for pleasure but to help make sense of and respond to the world around us. Here, he uses Ancient Greek tragedy to think about the ongoing refugee crisis in Greece and the rest of Southern Europe. What it provides is not precisely consolation, as might perhaps be expected; it is more an affirmation of the feeling that some things are simply wrong, and that sometimes this should, indeed, be overwhelming: “I could feel now what before I had known only in theory: that suffering is sometimes too much, that there is no limit to pain.”

Cole, by the way, has a new novel‚ his first since 2012, out now.

“A Hand from One Page, a Bomb from Another: Rethinking Spy vs. Spy“, by Gyasi Hall

I associate MAD magazine with field trips in junior high school. On the bus, you could count on somebody having an issue or two, and they would get passed around, helping to keep us entertained on long drives. (We went on a lot of field trips in junior high, and we lived a long way from anything). Spy Vs. Spy was always one of my favorite parts of the magazine, although I don’t think I could have told you why; it didn’t have any of the quotable jokes or puns from the TV and movie parodies, which took up the bulk of an issue and were what we talked about talked after reading (if we talked about anything).

Looking back, I think the apparent simplicity was probably the attraction, and the fact that it looked like nothing else in the magazine. This quality, Hall suggests, makes it easy to underestimate how much Spy Vs. Spy had going on.

Even those who understand comics as a unique literary genre see a plotless, virtually wordless screwball strip like Spy vs. Spy and see nothing but clever fireworks. It’s a mindset that’s corrosive to a comic’s integrity. Within this kind of reading, style and storyline are the only things worth taking away from any graphic narrative.

This actually makes sense to me as a partial explanation of why comics, in general, have had so much trouble getting taken seriously as a form of either art or literature: they are seen as simply plot plus spectacle, neither of which is what capital-A art or capital-L literature is supposed to focus on. In any case, a comic like Spy Vs. Spy is easy to dismiss, to file away as a Cold War parody without thinking much about how it does what it does. Hall points out that the minimalism of Spy Vs. Spy prevents it from being mapped too easily onto any particular side in the Cold War, so that even though the satire is obvious, it’s impossible to identify either Spy as any particular country or ideology, and, since neither one is ever smarter or more admirable than the other, you’re never really rooting for anybody to “win” (whatever that would mean). By providing no clues or context to allow the reader to locate the characters or their actions in any kind of larger narrative, their rivalry becomes its own explanation— they’re fighting because they’re fighting, because that’s what they do. The conflict remains as inexplicable and apparently pointless after many decades as it was at the start— just like the real thing.

Also, I was apparently reading it after the creator’s retirement, when, according to Hall, the strip had lost a lot of its wit. I don’t know if that speaks to the durability of the concept, or to my own lack of discretion as a 12-year old.

“Where Do Fonts Come From?”, by Sara Friedman

Fonts and typefaces are something I am interested in, but about which I feel like I know nothing. Case (no pun intended) in point: a single company, Monotype, which was founded (no pun intended) over a hundred years ago, has come to dominate the online font marketplace, buying up both other famous type foundries (like Linotype and Hoefler & Co.) and online sales venues like MyFonts until it owns most of the most popular fonts and the main means of distribution. Indecent font makers can sell their work on MyFonts, but Monotype takes a 50% cut of all sales, so unless your font is very popular it is hard to make any real money. But the website is so dominant that it is also hard to get attention anywhere else, and selling on MyFonts gets you legal support in case your work is used without permission— something which happens a lot. So, it’s kind of a rock and a hard place. (That Monotype’s dominance arose only recently, after it was purchased by a sequence of private equity firms beginning in 2004 only reinforces the sense of a corporate behemoth crowding out or consuming the competition.)

“‘Going Shopping’ is Dead”, by Whizy Kim

The title here again overstates the case, but the piece does a good job of explaining the difficulties facing brick-and-mortar retail stores. Although— shockingly, at least to me— only 15% of retail shopping was done online in the first part of 2023, the experience of shopping in physical stores is, by and large, a lot less pleasant than it used to be. Competition drives stores to cut costs, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to have fewer employees— which makes it harder of customers to get help when they want it— and to pay them very little, which makes them less inclined to be helpful or invested in the customer experience. Add to that increasingly abusive and even violent customers, unpleasant working conditions, and inconsistent or unreliable schedules, and employees have no incentive to make the shopping experience enjoyable. (Except, of course, wanting to keep their jobs, but, as we know from Office Space, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired). This line sums it up: “The dissonance between cutting costs — a perennial directive of a profit-seeking business — and providing the kind of store where people want to shop is only growing.”

“The Man Who Invented Fantasy”, by Dan Sinykin

I read a lot of Del Rey paperbacks in junior high and high school, but (probably not surprisingly) gave little thought to whose name was on the spine— in all honestly, I doubt I had much of a sense that different publishers specialized in particular things. But Del Rey is named for Lester Del Rey, who had worked for years as a write of Science Fiction when his wife, who worked at Ballantine, brought him in as an editorial consultant.

A big manuscript had come in over the transom, a work of epic fantasy by Terry Brooks. Judy-Lynn didn’t know much about sword-and-sorcery books, but Lester did. She passed The Sword of Shannara to him. He read it: It was a page-turning Tolkien rip-off. Many editors might have been dissuaded by the derivative imitation—many critics later were—but not Lester. He saw possibility. He saw a whole new genre to populate. Lord of the Rings stood alone in the marketplace. The Narnia books were for children. “There’s nothing else out there for them to read,” he told Publishers Weekly, about Lord of the Rings fans. “They just have to reread their Tolkien.”

Lester Del Rey’s great insight, in other words, was that fans of J.R.R. Tolkien tended to be big fans, ready and willing to dive into the the minutiae of his world. He realized that these people would probably want to read more books like Tolkien’s, if someone were selling them. He tapped into an unrealized market, and made lots of money— eventually not only for Del Rey, but for other publishers, like Tor, who followed their lead.

It’s hard to imagine fantasy not being a major fiction genre, so it seems strange that we can point a specific point when it became one. It’s also funny, and a little sad, to read about a time when Waldenbooks and B. Dalton could be said to “rule the world.” Everything has an origin, and everything has an end, I guess.

“A History of Moquette”, from the London Transport Museum

The dense, wooly fabric found on the seats of many public transit systems around the world has a name, and it was used first in London beginning in the 1920s. Made with 85% will and 15% nylon, “Moquette was chosen for public transport for two reasons. First, because it is hard wearing and durable. Second, because its colour and patterns disguise signs of dirt, wear and tear. On top of this moquette had the advantage of being easy and cheap to mass-produce.” All very practical reasons, and yet they’ve still put a good deal of time and energy over the years into the look of the material, bringing in “established artists and designers to create stylish, contemporary patterns for the Capital’s transport system.” I think for most of us, these kinds of choices are largely invisible— they don’t really register as choices at all, but simply as the way things are. Logically, you know that can’t be the case, but I like knowing more, specifically, about the process.

Related: Flanelette was an inexpensive substitute for flannel, and became popular in Victoria Britain for women’s and children’s clothing. The problem was that it was extraordinarily flammable, and finding a way to treat it that would last without changing the look or feel of the fabric was challenging.

And, speaking of knowing more about the process, here is how one Japanese manufacturer makes rubber bands. It seems like a lot of skilled labor and capital to produce such a simple thing, but they have been doing it for a century, so it must work somehow. Also, I love that the boxes say, in English: “Neater! Quicker! Cheaper! Than String.” I imagine an intense industrial battle between rubber band and string manufacturers to dominate the global binding market.

And this is a video about a man in India who makes vehicles that look like other things.

I will stop there before this gets even more excessive than it already is. Getting end-of-year roundups ready for, I hope, next month.

First, a couple of sets of photos that, to my eyes, go together: Tom Blackford’s Nihon Noir, of some of Tokyo’s more futuristic-looking architecture, and this Twitter thread of infrastructure that looks like it comes from science fiction. (And yes, I am still calling it Twitter. I refuse to validate Musk’s nonsense. I do hope this thread, and others like it, will be archived somewhere else by the time he finally finishes burning the company to the ground).

Next, I have three very different articles about libraries:

“Have You Been to the Library Lately?”, by Nicholas Hune-Brown, is about libraries in Canada, but with a few small exceptions you could say all of the same things about U.S. libraries as well. Hume-Brown describes the way that libraries have shifted from places to check out books to offering a wide range of educational and social services, responding to the growing needs of the communities they serve. (Although, frankly, if you still think of the library as a place with nothing but books and staff who are constantly shushing patrons, then I’d ask whether you think going to the movies involves looking into a little wooden box and turning a crank).

When people tell the story of this transformation, from book repository to social services hub, it’s usually as an uncomplicated triumph…That story, while heartwarming, obscures the reality of what has happened. No institution “magically” takes on the role of the entire welfare state, especially none as underfunded as the public library. If the library has managed to expand its protective umbrella, it has done so after a series of difficult decisions. And that expansion has come with costs.

From violent patrons and harassment to mental health crises— including a growing number in children— librarians are dealing with a range of problems that they are not trained, equipped, or, frankly, paid to deal with. But they also don’t really have a way to say no: they are public institutions, in every sense of the word, and don’t generally have the authority to turn people away.

One worker from Winnipeg became emotional when talking to me about her job. (Staff aren’t allowed to speak to the press, and the city denied an interview request.) She explained that threats and verbal abuse were common, and dealing with erratic behaviour was par for the course. As a veteran of more than ten years, she wasn’t particularly sensitive. But it was clear to her that, in recent years, the library was being asked to do far more than it could sustain. “It just becomes this really small space where all the issues that are in society are just magnified,” she said. Staff, she told me, were regularly being retrained in de-escalation techniques, seemingly with the idea that perhaps new training or a new attitude could mitigate the need for more funding or more employees or a functioning supportive housing system. “I spend a lot of time thinking, ‘Is this really what my job is now?’ And what is the library? I don’t even think I know anymore,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I actually did my real job.”

The issue, of course, is that libraries have been pushed into taking on all of these duties because governments and other public institutions have increasingly withdrawn from them. It is certainly reasonable to talk about increasing libraries’ funding and staffing, but channeling all these public services through a single institution that was never intended to provide them is neither sustainable nor reasonable. At some point, a library that has to try to do everything will end up doing nothing very well— and probably cease to be a library, in any meaningful sense.

“Ingenious Librarians”, by Monica Westin, is a good example, if any were needed, of why the loss of libraries would be a bad thing. It tells the story of the first “online’ electronic search, at Syracuse University in 1970. (“Online” here meaning using a remote terminal connected to a mainframe computer, not a search using the internet, which only sort of existed at the time). It was part of a study to figure out better ways for researchers to retrieve information, undertaken at a time when the volume of academic publications was growing too fast for librarians to keep up with it. However, it was intended to supplement reference librarians, not to replace them, and was meant mainly for users who were not near a reference desk and couldn’t ask anyone for help. The system, which was designed by librarians, anticipated many aspects of contemporary internet search engines, like using the full text of the document rather than assigned keywords or headings (which were too restrictive), and keeping track of other users’ searches to create suggestions to help people find what they were looking for. But the project was also guided by what seems, in retrospect, like a more realistic, less utopian vision of networked information exchange than that of the techno-futurists of post-WWII America. Comparing librarian Pauline Atherton, who headed up the study, to internet pioneer J.C.R. Licklider, Westin says:

Culture celebrates people like Licklider for being visionary in a positive vein. But, similarly, Atherton and the SUPARS research team should be celebrated for having seen and then designed for what the future would lose. Expanding our group of established internet visionaries to include people like Atherton, we see a more complex portrait of how different kinds of researchers envisioned the world to come. Where Licklider saw what we would gain from being able to communicate online with anyone in the world, Atherton’s group saw that we would lose expert intermediaries; they designed for this cost.

I was also interested in the study participants’ reaction to the system. The single most common word they used to describe the experience was “frustrating,” but at the same time “they also found the system intriguing and exciting (‘fun’, ‘thorough’, ‘I dig computers’), and 94 per cent said they would use SUPARS…again if it were available.” That seems like a good description of most developments in computers and digital technology: to start with, they are frustrating and often more trouble than doing things the old way, but there are enough people who are either sufficiently charmed by the novelty or convinced that it will eventually be better to keep pushing things forward.

“The Coolest Library on Earth”, by Elizabeth Landau, is about a collection of ice cores at the University of Denmark. The cores— which are long cylinders drilled out of the world’s coldest places— can reveal all kinds of things about how the earth’s climate has changed over time, going back thousands of years. This is, unfortunately, knowledge that is only becoming more necessary. This would probably be more accurately described as an “archive” than a “library,” but the general point here still holds: we need ways of storing and keeping track of information, of all kinds, and we also need people who specialize in doing that, and in making that information accessible to the people who need it. What that looks like in practice varies tremendously, depending on what kind of information we’re talking about, but the basic principle is consistent.

“Outsourcing Virtue”, by L.M. Sacasas, is about the desire to create systems— codes, rules, standards— that can eliminate bad or destructive behaviors without requiring virtue from the people they govern. This was, in a sense, one of the original goals of bureaucracy, which sought to eliminate bias and corruption from government by limiting the discretion given to the people in charge of providing services. The real decisions are made by the people at the top, and implemented in a (theoretically) neutral, consistent, even mechanical way by the bureaucrats further down. It’s also the impulse behind using various algorithmic systems to decide, for instance, the length of someone’s prison sentence, or whether they receive a home loan: we know that the people making those decisions have often been driven by racism and other forms of bias, but if you can remove human judgment from the process altogether you can avoid these problems without somehow purging people’s hearts of racism and hatred. You can also see this desire behind James Madison’s advocacy of checks and balances, in Federalist 51, when he asks,

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

In other words, if you could count on everyone to do the right thing all the time, then you wouldn’t need government at all; a good government will account for humans as they actually are, not as we might wish them to be, and will work even when they don’t do the right thing. The design of the system, itself, is what guarantees freedom and justice.

All of these attempts have, of course, failed to achieve their desired ends, for various reasons. But we keep trying: a similar kind of case is made for things like “smart contracts” using blockchain technology: if you make the contract self-executing and automatic, then nobody will be able to break their word. Individual honesty becomes irrelevant. Gavin Wood, the person who coined the term “Web3” and one of the developers of the Ethereum blockchain, argues that

trust in itself is actually just a bad thing all around. Trust implies that you are you’re placing some sort of authority in somebody else, or in some organization, and they will be able to use this authority in some arbitrary way.

Trust in this sense, he thinks, should be eliminated, or at least minimized, through technological systems that give us “greater reason to believe that our expectations will be met.” He sums this position up with the slogan “less trust, more truth,” which in effect means that the system tells you what to expect— that what you see is what you get.

The appeal of this idea is obvious, but, as Sacasas makes clear, it also takes us to places we probably don’t want to go. The corollary of not having to make moral choices is not having the chance to do so. A procedure or mechanism like a smart contract that makes it impossible not to fulfill your end of the bargain also robs that action of meaning; keeping your word has the same moral weight as obeying the laws of physics. A good society has to include some meaningful degree of human freedom, and allowing such freedom means, in turn, accepting that people will need to learn how to use it, and will sometimes use it wrong.

The alternative is to recognize that the contingency that appears as an obstacle and a threat to the system operating at scale may be the very condition of human flourishing. It is in the face of such contingency that a person is free to exercise a measure of agency, to make judgments and assume responsibility, to adapt creatively, to work meaningfully, to experience the consolation of knowing and being known and, yes, of cultivating skill and virtue.

And, speaking of taking people as they actually are: Patricia Marx’s “Is the Army’s New Tactical Bra Ready for Deployment?” underlines the difficulty of standardizing anything meant to be worn and used by human beings. It’s also a nice capsule history of military uniforms for American women, which were often concerned at least as much with aesthetics as with utility:

The government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms. Women marines were issued this Montezuma Red lipstick and matching nail polish in their official military kits. (It remained mandatory for thirty more years.) A Tangee cosmetics ad from the era reasoned, “No lipstick—ours or anyone else’s—will win the war. But it symbolizes one of the reasons we are fighting . . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely, under any circumstances.”

Numerous dissertations could be written— and some probably have been— about how this exemplifies how appearance is made to matter for women in ways it simply is not for men, as well as the adaptive capacity of capitalism. Which probably makes it sound like the article is dense and ponderous, but it is not at all— it’s totally entertaining, neatly capturing both the difficulty of this project and the absurdity you find at the intersection of military necessity and intimate biological reality.

I don’t know if people are sick of talking about AI yet, but it’s not going away any time soon. A couple of pieces I read recently look at it from new angles.

First, “AI is a Lot of Work”, by Josh Dzieza, is about the human labor— often tedious, repetitive, and performed by poorly-paid people in the global south— on which recent advances in machine learning and generative AI depend, but which is mostly hidden in the discussion about those technologies. The short explanation is that these systems are generally trained on very large data sets, and the elements of those data sets (e.g., images) need to be labeled to help the machines learn, and to help the people working with them understand what went wrong when they make mistakes.

Annotation remains a foundational part of making AI, but there is often a sense among engineers that it’s a passing, inconvenient prerequisite to the more glamorous work of building models. You collect as much labeled data as you can get as cheaply as possible to train your model, and if it works, at least in theory, you no longer need the annotators. But annotation is never really finished. Machine-learning systems are what researchers call “brittle,” prone to fail when encountering something that isn’t well represented in their training data. These failures, called “edge cases,” can have serious consequences. In 2018, an Uber self-driving test car killed a woman because, though it was programmed to avoid cyclists and pedestrians, it didn’t know what to make of someone walking a bike across the street. The more AI systems are put out into the world to dispense legal advice and medical help, the more edge cases they will encounter and the more humans will be needed to sort them. Already, this has given rise to a global industry staffed by people like Joe who use their uniquely human faculties to help the machines.

As Dzieza points out, the general feeling among AI researchers is that the need for such work is temporary, and will vanish when the systems are sufficiently mature. That might or might not be true, but even if it is, the fact remains that it is necessary now, and the people doing it are often not paid or treated very well, even as money is pouring into these technologies and the companies that produce them.

I think the idea the piece presents of a supply chain for data is also useful. In so many ways, we tend to think of digital technology as weightless, immaterial, despite the vast physical infrastructure required to produce, store, move, and analyze it. To put it in the relatively familiar terms we use to talk about other kinds of goods and products helps to emphasize not only this material footprint, but the human labor that activates and maintains it.

The piece also highlights the gap between the way humans think and the way machines process information, and the difficulties that gap creates. The unaccountable errors these systems sometimes make are on example, but trying to avoid such errors requires that humans, in a sense, ignore the way their own brains generalize and make distinctions.

The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human. Instruction writers must come up with rules that will get humans to categorize the world with perfect consistency. To do so, they often create categories no human would use. A human asked to tag all the shirts in a photo probably wouldn’t tag the reflection of a shirt in a mirror because they would know it is a reflection and not real. But to the AI, which has no understanding of the world, it’s all just pixels and the two are perfectly identical. Fed a dataset with some shirts labeled and other (reflected) shirts unlabeled, the model won’t work. So the engineer goes back to the vendor with an update: DO label reflections of shirts…The job of the annotator often involves putting human understanding aside and following instructions very, very literally — to think, as one annotator said, like a robot.

The irony, of course, is that the goal that drives companies to make human workers to label things in such strange or counterintuitive ways is to create systems that will behave more like humans. Or, as Dzieza later puts it, following a description of some of ChatGPT’s training:

Put another way, ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing.

And if it seems to you like the outcome of a process like that is predictable or comfortable, then you must know something I don’t.

Second, Maria Karpo’s “Imitation Games” looks at AI from another angle, explaining how generative systems like DALL-E are essentially making explicit something which ancient thinkers took as a matter of course, but modern ones rejected: the role of imitation in art.

Finally, a couple of very different pieces about crime, and the politics behind and around it:

“The Dark History of America’s First Female Terrorist Group”, by William Rosenau, feels a little dismissive of some of the ideas driving groups like the May 19th Movement, but at the same time it’s a good example of what you get when you start to think that the ends justify the means. I didn’t know much of anything about the specific people and groups he’s talking about, but the most surprising thing to me was that the U.S. Capitol was successfully bombed in 1983, but none of that has been mentioned (at least, not that I’ve heard) in all the discussion of January 6th. It’s also interesting that an all-women group formed in the late 1970s didn’t say much about feminism, but maybe Rosenau has just left out that part of the story.

“This is the Hometown of San Francisco’s Drug Dealers”, by Megan Cassidy and Gabrielle Lurie, has a somewhat sensational and over-simplifying title— for which we should probably not blame the authors— but actually gives a pretty in-depth and nuanced look at the links between one small area of Honduras and the drug markets of the Bay Area. It can be read as an indication of how some well-intended policies have negative effects, but I would say the most important takeaway is that drugs have to be addressed globally; no local or even national approach is going to be really effective. The reason this particular Honduran valley is the origin of so many dealers is really just a combination of chance and need: after the agricultural sector collapsed in the 1980s and a gold mind didn’t provide the anticipated benefits, the area had a lot of very poor people and no opportunities; once a few people to San Francisco and came back with enough money to build new houses and live well, others followed in their footsteps. (As one source in the piece puts it, “People follow people.”) To get to the U.S., they will often end up being exploited in one way or another, and left with few options other than dealing. To think that there is really something specific to these particular places that has led to this pattern is, I think, to ignore the larger picture. Fundamentally, the problem is poverty and inequality— as is usually the case.

Part 2 of the story deals with the San Francisco drug markets themselves.

And this is the post from January:

“In Defense of the Art-Targeting Climate Activists,” by Peter Singer

Over the last few months, there have been a number of protests involving people gluing themselves to museum walls or the frames of paintings, or smearing point, oil, cake, or mashed potatoes over paintings (all of which are behind glass, and are undamaged). The protests seek to draw attention to climate change, and the failure of world governments to take sufficient action to do anything about it. I certainly agree that our governments have so far failed us, and continue to fail us, in this area, but I’ve been pretty skeptical of the utility of these particular protests. So I was interested to see a defense of them from Peter Singer, who is one of the most important contemporary ethicists.

Part of Singer’s argument is that we are inconsistent, or even hypocritical, in our judgement of protest and political activism: that we applaud the protests of the past, even those deemed disruptive or “extreme” at the time, but castigate the people engaging in similarly dramatic forms of protest today. I’m certainly sympathetic to the implicit point that we don’t learn from history, that we repeat the same patterns over and over again. “Hindsight is 20/20” is both a cliché and profoundly untrue, but at least we can say that the passage of time shifts perspective. At the same time, is Singer right that we now think of the British suffragettes, who actually destroyed works of art (and attempted to bomb the homes of politicians) were in the right? Or do we instead tend to honor the less “extreme” wing of the suffrage movement? (The answer to that question might actually be different for people in the U.K. and the U.S., I don’t know).

Rather than the passage of time allowing us to see historical events more clearly, I think part of what is going on here is selection bias. What characterizes the protests and demonstrations of the past that we now condone is, ultimately, that they were successful in some significant way. Martin Luther King and the movement he helped lead succeeded in getting the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed; the suffrage movement succeeded in getting the right to vote for women. This makes it easy to look back and consider them justified, because what they did worked, and it’s impossible to say whether a less confrontational approach would have. On the other hand, if we look back at, say, the anarchist movement in the U.S. in the early 20th century, which generally failed to achieve any of its aims, it’s again easy to think that they went too far, and that this undermined their cause. (Of course, you could also say that this movement is just too different from the other examples for the comparison to make sense).

Singer concludes with what I think is his strongest argument: that protest, even protest seen as disruptive or destructive, is necessary for people who are excluded from the democratic process. He notes that

In seeking a conviction against the people who glued their hands to the frame of The Hay Wain, the prosecutor sought to distinguish the actions of the suffragettes from those of the activists on trial by saying that the former “had no democratic means by which they could further their cause,” whereas today “We have an established democracy.”

But, of course, Britain in the early 20th century might have claimed to be an established democracy, too, despite the exclusion of half the population. And in this case, the people most affected by the problem may be those with the least ability to influence policy— a clearly undemocratic situation. Singer says, “Ask yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate change. The answer is the young and those yet to be born – both categories unrepresented in our political systems.” This is also self-evident, and a powerful argument.

To me, the problem, ultimately, with these particular protests isn’t that they “go too far,” it’s that their message is muddled. I don’t have data to support this, but I suspect that few people in the general public think there is any clear link between the art chosen, or works of art in general, and the climate. As Singer says, the point is to highlight what will be lost if climate change is not mitigated; after gluing themselves to Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” a protestor asked the watching crowd, “How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your eyes?…Do you feel outraged? Good. Where is that feeling when you see the planet being destroyed before your very eyes?” But is anybody getting that message? The group behind this action is Just Stop Oil, and they want to end the use of fossil fuels; how likely is it that people will make a connection between burning oil and the (apparent) destruction of a Vermeer?

I can appreciate Singer’s point that the art being targeted, no matter how great or important, is less significant than the fate of the planet, and all the life on it. This is self-evidently true, and so if one could say that the attack on the art (even if it were actually damaged) was actually, concretely making the planet’s destruction more likely, then that trade-off would be tragic but reasonable. But that’s a big “if.” I can also understand the general idea that protests are intended to draw attention and get people talking about issues, even if the action itself doesn’t seem closely connected to those issues. By that measure, these actions are certainly successful. But this can also backfire; if people see the protests as frivolous or misdirected, then it can undermine support for the whole cause. Then again, it’s all too easy for people to go on with our lives and ignore this problem, which is still mostly abstract (at least in the wealthier northern countries) and seems intractable. Only disruptive action is likely to change that and garner sustained attention. So, I guess I remain torn about these particular actions.

“TikTok’s Addictive Anti-Aesthetic Has Already Conquered Culture”, by Carolina A. Miranda

I’m not on TikTok. There are several reasons for this. One is privacy; I don’t know if TikTok is actually any worse than any of the other apps/companies to whom I’ve already handed over my personal information in exchange for their services (though there is some reason to think it might be), but really, I just feel done with making that particular exchange. But also, the app seems to embody everything I dislike about social media. The reliance on algorithms rather than connection; the stripping away of all contextual information from videos; the idea of a continuous feed that just keeps coming; the brevity of the videos, the intensive personalization. To me, it seems like ByteDance read a bunch of articles about all the things people find wrong with social media, and designed an app to maximize those qualities. I absolutely detest the changes that have been made to Instagram recently, and those are essentially aimed at making it more like TikTok, so, yeah, not for me. Miranda summarizes TikTok as “present[ing] short-form videos in a frantic endless scroll,” which pretty well summarizes the reasons for my lack of interest. Yes, I know there’s good stuff there, and that people have found creative ways to use it. But finding funny or entertaining content on the internet is not, at this point, a difficult enough task to make another channel for such content sufficiently appealing to overcome the downsides.

At the same time, you can’t exactly avoid it. As Miranda points out, it has had 3 billion downloads, and by some measures it’s now bigger, or at least more influential, than Facebook or Instagram (or certainly Twitter). It has already transformed the music industry. And, again, competition from TikTok is reshaping other apps and services:

The TikTok effect has sent Big Tech back to the drawing board on long-established apps. In July, a Google exec revealed at a conference that, according to internal studies, 40% of young people turn to TikTok or Instagram when looking for a basic service like lunch — not a search engine like Google. Since then, Google has made user reviews much more prominent on its maps and now delivers many more images, graphic text boxes and social media feeds in its results.

I don’t deny that there are things about TikTok that are appealing, or at least interesting: Miranda calls the duet function as like “an ouroboros of looking,” which sounds terrible, but then describes “the duet train, in which one user pairs her video with another who pairs it with another and another — like a digital exquisite corpse,” which sounds…pretty cool. And I know there are lots of people talking about science or history in interesting and creative ways. So I’m not suggesting that it’s valueless, or that people are stupid for using it. But I got back to the phrase “frantic endless scroll,” and think: nope.

“Getting Lost in the World’s Largest Stack of Menus,” by Adam Reiner

The New York Public Library has the world’s largest collection of menus, and the majority of them of them were gathered by a single person: a woman named Frank E. Buttolph. On her own initiative, she got the library to create a menu collection, and give her “a voluntary position as menu archivist” in 1900. By 1908, she’d collected 14,500 menus, and by the time she died, in 1925, there were over 25,000. The collection now has 40,000, so more than half were collected by Buttolph. They’re a weird little window into history, especially New York history.

Speaking of windows into history: “HBOMax’s Great Looney Tunes Purge,”, by Sam Thielman, makes the case for the classic Warner Brothers cartoons as part of our collective cultural heritage, which should be preserved and made available to the public. Apparently HBO has been quietly removing a lot of material from their streaming service, and the Looney Toons cartoons are part of that; they are, somewhat shockingly, difficult to find elsewhere. This seems strange to me in part because when I was growing up, Bugs Bunny and co. were always on TV somewhere; they were used (or so it seemed) to fill in the schedule in low-priority time slots, like Sunday afternoons. I didn’t often go looking for them, but I watched them all the time, and I came to think of them as something that would simply always be there, always be accessible. That they are not anymore is, if nothing else, an example of how the streaming era often fails to live up to its promise.

And finally: this cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” by Kamauu is kind of magical.