In the latest mailbag post on his blog, Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias starts with a brief (but convincing) refutation of a recent Jacobin article that offers a novel, leftist theory of the root-causes of the present "reading crisis."
There has ben a lot of hand-wringing over the past year about the reported decline in reading for pleasure among twenty-first century Americans.
A New York Times article yesterday points out that Trump's latest dust-up with Ukraine's leadership repeats a now-familiar pattern of behavior for him. First, Trump insults and berates a friendly nation. Then, when the latter tries to mildly push back, Trump seems genuinely outraged and appalled that they would dare to defend themselves, rather than grovel and kiss the boot that kicks them.
As Peter Baker's analysis puts it: "The rules of the road when it comes to President Trump’s relations with foreign leaders are clear: He may trash you. But woe unto you if you whack back."
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.
So I guess, per Trump's remarks yesterday, our nation will not in fact be live-streaming the gruesome death by firing squad of a human being for the delectation of howling social media mobs, despite Pete Hegseth's earlier pledge. Even Trump appears to have blanched at the optics of lining up rifles to shoot down a semi-paralyzed man who uses a wheelchair to get around.
But it's only the live-streaming that's been called off, keep in mind. Not the execution itself. That means a group of U.S. soldiers will still be lining up, presumably, with rifles at the ready, and gunning to death a disabled man. The bullets will still tear through his flesh and blot out his life. He will still void his bowels in the final moment of agony.
Yesterday, Trump appears to have moved from tongue-lashing Ukraine to actively trying to undermine their efforts to defend themselves. He has already pulled most forms of military aid from the country. Now, he seems to have gone even further, apparently blocking Ukraine from a key Pentagon platform for intelligence sharing (though U.S. officials deny anything has formally changed).
In the past few days, Trump delivered a major form of diesel sanctions relief to Russia—overriding the clear intent of Congress in their recent bipartisan sanctions legislation—in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from Putin. Trump proceeded to blame our Ukrainian allies for being invaded. He also exerted verbal pressure on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.
Okay, so let me see if I'm following along accurately here. In the last few days, Trump has announced a major form of sanctions relief for Russian diesel in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from Putin. He then proceeded to blame Zelensky for the war, even as Russian bombs killed more Ukrainian civilians. He then declared a bilateral "energy ceasefire" between the two nations, which Putin proceeded to violate within hours.
And still, Trump does not appear to be interested in applying any pressure on Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine. Instead, all he seems to want to do is to blame Zelensky for being invaded and to unwind whatever shreds of U.S. support are still in place for Ukraine.
The other day on his Substack, the blogger Noah Smith was warning that the availability of endless short-form video content on our smartphones risks trapping us in a kind of hedonistic dystopia: a place where reward-chemicals have become so readily accessible that much of the meaning is drained from life—since meaning can only be derived from struggle.
He writes with despair: "Perhaps it’s in the fundamental nature of intelligence to hack its own reward function — to find a way to give up striving and building and loving, and to simply hit the dopamine button until it starves itself ecstatically to death."
Californians are getting ready to vote next month on Proposition 42, a measure that would forbid any future tax on wealth holdings. Gavin Newsom announced his endorsement of the proposal a few days ago, adding his voice to those of tech billionaires who sponsored the measure, as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, in opposition to the possibility of any tax on wealth as opposed to income.
The reasons they cite are essentially the same old penguin ones we've discussed before. They point out that billionaires may simply leave the state to avoid paying. California will experience capital flight and end up poorer in public revenues than it was before the wealth tax. As the richest burghers among the Penguins intone, in Anatole France's novel Penguin Island:
Ever since Trump came back into office, people have been warning that it seems like he is planning to betray Ukraine. But, no matter how inevitable it seemed that Trump would eventually pull a Neville Chamberlain and cut a deal with Putin to hand our ally over to the country that was invading them, the decisive moment never quite came. Instead, Trump would at times appear to suddenly and radically undermine our relationship with Ukraine; but then, the next day, he would backpedal. And so the cycle would continue.
For all we know, Trump's remarks yesterday may not have been his final word on the subject either. Mere days from now, he may patch things up with Zelensky yet again and pivot to offering another round of halfhearted praise for our ally. Whatever Trump may do from day to day, however, the larger pattern is unmistakable at this point: he really is walking away from Ukraine, by whatever fits and starts. He may be acting less precipitously than Neville Chamberlain did in 1938—but this is still a Munich in slow motion.
Last week, following the horrific botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, I repeated as a sort of thought experiment Albert Camus's argument (in Reflections on the Guillotine) that every government that really claims to believe in the death penalty ought to broadcast footage of its executions as widely as possible, since they claim that the whole point of the killing is to "send a message."
Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Because just days later, the Trump administration announced that they do indeed plan to livestream the public execution by firing squad of a man convicted for his role in a 2009 mass shooting (convicted, we should add, in the military justice system—a parallel legal system with fewer constitutional protections for defendants; though there seems little doubt of his guilt).
In a recent podcast interview with Ezra Klein, Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed was trying to explain what motivates his sense of mission to try to expand access to healthcare in this country. He told the story of a former patient of his—a woman struggling with homelessness and substance abuse—whom he encountered in the emergency room.
After ordering the usual round of tests and treatment, he said he tried to convince her to stay in the hospital system for rehab. He prepared a whole treatment plan for her, and the hospital would have covered it. She refused these multiple offers of help, however, and left, claiming that her daughter was picking her up.
Just days after the horrific botched execution of Christa Pike reminded all the world of the inhumanity of capital punishment—and stripped away any lingering illusion that lethal injection is an especially "painless" or "humane" means of taking a person's life by force—Texas apparently proceeded last night with yet another state murder.
Jamaal Howard was taken to the death chamber last night in Huntsville, where he was administered a fatal dose of pentobarbital. Multiple courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, declined to spare his life at the 11th hour, despite claims he is intellectually disabled. According to the Associated Press, he was "pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m."
Over the summer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indelibly (and correctly) said that the U.S. had essentially "attacked" his country in an unprovoked act of trade aggression. "America has changed, [...] and we will not return to our old relationship," he said.
I was of course entirely with him on the merits. The Trump administration had started harassing Canada, belittling its nationhood, threatening to annex its territory, and using strong-arm trade war tactics to try to force it to cede sovereignty—all totally without provocation. It was and is an insanely gratuitous sabotage of a centuries-old friendship and alliance.
I spent a lot of time last month, as part of the reflections around the 25th anniversary of 9/11, trying to pinpoint exactly what the difference was between the Bush and Trump administrations.
After all, every Trump-era human rights abuse has its rough analogue from the Bush and Obama–led War on Terror.
Up there with the notion that "everyone goes to the death chamber with great dignity and decorum," another great myth about capital punishment is that the state can somehow murder people "humanely."
As Arthur Koestler writes in his classic Reflections on Hanging, "the defense of a savage method of execution on the grounds that 'it doesn't really hurt,' is another leitmotif down to our day."
A couple weeks ago, the leftist streamer bro Hasan Piker generated yet another round of inevitable headlines when he appeared to imply that the United States is a bigger terrorist than Al Qaeda.
Obviously, this was a ridiculous question to pose in the first place. These are not commensurable entities. The U.S. is a global power that has existed for two hundred and fifty years, has the largest military budget in the world, and fields troops on every continent. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has existed for less than a few decades and never had anything close to that reach.
One of the greatest sources of confusion in the interminable AI debate is the fact that many of the people building the most sophisticated models also hold a quasi-religious belief in the inevitability of an eventual AI "singularity," which they have long endowed with divine and apocalyptic traits.
In trying to figure out how seriously to take both their warnings of "existential risk" from AI, as well as their utopian promises of eventual "superabundance" or immortality from the same technology, then, our challenge is constantly to have to figure out how to separate out the scientific from the mythological elements of the way the designers are thinking about their new machine.
In his Reflections on the Guillotine, Albert Camus argues that every government that wants to maintain the death penalty should have to conduct all of their executions in public. Indeed, they should broadcast footage of the state murder as widely as possible.
He argues this because, in the absence of it, the public has no window into what actually happens in the death chamber. This allows the authorities to draw a veil of decorum over the whole hideous proceeding. As Arthur Koestler observes, in his Reflections on Hanging, the officials and the newspapers can talk about the execution in somber tones afterwards, leaving us to believe that all was transacted with the utmost calm and respect.
Yesterday, driving through the deep South, I was pulled over by someone representing himself as a member of the county sheriff's "counter-narcotics" team. He ended up searching my vehicle, lining up and photographing the covers of some novels and nonfiction political books I had with me in the car, and berating me about going to a protest.
"Why not just say you're heading to a protest? That's your right. But we've got people trafficking drugs. We've got people trafficking human beings. We've got people trafficking terrorism. Why not just be honest with me? You're going to a protest. Doesn't it feel better to be honest with me? Don't you feel better?"
