Gloomy Vanity

 Everyone knows that technological change sometimes displaces whole art forms. It is a commonplace of art history that the invention of photography totally reshaped the purpose of painting, because oils and pigments were suddenly no longer the most efficient way to accurately represent a visual scene. Painters thus went off to explore more subjective and emotional impressions that were not so grounded in the mere literal transcription of reality—hence movements like expressionism, impressionism, Symbolism, cubism, surrealism, etc. 

In his introductory essay in his collection of prose pieces, Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), B.S. Johnson points out that something similar happened to the novel after the development of film. He notes that Joyce was well aware of the potential of the cinema to be a more efficient medium for telling stories. And so, the novel had to figure out what it could do better than film—if its 19th century task of merely telling "what happens next" in a narrative had been eclipsed. 

The Last Act

 Amidst the mental confusion caused by his brain cancer, my dad had a moment earlier in the week of unusual clarity and lucidity. 

It was heartbreaking, because in the brief interval when the fog lifted, he seemed to have a glimpse of everything he had lost. "I feel like I'm losing capacity," he said. "I feel like I'm letting everyone down." 

Tired of Kings

 Earlier this week, the official U.S. White House account on X decided to mock the American people by posting a caption under a photo showing Trump and King Charles walking together: "Two Kings," it read. 

But if Trump is a king, he is a king of the sort Shelley described: "an old, mad, despised and dying king."

Ban Foie Gras

 The Boston Globe had an article out yesterday about the growing nationwide movement to ban foie gras. 

Like a lot of people, I at first assumed this movement was just a bunch of annoying self-righteous busybodies looking for any available moral crusade. 

This attitude on my part lasted precisely as long as it took someone to describe to me for the first time what is actually involved in making foie gras.

Lead Us Towards Work?

 A New York Times article yesterday surveyed the budding anti-AI movement across the country that has sprung up in the least likely places and brought together people of wildly different ideological persuasions. It seems the days of Captain Swing and Ned Ludd have come again, and chiefly for the same reasons: elites are forging ahead with a technological change that will radically undermine the livelihoods of millions—and they have no clear plan as to how this is all supposed to work out in a way that is tolerable for the human population. 

Indeed, the people most involved in developing the new technology openly tell you that it will probably cause massive employment displacement—at least in the short term. Some of the more starry-eyed AI boosters envision that it could soon eclipse the need for human cognitive labor entirely—setting the market value of human brain power at something close to zero. 

A Large Postulate

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday looking into just how disastrous Trump's budget cuts to the food stamp program have been for poor families over the past year. 

When Trump's "big beautiful bill" passed last summer through the reconciliation process, it cut tens of billions of dollars from the program and introduced a range of new criteria designed to restrict people's eligibility. 

Indelible Stain

 Just twenty-four hours before the attempted assassination at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner on Saturday, the U.S. military killed two more unarmed and defenseless people in a strike on a civilian vessel in the Pacific. 

Since just the start of April, Trump's administration has carried out at least six such extrajudicial killings, bringing the total number of people he has murdered in these strikes—without charge or trial—to above 180.