Like the rest of the world, I too saw that Elizabeth Holmes documentary over the weekend. I found it a completely riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying and strange piece of work.
The directors make the odd choice never to review in depth the factual background of Theranos and Holmes's career. For this reason, the film never bothers to re-indict her for fraud or to convince the viewership that she really did lie to investors and cheat the public.
Listening to former Canadian trade negotiator Chrystia Freeland's interview with Ezra Klein yesterday on his podcast, I received a sharp reminder of what it means to be part of a nation that is morally disgracing itself on the global stage. As a friend of mine would put it, there may be no such thing as collective guilt—but we are certainly experiencing collective shame.
Like the majority of my fellow Americans (Klein cites polling to this effect on his show), I entirely take Canada's side in the trade war. Most Americans view Freeland's nation in friendly terms. We know they had been a good neighbor and ally and trading partner to us for decades—until Trump staged a gratuitous and unprovoked attack on their economy—for the explicitly stated (and completely deranged) purpose of trying to undermine their sovereignty and forcibly incorporate their territory into the United States.
Fears of an "AI bubble" are back in the news this week, with investors starting to show some alarm about the level of indebtedness of the big AI companies and the mind-boggling and possibly unrealistic scale of future earnings they would need to generate ever to pay it off.
Some analysts have started to talk about this as the risk that we may end up with a ruinous over-supply of AI infrastructure, after the current capital build-out, without ever generating enough consumer demand to actually pay for all these AI services we are developing.
An opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday argues that business schools ought to be abolished. Whereas every other professional school in a university teaches students to pursue some identifiable public good—the author argues—MBA programs only teach people how to make money for themselves and the shareholders.
As the author, a Cambridge business school professor himself, puts it: "A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school's is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit."
The riots and violent protests that have gripped France over the last few days are rather frightening. They are also typically French in that it's very difficult to tell what they are even about.
They had something to do with conditions at French schools, I thought. But now I am told they are more about the cost of living and the deteriorating conditions of the country's public finances.
Nicholas Kristof's column yesterday in the New York Times calls our attention to a recent undercover video released by an animal rights activist that offers a glimpse into the inner workings of one of the slaughterhouses that puts chicken on Americans' plates.
The indelible video shows the assembly line manner in which the chickens are strung up in rows by the heels (I think of Ezra Pound: "by the heels at Milano") on an electronic conveyor belt. As the birds rotate through the room past a series of knives, the latter cut their throats.
In his memoir about life in France on the threshold of World War II, Scum of the Earth, Arthur Koestler charts out the full ignominious course of events by which once-proudly democratic France surrendered to Hitler and gradually converted itself into an authoritarian, collaborationist state.
First, Koestler recounts, the French government locked up all the anti-Hitler refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe (including Koestler himself). This perverse action was accompanied by a wave of unthinking xenophobia directed against any outsider, wholly unable (or unwilling) to distinguish friend from foe.
