In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I emphasize that Congress and the President are subject to a higher law, the law of supply and demand. In an excellent column, Jason Furman gives a clear example of how difficult it is to fight the law of inelastic demand:
…Today a given number of autoworkers can make, according to my calculations, three times as many cars in a year as they could 50 years ago.
The problem is that consumers do not want three times as many cars. Even as people get richer, they increase their spending on manufactured goods only modestly, preferring instead to spend more on services like travel, health care and dining out. There are only so many cars a family can own, but that’s not the case for expensive vacations or fancy meals. As a result we have fewer people working in auto factories and more people working in luxury resorts and the like.
These forces — rising productivity but steady demand — explain why the United States was losing manufacturing job share as far back as the 1950s and 1960s, long before trade became a major factor.
I spend a lot of time reading about the nature of technological progress, and I’ve found that the literature on technology is somewhat uneven. If you want to learn about how some particular technology came into existence, there’s often very good resources available. Most major inventions, and many not-so-major ones, have a decent book written about them. Some of my favorites are Crystal Fire (about the invention of the transistor), Copies in Seconds (about the early history of Xerox), and High-Speed Dreams (about early efforts to build a supersonic airliner).
But if you’re trying to understand the nature of technological progress more generally, the range of good options narrows significantly. There’s probably not more than ten or twenty folks who have studied the nature of technological progress itself and whose work I think is worth reading.
One such researcher is Brian Arthur, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute.1 Arthur is the author of an extremely good book about the nature of technology (called, appropriately, “The Nature of Technology,”) which I often return to. He’s also the co-author, along with Wolfgang Polak, of an interesting 2006 paper, “The Evolution of Technology within a Simple Computer Model,” that I think is worth highlighting. In this paper Arthur evolves various boolean logic circuits (circuits that take ones and zeroes as inputs and give ones and zeroes as outputs) by starting with simple building blocks and gradually building up more and more complex functions (such as a circuit that can add two eight-bit numbers together).
Logic circuits invented by Arthur’s simulation.
I wanted to highlight this paper because I think it sheds some light on the nature of technological progress, but also because the paper does a somewhat poor job of articulating the most important takeaways. Some of what the paper focuses on — like the mechanics of how one technology gets replaced by a superior technology — I don’t actually think are particularly illuminating. By contrast, what I think is the most important aspect of the paper — how creating some new technology requires successfully navigating enormous search spaces — is only touched on vaguely and obliquely. But with a little additional work, we can flesh out and strengthen some of these ideas. And when we look a little closer, we find what the paper is really showing us is that finding some new technology is a question of efficiently acquiring information.
Outline of the paper
The basic design of the experiment is simple: run a simulation that randomly generates various boolean logic circuits and analyze the sort of circuits that the simulation generates. Boolean logic circuits are collections of various functions (such as AND, OR, NOT, EQUAL) that perform some particular operation on binary numbers. The logic circuit below, for instance, determines whether two 4-bit numbers are equal using four exclusive nor (XNOR) gates, which output a 1 if both inputs are identical, and a 4-way AND gate, which outputs a 1 if all inputs are 1. Boolean logic circuits are important because they’re how computers are built: a modern computer does its computation by way of billions and billions of transistors arranged in various logic circuits.
The simulation works by starting with three basic circuit elements that can be included in the randomly generated circuits: the Not And (NAND) gate (which outputs 0 if both inputs are 1, and 1 otherwise), and two CONST elements which always output either 1 or 0. The NAND gate is particularly important because NAND is functionally complete; any boolean logic circuit can be built through the proper arrangement of NAND gates.
Using these starting elements, the simulation tries to build up towards higher-level logical functions. Some of these goals, such as creating the OR, AND, and exclusive-or (XOR) functions, are simple, and can be completed with just a few starting elements. Others are extremely complex, and require dozens of starting elements to implement: an 8-bit adder, for instance, requires 68 properly arranged NAND gates.
To achieve these goals, during each iteration the simulation randomly combines several circuit elements — which at the beginning are just NAND, one, and zero. It randomly selects between two and 12 components, wires them together randomly, and looks to see if the outputs of the resulting circuit achieve any of its goals. If it has — if, by chance, the random combination of elements has created an AND function, or an XOR function, or any of its other goals — that goal is marked as fulfilled, and circuit that fulfills it gets “encapsulated,” added to the pool of possible circuit elements. Once the simulation finds an arrangement of NAND components that produces AND and OR, for instance, those AND and OR arrangements get added to the pool of circuit elements with NAND and the two CONSTS. Future iterations thus might accidentally stumble across XOR by combining AND, OR, and NAND.
An XOR gate made from a NAND, an OR, and an AND gate.
Because finding an exact match for a given goal might be hard, especially as goals get more complex, the simulation will also add a given circuit to the pool of usable components if it partially fulfills a goal, as long as it does a better job of meeting that goal than any existing circuit. Circuits that partially meet some goal (such as a 4-bit adder that gets just the last digit wrong) are similarly used as components that can be recombined with other elements. So the simulation might try wiring up our partly-correct 4-bit adder with other elements (NAND, OR, etc.) to see what it gets; maybe it finds another mini-circuit that can correct that last digit.
Over time, the pool of circuit elements that the simulation randomly draws from grows larger and larger, filled both with circuits that completely satisfy various goals and some partly-working circuits. A circuit can also get added to the pool if it’s less expensive — uses fewer components — than existing circuits for that goal. So if the simulation has a 2-bit adder made from 10 components, but stumbles across a 2-bit adder made from 8 components, the 8-component adder will replace the 10 component one.
When the simulation is run, it begins randomly combining components, which at the beginning are just NAND, one, and zero. At first only simple goals are fulfilled: OR, AND, NOT, etc. The circuits that meet these goals then become building blocks for more complex goals. Once a 4-way AND gate is found (which outputs 1 only if all its inputs are 1), that can be used to build a 5-way AND gate, which in turn can be used to build a 6-way AND gate. Over several hundred thousand iterations, surprisingly complex circuits can be generated: circuits which compare whether two 4-bit numbers are equal, circuits which add two 8-bit numbers together, and so on.
However, if the simpler goals aren’t met first, the simulation won’t find solutions to the more complex goals. If you remove a full-adder from the list of goals, the simulation will never find the more complex 2-bit adder. Per Arthur, this demonstrates the importance of using simpler technologies as “stepping stones” to more complex ones, and how technologies consist of hierarchical arrangements of sub-technologies (which is a major focus of his book).
We find that our artificial system can create complicated technologies (circuits), but only by first creating simpler ones as building blocks. Our results mirror Lenski et al.’s: that complex features can be created in biological evolution only if simpler functions are first favored and act as stepping stones.
Analyzing this paper
I don’t have access to the original simulation that Arthur ran, but thanks to modern AI tools it was relatively easy for me to recreate it and replicate many of these results. Running it for a million iterations, I was able to build up to several complex goals: 6-bit equal, a full-adder (which adds 3 1-bit inputs together), 7-bitwise-XOR, and even a 15-way AND circuit.
Screenshot of my simulation running.
But I also found that not all of the simulation design elements from the original paper are load-bearing, at least in my recreated version. In particular, much of the simulation is devoted to the complex “partial fulfillment” mechanic, which adds circuits that only partially meet goals, and gradually replaces them as circuits that better meet those goals are found. The intent of this mechanic, I think, is to make it possible to gradually converge on a goal by building off of partly-working technologies, which is how real-world technologies come about. However, when I turn this mechanic off, forcing the simulation to discard any circuit that doesn’t 100% fulfill some goal, I get no real difference in how many goals get found: the partial fulfillment mechanic basically adds nothing (though this could be due to differences in how the simulations were implemented).
To me the most interesting aspect of this paper isn’t showing how new, better technologies supersede earlier ones, but how the search for a new technology requires navigating enormous search spaces. Finding complex functions like an 8-bit adder or a 6-bit equal requires successfully finding working functions amidst a vast ocean of non-working ones. Let me show you what I mean.
We can define a particular boolean logic function with a truth table – an enumeration of every possible combination of inputs and outputs. The truth table for an AND function, for instance, which outputs a 1 if both inputs are 1 and 0 otherwise, looks like this:
Every logic function will have a unique truth table, and for a given number of inputs and outputs there are only so many possible logic functions, so many possible truth tables. For instance, there are only four possible 1 input, 1 output functions.
However, the space of possible logic functions gets very very large, very very quickly. For a function with n inputs and m outputs, the number of possible truth tables is (2^m)^(2^n). So if you have 2 inputs and 1 output, there are 2^4 = 16 possible functions (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, and 10 others). If you have 3 inputs and 2 outputs, that rises to 4^8 = 65,536 possible logic functions. If you have 16 inputs and 9 outputs, like an 8-bit adder does, you have a mind-boggling 10^177554 possible logic functions. By comparison, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be on the order of 10^80, and the number of milliseconds since the big bang is on the order of 4x10^20. Fulfilling some goal from circuit space means finding one particular function in a gargantuan sea of possibilities.
The question is, how is the simulation able to navigate this enormous search space? Arthur touches on the answer — proceeding to complex goals by way of simpler goals — but he doesn’t really look deeply at the combinatorics in the paper, or how this navigation happens specifically.2
The emergence of circuits such as 8-bit adders seems not difficult. But consider the combinatorics. If a component has n inputs and m outputs there are (2^m)^(2^n) possible phenotypes, each of which could be realized in a practical way by a large number of different circuits. For example, an 8-bit adder is one of over 10^177,554 phenotypes with 16 inputs and 9 outputs. The likelihood of such a circuit being discovered by random combinations in 250,000 steps is negligible. Our experiment— or algorithm—arrives at complicated circuits by first satisfying simpler needs and using the results as building blocks to bootstrap its way to satisfy more complex ones.
Navigating large search spaces
In his 1962 paper “The Architecture of Complexity,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon describes two hypothetical watchmakers, Hora and Tempus. Each makes watches with 1000 parts in them, and assembles them one part at a time. Tempus’ watches are built in such a way that if the watchmaker gets interrupted — if he has to put down the watch to, say, answer the phone — the assembly falls apart, and he has to start all over. Hora’s watches, on the other hand, are made from stable subassemblies. Ten parts get put together to form a level 1 assembly, ten level 1 assemblies get put together to form a level 2 assembly, and 10 level 2 assemblies get put together to form the final watch. If Hora is interrupted in the middle of a subassembly, it falls to pieces just like Tempus’ watches, but once a subassembly is complete it’s stable; he can put it down and move on to the next assembly.
It’s easy to see that Tempus will make far fewer watches than Hora. If both have a 1% chance of getting interrupted each time they put in a part, Tempus only has a 0.99 ^ 1000 = 0.0043% chance of assembling a completed watch; the vast majority of the time, the entire watch falls to pieces before he can finish. But when Hora gets interrupted, he doesn’t have to start completely over, just from the last stable subassembly. The result is that Hora makes completed watches about 4,000 times faster than Tempus.
Simon uses this model to illustrate how complex biological systems might have evolved; if a biological system is some assemblage of chemicals, it’s much more likely for those chemicals to come together by chance if some small subset of them can form a stable subassembly. But we can also use the Tempus/Hora model to describe the technological evolution being simulated in Arthur’s paper.
Consider a technology as some particular arrangement of 1,000 different parts, such as the NAND gates that are the basic building blocks of Arthur’s logic circuits. If you can find the proper arrangement of parts, you can build a working technology. Assume we try to build a technology by adding one part at a time, like Tempus and Hora build their watches, until all 1000 parts have been added. In this version, instead of having some small probability of being interrupted and needing to start over, we have a small probability (say 1%) of correctly guessing the next component. This mirrors Arthur’s simulation, where we had a small probability of randomly connecting a component correctly to fulfill some goal. Only by properly guessing the arrangement of each part, in order, can we create a working technology.
In Simon’s original model, assembling a watch was like flipping 1000 biased coins in a row. Each coin had a 99% chance of coming up heads, and only when 1000 heads were flipped was a watch successfully assembled. Our modified model is like flipping 1000 biased coins which have only a 1% chance of coming up heads. Creating a technology via the “Tempus” method is like flipping 1000 coins in a row and hoping for heads each time. The probability of producing a working technology is 0.01^1000, essentially zero. But if we create a technology via the “Hora” method of building it out of stable subassemblies, the combinatorics become much less punishing. Now instead of needing to flip 1000 heads in a row, we only need to flip 10 in a row. 10 successful coinflips — 10 parts successfully added — gives us a stable subassembly, letting us essentially “save our place.” Flipping a tails doesn’t send us all the way back to zero, just to the last stable subassembly. The odds are still low — for each subassembly, you only have a 0.01^10 chance of getting it right — but it’s enormously higher than the Tempus design. You’re much more likely to stumble across a working technology if that technology is composed of simpler stable components, and you can determine whether the individual components are correct.
Arthur’s circuit simulation is able to find complex technologies because it works like Hora, not Tempus: complex circuits are built up from simpler technologies, the way Hora’s watches are built from stable subassemblies. Going from nothing to an 8-bit adder is like Tempus trying to build an entire and very complex watch by getting every step perfect. Much easier to be like Hora, and be the one that only needs to get the next few steps to a stable subassembly correct: adding a few components to a 6-bit adder to get a 7-bit adder, then adding a few to that one to get an 8-bit adder, and so on.
We can illustrate this more clearly with a modified version of Arthur’s circuit search. In this version, rather than trying to fulfill a huge collection of goals, we’re just trying to find the design for a specific 8-bit adder made from 68 NAND gates. Rather than build this up from simpler sub-components (7-bit adders, 6-bit adders, full adders), in this simulation we simply go NAND gate by NAND gate. Each iteration we add a NAND gate, and randomly wire it to our existing set of NAND gates. If we get the wiring correct, we keep it, and go on to try adding the next gate. If it’s incorrect, we discard it and try again.
We can think of this as a sort of modular construction, akin to building a complex circuit up from simpler circuits; at each level, we’re just combining two components, our existing subassembly and one additional NAND gate. This loses verisimilitude, since each subassembly no longer implements some particular functionality (we essentially just dictate that the simulation knows when it stumbles upon the correct gate wiring). But we don’t lose that much: it is, notably, possible to build an 8-bit adder with a hierarchy that requires just two components at almost every level (a few steps require three components). And this simpler simulation has the benefit of making it very easy to calculate the combinatorics at each step.
Hierarchical 8-bit adder. FA is a full-adder (which adds 3 input values together), HA is a half-adder which adds 2 input values together). Full decomposition down to NAND gates not shown.
68 NAND gates can create around 2^852 possible wiring arrangements with 16 inputs and 9 outputs. This is much less than the 10^177,554 possibile 16 input and 9 output functions, but it’s still an outrageously enormous number. If we tried to find the right wiring arrangement by random guessing all 68 gates at once, we’d never succeed: even if every atom in the universe was a computer, each one trying a trillion guesses a second, we’d still be guessing for about 10,000,000,000,000…(140 more zeroes)..000 years.
But by going gate-by-gate, the correct arrangement can be found in 453,000 iterations, on average. Each time we add a gate, there’s only a few thousand possible ways that it can be connected, so after a few thousand iterations we guess it correctly, lock the answer in, and move on to the next gate. By determining whether each step is correct, instead of trying to guess the complete answer all at once, the search becomes feasible.
This is why Arthur’s original simulation couldn’t fulfill complex needs without fulfilling simpler needs first: if you try to take too many steps at once, the combinatorics become too punishing, and it becomes almost impossible to find the correct answer by random guessing. In our 68 NAND gate search, finding an 8-bit adder is relatively easy if we go one gate at a time, but if we change that to two gates at a time (randomly adding one gate, then another gate, then checking to see if we’re correct), the expected number of iterations rises from 453,000 to 1.75 billion: if the probability of guessing one gate correctly is 1/1,000, the probability of guessing two gates is 1/1,000,000. If we try to guess three gates at a time (1 in a billion odds of guessing correctly), the number of expected iterations to guess all 68 gates correctly rises to ~9.3 trillion.
The explosive combinatorics gives us a better understanding of some of the results that come out of Arthur’s simulation. For instance, Arthur notes that in each iteration the simulation combines up to twelve components, then checks to see if a working circuit has been found. But Arthur notes that you can vary the maximum value and it doesn’t impact the results of the simulation much, stating of the various simulation settings that “[e]xtensive experiments with different settings have shown that our results are not particularly sensitive to the choice of these parameters.” Indeed, if we re-run the simulation and only allow it to try a maximum of 4 components at once, it works basically just as well as with 12 components. The more random components you combine together, the more the combinatorial possibilities explode, and the lower the chance of finding something useful. The probabilities of finding a useful circuit amongst the various possibilities becomes so immensely low with larger numbers of components that you don’t lose much by not bothering with them at all. Similarly, this also explains another result in the paper, that it’s easier to find complex goals if you specify only a narrower subset of simpler goals related to them. Arthur notes that a complex 8-bit adder is found much more quickly if you only give the simulation a few goals related to building adders. With fewer goals specified, the pool of possible technology components will remain smaller, the number of possible random combinations becomes fewer, and the easier it becomes to find the complex goals.
In essence, using simpler components as stepping stones to more complex ones is a kind of hill-climbing. The simulation looks in various directions (possible combinations of building blocks), until it finds one that’s higher up the hill (finds a circuit that meets some simple goal), restarts the search at the new, higher point on the hill, until it reaches a peak (satisfies a complex goal). The simulation is able to satisfy complex goals because it specified a series of simpler ones that provide a path up the hill to the complex goals. Arthur notes that “[t]he algorithm works best in spaces where needs are ordered (achievable by repetitive pattern), so that complexity can bootstrap itself by exploiting regularities in constructing complicated objects from simpler ones.”
Trying to go to complex circuits directly, then, is akin to just testing random locations in the landscape and seeing if they’re a high point: this is obviously much worse than following the slope of the landscape to find the high points.
Technological search and information
We can sharpen these ideas even further by bringing in some concepts from information theory. Information theory was invented by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in the late 1940s, and it provides a framework for quantifying your uncertainty, and how much a given event reduces that uncertainty.
I find the easiest way to understand information theory is with binary numbers. The normal math we use day to day uses base 10 numbers. When we count upward from zero, we go from 0 to 9, then reset the first digit to 0 and increment the next digit: 10. With binary, or base 2, we increment the next digit after we get to 1. So 1 in base 10 is 1 in binary, but 2 is 10, 3 is 11, 4 is 100, and so on.
Decimal (base 10) and binary (base 2) numbers.
In binary, each binary digit, or bit, doubles the potential size of the number we can represent. So with two digits, we can define 4 possible values (0, 1, 2, and 3 in base 10). With 3 digits, that doubles to 8 possible values (getting us from 0 through 7), with 4 digits that doubles again to 16 possible values, and so on. A 16 bit binary number can represent 2^16 = 65,536 possible values, which is why in computer programming the largest value that a 16 bit integer can represent is 65,535.
Say you have a string of bits, but don’t know whether they’re ones or zeroes. Because each bit doubles the number of possible values that can be represented, each unknown bit you fill in reduces the number of possible values by half. If you have 3 binary digits, there are 8 possible numbers that could be represented. Each time you learn what one of the bits is, you reduce the number of possible values by half.
With information theory, we generalize this concept somewhat. In information theory one bit of information reduces the space of possibilities by 50%; in other words, each bit reduces our uncertainty by half. Say you’re like me, and you often lose your phone in your jacket pockets. If you’re wearing a coat with 2 pockets and you know the phone is in one of them, specifying the location of your phone, narrowing it down from 2 possibilities to 1, takes one bit of information. If you’re wearing a coat with 4 pockets, you now need 2 bits of information: 1 bit to tell you whether it’s on the right or the left, and another bit to tell you whether it’s an upper or lower pocket. The first bit cuts the possibilities in half, leaving you with two possibilities, and the second bit cuts it in half again. If your jacket has 8 pockets, now you need 3 bits to specify its location, and so on. The more places that something could be, the more information it takes to specify its location.
Information theory is particularly useful for quantifying how much information we get from some particular outcome. Say someone flips a fair coin; how much information do I get when they reveal whether it was heads or tails? Well, before they reveal it, I knew it could be one of two options, heads or tails. Revealing it narrows the number of possibilities from two down to one. We’ve cut the number of possibilities in half, and thus gained 1 bit of information. More generally, the information provided by some outcome is equal to -log2(the probability of that outcome). So revealing how a fair coin was flipped gives us -log2(0.5) = 1 bit. If we’re dealt a single card from a deck face down, when we reveal that card we’ve reduced the number of possible cards from 52 down to 1, and gained -log2(1/52) = 5.7 bits of information.
For a repetitive process, we also want to know a related quantity: entropy. Entropy is determined by calculating the information received from each possible outcome, multiplying it by the probability of that outcome, then summing all those values together. It’s the expected quantity of information you’ll get by taking some particular action.
Say I’ve lost my phone in my jacket with eight pockets, and am looking for it by randomly trying pockets until I find it. A random guess has a 1/8 chance of successfully finding the phone, and a 7/8 chance of coming up empty. Guessing correctly will yield me -log2(1/8) = 3 bits of information, as expected: once I guess correctly, I know the phone’s location. But an incorrect guess will yield me only 0.19 bits of information: I already knew most of the pockets don’t have the phone, so failing to find the phone in one pocket doesn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. The entropy of a guess is (1/8) * log2(1/8) + (7/8) * log2(7/8) = 0.54 bits. When I first check a pocket, I can expect to get a little more than half a bit of information. (If I rule out pockets that I’ve already checked, the expected amount of information I get will rise each time, though if you’re like me you might have to check the same pocket a few times before you find the phone.)
Because each bit of information we get cuts the number of possibilities remaining by 50%, it doesn’t take that much information to narrow down an enormously large search space. The 2^852 possible circuits that can be created by wiring up our 68 NAND gates requires only 852 bits — 852 times cutting the number of possibilities in half — to specify. (That’s approximately the same number of bits that it takes to specify each letter of this sentence.)
A key aspect of entropy is that we maximize how much information we get when each outcome is equally plausible. So the entropy of a fair coin, with a 50% chance of coming up heads, is 1 bit. But if the coin has a 90% chance of coming up heads, the entropy is now just 0.46 bits. If the coin has a 99% chance of coming up heads, the entropy falls to 0.08 bits. When one outcome is very likely, you learn much less on each attempt, because you mostly get the outcome you already knew was likely. This is why when playing the game “20 questions,” the most efficient strategy is to try and ask questions where the answer divides the number of possibilities in half. “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” is a good starting question because there are probably roughly similar numbers of items that are bigger and smaller than a breadbox. “Is it a 1997 Nissan Sentra?” is a bad starting question because most possibilities are not a 1997 Nissan Sentra, so we learn very little when the answer is “no.”
We can think of our 68 NAND gate search as flipping a series of very biased coins, each one with a ~ 1/(several thousand) probability of coming up heads (where “heads” is “guessing the right wiring combination for that particular NAND gate”). The entropy of this process — the expected amount of information that we get — is very low, around 0.003 bits per attempt. Each attempt we learn very little about the correct wiring diagram (“it wasn’t this arrangement, it wasn’t this arrangement either, or this one”) so we need a lot of attempts — around 453,000, on average — to accumulate the 852 bits needed to specify the correct wiring for our 8-bit adder.3
Trying to guess two gates at a time is like biasing the coin even further: now each one has a ~1/(several million) probability of coming up heads. We thus get vastly less information per attempt — less than 0.000001 bits per attempt on average — so it takes us many, many more attempts to accumulate the information needed.
A useful way of thinking about our 68 NAND gate search is that it’s like a huge, branching tree. At every step — every time we add a gate — there are thousands of branches, each one representing one possible way to wire up the gate. Each branch then splits into thousands more (representing all the possible ways of wiring up the next gate), which split into thousands more, which split into thousands more, until at the end we have 2^852 possible “leaves,” each one representing a unique way of wiring up all 68 gates. Trying to get all 68 gates right at once, and then checking to see whether or not you did, is like examining one single leaf, one path from the base of the tree all the way to the tip of a branch. Not only are you overwhelmingly likely to guess wrong, but you haven’t narrowed down your possibilities at all: all you know is that one single leaf wasn’t the right answer, leaving you with the rest of the 2^852 possible leaves to sift through.
Checking to see whether each gate we add is correct before we proceed to the next one, by contrast, massively narrows down the number of possibilities. Whenever we determine a gate isn’t in the right spot, it eliminates every possibility that branches off from that point. If there are 1000 possible ways to wire each gate, each time we guess correctly we’ve narrowed down the possibilities downstream of that choicepoint by 99.9%. Huge swaths of possibilities get eliminated at each correct guess, letting us converge on the correct answer much more quickly.
The same basic logic applies to Arthur’s simulation. (In fact, in another publication, Arthur uses a very similar metaphor, describing technological search as trying to find a working path up a mountain, which is full of various obstacles.) Building up complex functions without the aid of intermediate, simpler ones is like trying to find a single leaf on a tree the size of the universe. Building up to complex circuits gradually, using simpler components as building blocks, lets you screen off huge branches of the tree at once. Once you have a working 2-bit adder, every branch that has a non-working 2-bit adder in it gets screened off. Your iterations yield massively more information, and the search problem becomes tractable.
Conclusion
The logic of Arthur’s simulation, and our simpler simulation, also applies to creating new technologies more generally. Logic circuits are a useful model to explore, because they’re real technology that is very amenable to simulation (they have a well-defined, simple behavior), but technology in general can be thought of as a combination of simpler components or elements arranged in various ways to create more complex ones. As Arthur notes:
…in 1912 the amplifier circuit was constructed from the already existing triode vacuum tube in combination with other existing circuit components. The amplifier in turn made possible the oscillator (which could generate pure sine waves), and these with other components made possible the heterodyne mixer (which could shift signals’ frequencies). These two components in combination with other standard ones went on to make possible continuouswave radio transmitters and receivers. And these in conjunction with still other elements made possible radio broadcasting. In its collective sense, technology forms a network of elements in which novel elements are continually constructed from existing ones. Over time, this set bootstraps itself by combining simple elements to construct more complicated ones and by using few building-block elements to create many.
One takeaway from this paper, as Arthur notes and we explored more deeply, is that a hierarchical arrangement of components, where a complex technology is made of simpler components, which are in turn made from even simpler components, makes it much easier to create some new technology. But a more general takeaway is that successfully creating some new technology means getting new information as quickly as possible. Working from (or towards) a hierarchical, modular design for some technology, where each element has some specific job it must do, makes it easier to find new technologies in part because you learn vastly more from each attempt at building one of those subparts. Knowing whether some entire complex function works or not tells you much less than knowing which individual component is working right, and what specific functionality needs to be corrected to fix the problem.
In addition to Brian Arthur, some other folks who I think have done really good work on this are Bernard Carlson, Clay Christensen, Joel Mokyr, Hugh Aitken, Edward Constant, and various folks associated with the Trancik Lab. There’s also a few folks, such as Joan Bromberg and Lillian Hoddeson, who have produced multiple very good technological histories that I return to often.
Indeed, we find that if we just randomly combine dozens of NAND gates, we get a random truth table almost every time, and never solve even medium-complex functions with a few inputs and outputs.
Adding things up, you find that the search actually yields over 900 bits, rather than 852 bits. This is due to the information overhead of a sequential search: you end up getting “extra” information that you don’t need. In our 8-pocket jacket search, if we just guess randomly it will take us on average 8 tries to find the phone. 8 attempts * 0.54 bits per attempt yields 4.32 bits, more than the 3 bits we need to actually specify the phone’s location.
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"Donald John Roberts, the John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management and International Business, Emeritus, died Jan. 23 after a long illness. He was 80.
"His start at Stanford GSB was carefully cultivated. When economics professor Robert Wilson began growing the economics faculty at the business school in the late 1970s, he had already recruited an impressive group of young scholars. But he needed someone to shape the intellectual direction of the program.
"Wilson believed Roberts was that person.
At the time, Roberts was a young professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, already known for his teaching credentials and research in economic theory. Wilson persuaded him to join Stanford in 1980, bringing him west to help build what would become one of the most influential economics groups in academia.
“John played a central role in shaping the direction of the economics group in those years,” says Wilson, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. “He had a remarkable ability to see where an idea could lead and to push it until the logic became clear.”
"Roberts remained at the school until his retirement in 2012. At Stanford GSB, he helped lead the doctoral program, mentored younger faculty, and played a central role in recruiting a generation of economists whose work reshaped the field. His four decades of research helped transform how economists study organizations and their management, bringing rigorous economic theory to questions about how firms function internally.
... “Besides his scholarship, John was an institution builder who helped shape the intellectual culture of the school,” says David M. Kreps, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus. “John helped create an environment where both ambitious research and professional education thrived. He was the personification of balanced excellence.”
I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.
TL;DR: Gas Town and Beads have both released version 1.0.0 today. Enjoy!
Gas Town and Beads hit v1.0.0
It has been a wild 3-month ride since I launched Gas Town.
First there was the part where I was like nooo don’t use it, and everyone was like, hold my beer. I am so glad some of you ignored me so hard. It’s just what I’d hoped for. You early adopters helped pave the way for everyone else.
And we went through some chaotic times early on. There were the serial killer sprees, viciously taking out random workers mid-job. (It’s always the Deacon, the modern-day Butler in the Gas Town murder mysteries.) There was the 22-nose Clown Show, where the Mayor scored a new clown nose every time it had massive data loss, which went on for weeks. And more. We’ve had our share of trying times, honking alert noses, piles of worker corpses. All long past us now.
The Gas Town Serial Murders and Clown Show
Despite the early bumps, we’ve continued to enjoy absolutely massive community engagement. Even though Gas Town “only” has 13k stars (at 3 months!), it has hundreds of enthusiastic committers, and bugs get noticed and fixed fast.
It’s safe to say that Gas Town has largely been in maintenance mode since the Dolt migration finished up, and that was well over a month ago. I’ve continued to allow a few nice features here and there, but for the most part we are now directing people’s creative efforts to the successor, Gas City, which is in alpha testing and on track for a fast GA.
And maintenance mode is a good thing! It means it’s not thrashing. Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
As one example, Gene Kim and I were chatting with a very cool midsize company, who are making a company-wide move to adopt agentic AI. A person in their Communications department, who is a Comms major four years out of school, shared with us (to our lasting astonishment) that she has been using Gas Town since “a few weeks after it came out.” She decided to build replacement for a niche but pricey SaaS product their company has been paying for. She’s working with another non-technologist on it, and it’s so good the company is getting ready to switch over to it. Amazing!
Anyone can build software with Gas Town — and people are!
Non-technologists using Gas town to build software! It sounds crazy but I’m seeing it all over. People in academia, non-technical knowledge workers, even just people curious about vibe coding; all are figuring it out.
So as far as I’m concerned, Gas Town is ready. That’s why I feel it merits a 1.0.0 release.
To get started, you just have your coding agent install it, and talk to the Mayor. More on that below. The Mayor is cool. You’ll like the Mayor.
Importantly, we are also rolling Beads to version 1.0.0 today. Beads is the secret sauce that makes Gas Town and Gas City both possible and best-of-class. I’ll spend some time talking about Beads before we get back to Gas Town.
Beads: The Memory Revolution
Last year I noticed that agents were struggling with basic stuff: working memory, and simple task tracking. They had zero attention span and developed progressive dementia. That led me to create Beads, which is a drop-in, generic, unopinionated memory system and knowledge graph for coding agents. Beads gives your coding agent sudden clarity and long-horizon planning capability.
Beads started life back in October as a lightweight issue tracker with version control. But it quickly became clear that it was like Adderall for your agent. It is an instant cognitive upgrade for any coding agent, even replacing their built-in memory and task tracking systems with a system that’s more powerful, more portable, and every bit as transparent and easy to use. You don’t need to know Beads in order to use it; your agent handles it all.
Over time, it became clear that Beads was a sort of universal discovery, a gift that keeps giving. It’s way more than an issue tracker, and is evolving gradually into something more like a universal ledger for all knowledge work. One that agents happen to really, really like.
It was a high-level insight from Chris Sells, an old friend of mine and (with Julian Knutsen) the co-creator of Gas City, that helped crystallize for me why Beads seems to solve so many problems at once: Beads is the Why.
Beads is the Missing Why
In Beads, every work item becomes a bead. A bead is just a structure with some fields: a lightweight bug/issue report, with a title, description, status, etc. Beads are stored and versioned in Git, linked together as a multi-graph, and they are queryable with SQL like a database. Best of all worlds.
Versioning your Beads is critical: you get a complete historical log of every change to any Bead, trivial to query. So in multi-agent environments, everyone using Beads can tell what everyone else using Beads did, and why.
Your project’s Git commit history has always been your permanent ledger that contains the What, Where, Who, and How of what happened to your code. But as Chris Sells astutely observed a few months back, Beads is the Why — the missing piece in your commit history. It completes the data-warehousing picture of your project needed (by agents) for forensics, recovery, onboarding, design, and more. Having this information handy is invaluable for agents when they are trying to reconstruct how we got where we are.
Beads: The Missing Why for your projects
Individual beads capture and record all your work on the Git ledger, through its entire lifecycle, from planning/design, through implementation, and then they form the audit trail after the work is closed. This isn’t limited to development work, either; you can use it anything. Someone once told me they use Beads for their grocery shopping (which they do with an agent.)
A key insight was that you can use Beads for defining and tracking orchestration work, which is how Gas Town and Gas City operate. Beads string together into “molecules” that have deterministic steps to follow, for patrols, releases, etc. Every step an agent takes in a Beads-based workflow is recorded on a ledger. This acts like a save-game that you can roll back to, or at least use to see how you got where you are.
Beads is for Literally Everyone, and Everything
Beads is completely unaware of Gas Town (though Gas Town uses Beads as a dependency.) You can use Beads by itself and get a vastly improved agentic experience, no matter which coding agent you’re using. Unlike Gas Town, which only works with a handful of agents today, Beads works with anything and everything, as long as it’s roughly as smart as Claude Sonnet 3.5 was.
People who switch to Beads soon realize they can build their own workflows and orchestration using nothing but Beads. It’s an incredibly powerful and versatile data plane. Once you start storing stuff in Beads, you kind of want everything there. It doesn’t solve the memory problem by itself, but it certainly gives you a solid foundation for solving it your own way.
Beads crossed 20k stars on GitHub this week, a bit over 5 months since launch. I have not been much of a GitHub user for most of my career, so I didn’t appreciate how unusual 20k stars is until this week. Chris, Julian and I all guessed that roughly 10k-20k repos would be that popular. But we were way off. You can browse them all with a query. There are currently 1988 with more than 20k stars.
So Beads is already in roughly the top 2000 GitHub repos, out of some 300 million. That’s pretty rarified air. But it makes sense. I mean, it just works. It’s soooo easy. You start using Beads, everything becomes a bead, and life with agents just starts getting easier.
Beads enters the stratosphere with 20k stars
Beads: Ready for v1
I held out on a v1.0.0 release for Beads for months because I had a feeling it would become clear when it’s ready for prime time. With the recent completion of Beads with Embedded Dolt by the amazing Dolt team, Beads is finally back to its Day Zero experience. We have managed to land on an architecture and implementation that serve all the key audiences:
Solo, single-player users with just a coding agent or a chat session. Great experience out of the box, simple setup, syncs to GitHub automatically.
Multi-agent power users who might be working on multiple projects or workflows.
Gas Town users doing high-velocity orchestration on heavy-duty project work.
Gas City users doing multiple projects and enterprise-level orchestration setups.
Wasteland and other federation users, who want the power of Dolt, Git, and Beads as a work federation protocol.
Anyone building their own orchestrator.
Many of these audiences were poorly served by the original, janky Beads architecture of SQLite + JSONL + awkward syncing and tons of merge conflicts. When it did work, it was often last-write wins semantics with SQLite just taking “whatever” happened to win. Not exactly enterprise-grade building material.
All that jank is gone. Torn out of the code base entirely. Beads is now backed with the power of Dolt, which itself sports an impressive 22k GH stars. The inherent fragility of the v0.x Beads architecture, with its bidirectional sync, 3-way merge, two sources of truth, race conditions, and tombstone hell — that’s all gone now. Dolt was designed to handle all this stuff gracefully. We got incredibly lucky that it exists at all.
Now that Beads is stable on Dolt, with both embedded and server-mode fully supported, v1.0.0 is the right call. I’ve moved the Beads repo into the gastownhall org (soon to be gascityhall), where we will continue to support Beads as a first-class standalone product for non-GT/GC users.
Dolt: Migration complete!
Gas Town: It’s That Dang Mayor
I want to chat a little more about what we’ve learned about Gas Town before we wrap.
One of the reasons that people like Gas Town is that they don’t have to read as much, or even pay attention as closely. It’s more like DM’ing with a friend.
Claude Code makes you read. A lot. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like reading, or if this isn’t your native tongue, or if you’re busy, or tired. With coding agents, you’re gonna do some reading. Read read read read. It’s like a stevey post gone wild, running rampage, in every session. But make sure you don’t miss anything important!
I read just fine, and even I didn’t like doing all that reading. Most of it clearly could have been read by a model, saving me the trouble. I wanted something else, some other interface, but wasn’t sure what. I just didn’t want to have to read so much unnecessary cruft.
I spent a bunch of time building orchestrators last year, trying to get Claude to run Claude. At first, I was trying to achieve the elusive “visibility without reading” by chasing classic Observability. I was initially thinking that I wanted dashboards or activity feeds or some other visualization of my town’s workers. And some people still do like those, and they can be handy.
But after a while I realized I just wanted someone to talk to, while the system was working. And perhaps, as occasion might demand, someone to yell at.
The Mayor abstraction turned out to be perfect. Mayors are there to get yelled at. A Mayor isn’t so distant, like some higher-level governor or executive, to whom yelling seems like it will go unheard. A city mayor is ostensibly someone who has your local interests at heart, so the mayor is who you yell at first. It’s a social custom going back centuries. As one famous and rather wise U.S. mayor put it a week ago, if your constituents aren’t yelling at you, it’s because they aren’t around at all, and you don’t want that.
Programming in 2026 will become talking to a face
With the Gas Town Mayor, you feel like you’re operating at a special level, a VIP, above all the workers. You are talking to someone important: the mayor of a factory the size of a town. You have access to someone with resources, someone who gets you, someone who appreciates how busy you are.
Working with regular coding agents just doesn’t give you that special feeling. I’m not making this up; this is a pretty consistent report I get from the field, from people around the world, particularly nontechnical people. I truly think it comes down to the Mayor giving you less stuff to read.
Claude Code only has one way to tell you what’s going on, which is to tell you what’s going on. It babbles while it works. “Now I will run this awk script s@(*fj$&h(*!&. Now I will print 8 pages of recaps. Now I’m deleting your database. Now I’m printing more recaps, and running another script here is the code #$AWESR@#$.”
Claude Code is a wall of scrolling text. The harder it works, the scrollier it gets. Now imagine having 10 standard coding agents running. Any agent, could be Codex, whatever. Ten of them puking out text. And you have to sort through all their output to find the nuggets of actually interesting stuff you need to know about, like the part where they’re deleting the database.
This is why people love Gas Town. The Mayor reads all that crap that the workers are printing. The Mayor knows your context, your hopes and dreams. The Mayor has an army of polecats it can whip up when it needs to. The Mayor has all these cool-sounding resources, like the Crew and Convoys and Dog patrols, that it can bring to bear on your problem. Just say the word, the Mayor’s on it for you.
Claude Code and some other agents are trying to turn themselves into dark factories, by running subagents, and providing their own task management, memory systems, etc. But so far, they’re all trying to do it with a product lens, no platform to speak of — a monolith. I’ve read some interesting blog posts about that approach, but safe to say I’m not a fan.
Gas Town at least lets you talk to your agents as first class citizens, with externally visible identities; Gas City takes it further and decomposes the entire stack into a modular platform architecture.
In short, what’s behind the Mayor also matters, and as soon as people start getting curious, today’s coding agents immediately disappoint. And believe you me, people are getting curious. And they’re finding their way to Gas Town.
The Mayor does your reading for you, so you can supervise
Ultimately the Mayor is doing way more than just saving you a bunch of reading. It is your personal concierge. If Claude Code is an Executive Assistant, then the Gas Town Mayor is more like your Chief of Staff, who manages a full team of capable EAs, all working for you behind the scenes.
I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs.
On to Gas City
As I mentioned in my long-overdue Vibe Maintainer post, we’re going to start gently nudging everyone towards Gas City. You literally just install it, import your Gas Town configuration, and then you’re using that instead of Gas Town. It’s functionally identical, when used as a dev IDE.
Except with Gas City, you can now build your own orchestrators using all the Gas Town primitives: identity, roles, messaging, mail, sessions, cost tracking, multi-model dispatch, skills, prompting and priming, hooks, GUPP, NDI, formulas, molecules, beads, epics, convoys, orders, patrols, plugins, tmux, seances, and more more more. It’s all there. You can mix and match to create arbitrarily simple or fancy orchestrators, with all their work logged to a beautiful set of git ledgers.
There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City. We will have some imitators, but I’m not worried. Ask your agent to dig into Dolt federation and have a look at our Wasteland, and you’ll quickly see why this is a superior way to do work.
I can’t begin to express my excitement about Gas City. It is all MIT-licensed, supported by a growing team of enthusiasts, and it is already starting to have legit hosting options for people who want to build orchestration in the cloud. I will have a detailed post about it when we get closer to GA, when it’s late beta and ready for wider adoption.
But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” “How can I rid myself of gougy niche SaaS by in-sourcing it all to AI,” and similar. I know you’re all thinking about it!
Stay tuned. I have another blog post hot on this one’s heels. I’m giving some talks next week, one in NYC and one in San Jose, and I figured, why not just spill all my talk secrets in a public blog so that I have nothing interesting or new to add during my talks!
Anyway, that’s a wrap! Congrats to the Beads community for riding the wave to the 1.0 release and 20k stars, and for finally getting a solid embedded-Dolt experience. Thanks to the Dolt team and Dustin Brown for that! And congrats to everyone who has used Gas Town to do something cool. I couldn’t be happier!
Finally, a huge thank you to the core team who have all worked incredibly hard to bring you Gas Town, Gas City, the Wasteland, and much more to come. From left to right, skipping me the panda, there’s Matt Beane, Chris Sells, Julian Knutsen, Tim Sehn, and Brendan Hopper. We’ve got so much more in store for this ecosystem. Come join our Discord at gastownhall.ai!
Gas Town Ecosystem Generals: Matt, Chris, Steve, Julian, Tim, Brendan
I guess, for the sake of temporary reprieve, we’re glad for the push to get TSA workers paid again and back to work. The security lines were becoming abysmal.
Count me among those a little disappointed, however. Ultimately, what we need isn’t to keep TSA funded, but quite the opposite. We need to dismantle the entire thing and start over. As I’ve been opining for years, our approach to airport security is, for the most part, a colossal waste of time and money. It needs to be rethought and rebuilt.
The major record labels have abandoned it—investing in old songs, not new artists.
Streaming platforms are even worse, promoting AI slop and algorithmic crud.
Meanwhile the whole technocracy wants to turn music-making into digital content farming—and will spend a trillion dollars to make that happen.
Each year, fewer and fewer new songs reach the charts. Every genre gets turned into a museum, where antiquated works predominate. And fans can’t even remember the name of the artist they heard online—because they never learned it in the first place.
Below are the latest numbers, courtesy of Chartmetric. It shows the decline of new music as a percent of streaming hits. The trend is ominous.
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Thin, broken-up sea ice and areas of open water dominate the northern Barents Sea in this image acquired on March 17, 2026, by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
At the top of the planet, the cap of sea ice across Arctic waters grows and shrinks with the seasons, usually reaching its annual maximum extent in March. In 2026, this peak occurred on March 15, when the extent reached 14.29 million square kilometers, matching the lowest maximum observed since satellite monitoring began in 1979. One of the key areas contributing to the low maximum this year was the Barents Sea.
The Barents Sea lies at the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, bordered to the northwest by the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, and to the northeast and east by the Russian islands of Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, respectively. It is one of more than a dozen subregions—including the Central Arctic Ocean and nearby seas, bays, and waterways—across which scientists use remote sensing to track sea ice. The region is important for fisheries, shipping routes, and scientific research.
On March 17, 2026, the Terra satellite captured this image of the northern Barents Sea. Near Franz Josef Land, broken sea ice drifted near areas of open water closer to Novaya Zemlya. The region is often cloudy, as it was that day, but most clouds were thin enough to reveal the sea ice and water below.
In addition to the low extent, data from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite indicate that Barents sea ice in mid-March 2026 was also very thin, according to Nathan Kurtz, chief of the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Previous years, such as 2021 and 2025, also saw especially thin ice around the time of the maximum. “What was striking this year, however, was that the ice was also completely melted away in more of the Barents Sea, in addition to areas of thinning spreading northward,” Kurtz said.
On the opposite side of the Arctic, the Sea of Okhotsk also contributed to the low total sea ice extent across the Arctic in March 2026. But the factors driving the losses differ between the two regions.
In the Barents, studies have shown that the main driver is large-scale atmospheric circulation, with winds channeling warm, humid air from the North Atlantic straight into the area, accelerating melt. These winds can be influenced by tropical weather thousands of miles away. Disturbances originating over the Maritime Continent near Indonesia can “send ripples through the atmosphere that reach the Arctic within one to two weeks,” Kurtz said.
In contrast, the Sea of Okhotsk mostly has thin, seasonal ice that changes thickness from year to year. Local winds play a big role, sometimes pushing the ice together to create thicker, ridged areas, and other times spreading it out, making it thinner. Because of this, the ice loss there is mainly driven by local weather, unlike in the Barents Sea, where distant atmospheric forces have a greater impact.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
1. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid. This history book actually tries to explain to the reader how things were. Oh such books are so rare! (Why is that?) Definitely recommended, written at the very end of the apartheid era which gives it yet another angle of interest.
2. Nic von Wielligh and Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme. I had been looking for a book on this topic for a long time, and finally I found the right one in a South African bookshop. They did build six atomic bombs, almost seven, and this is the story of how that started and was later reversed. Hundreds of pages of substantive detail, and I had not realized how much the conflict in Angola, and Cuban/Soviet involvement, was a major factor in the whole episode.
3. David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. We keep on learning lots about the Maya, and this is the best book to follow what has been going on. Well-written and clear, and it does not numb your mind with details you may not care about.
4. Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991. I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was. This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history. It makes the time and place imaginable. The book also goes a long way toward disaggregating different Soviet eras, rather than just the end of Stalinism.
In the world of politics, time isn’t just money – it’s momentum, and momentum is everything. Election cycles are notoriously volatile, moving from a quiet stroll to a full-blown sprint in the blink of an eye. For a campaign manager, the pressure to stay visible while responding to a rapidly changing landscape is a constant weight. You need a team behind you that understands that a delay of even a few days can feel like a lifetime when the polls are about to open.
Most local print shops are great for a small business that needs a few hundred business cards or a single banner for a grand opening. However, those same shops often crumble when they are hit with an order for ten thousand yard signs on a Tuesday afternoon. Political work requires a level of intensity and a specific understanding of deadlines that your average commercial printer simply isn’t built to handle. You aren’t just looking for a vendor; you’re looking for a logistical partner who can survive the storm with you.
Choosing the wrong partner can lead to empty street corners and missed opportunities just when the race is heating up. It’s about finding a facility that has the horsepower to keep up with your growth and the flexibility to pivot when the strategy changes. Knowing how to choose a political printer that can handle the unique demands of a campaign is essential to protecting your candidate’s success.
Analyzing Throughput and Production Capacity
When you’re vetting a potential printer, the first thing you need to look at is their actual “throughput capacity.” This isn’t just about how many machines they have on the floor, but how fast those machines can actually turn a digital file into a finished product. In a tight race, you might need thousands of signs printed, dried, and ready for pickup within a forty-eight-hour window. If a shop can’t guarantee that kind of speed, they are a liability to your field operation.
High-volume printing requires specialized equipment that can run around the clock without breaking down or losing quality. You want a shop that has invested in industrial-grade presses designed for speed and consistency across every single unit. Ask them about their peak capacity and how they handle multiple large orders simultaneously during the busy season. A printer that is already at eighty percent capacity before you even place your order is a recipe for disaster.
Efficiency in the back-end logistics is just as important as the speed of the press itself. You need to know that they have the staff to handle the trimming, the grommeting, and the packaging without creating a bottleneck in the warehouse. A fast printer with a slow finishing department is still a slow printer at the end of the day. Verify that their entire workflow is optimized for the kind of rapid-fire production that political campaigns demand.
The Importance of the Union Label
For many political organizations and candidates, the presence of a “Union Label”—often called the Union Bug—is a non-negotiable requirement for all printed materials. This small mark signals to voters and labor groups that the campaign supports fair wages and professional working conditions. In a competitive primary or a general election, failing to include this label on your signs can lead to significant blowback from key stakeholders. It’s a small detail that carries a massive amount of political weight.
The Union Bug acts as a symbol of solidarity and a commitment to the local workforce that resonates deeply with many voter demographics. It shows that you aren’t just looking for the cheapest possible option, but that you value the people who are actually building your campaign materials. For some organizations, the absence of this mark is enough to withhold an endorsement or a donation. It is a vital part of your brand’s “street cred” and its overall standing in the community.
Not every print shop is authorized to use these labels, so you must verify this capability long before you sign a contract. A shop that claims they can “just add it” without a legitimate union agreement is putting your campaign at serious legal and reputational risk. Make sure you’re working with a shop that is fully certified and understands the specific placement rules for these marks. The Union Bug is an essential tool for building trust with a large and influential part of the electorate.
Prioritizing Reliability Over the Initial Low Bid
When you’re managing a tight budget, it is incredibly tempting to just go with the shop that provides the lowest initial bid. However, in the world of political printing, a lower price often comes with a hidden cost in terms of reliability and speed. If a sign is five cents cheaper but arrives three days late, it’s actually much more expensive for the campaign. Saving a few dollars isn’t worth the risk of being invisible during a critical voting window.
The real value of a printing partnership is found in the “total cost of success,” which includes the peace of mind that the job will be done right. You want to pay for a team that knows your history, understands your branding, and is committed to your candidate’s victory. This relationship allows for a much more efficient workflow where errors are minimized and the quality remains high across every single piece. A trusted partner is an investment in the overall health and momentum of the race.
Ultimately, the goal is to build a foundation that allows the candidate to focus on the voters rather than the logistics of the signs. By choosing a printer based on capacity, certification, and reliability, you’re setting the stage for a much smoother and more effective campaign. A few extra cents per sign is a small price to pay for the confidence that your message will be on the street when it matters most. Success is built on the quality of the people you choose to have in your corner.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—The first time NASA launched humans toward the Moon, in December 1968, the United States was a deeply fractured nation.
The historic flight of three people into the unknown brought a measure of solace to a country riven by assassinations, riots, political discord, and a deeply unpopular foreign war.
If history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. Today, four humans are on the way to the Moon, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. They do so, once again, amid a troubled world.
This is for new routers; you don’t have to throw away your existing ones:
The Executive Branch determination noted that foreign-produced routers (1) introduce “a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt the U.S. economy, critical infrastructure, and national defense” and (2) pose “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure and directly harm U.S. persons.”
Any new router made outside the US will now need to be approved by the FCC before it can be imported, marketed, or sold in the country.
In order to get that approval, companies manufacturing routers outside the US must apply for conditional approval in a process that will require the disclosure of the firm’s foreign investors or influence, as well as a plan to bring the manufacturing of the routers to the US.
Certain routers may be exempted from the list if they are deemed acceptable by the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security, the FCC said. Neither agency has yet added any specific routers to its list of equipment exceptions.
[…]
Popular brands of router in the US include Netgear, a US company, which manufactures all of its products abroad.
One exception to the general absence of US-made routers is the newer Starlink WiFi router. Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.
Presumably US companies will start making home routers, if they think this policy is stable enough to plan around. But they will be more expensive than routers made in China or Taiwan. Security is never free, but policy determines who pays for it.
Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they’re calling “Coruna,” a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers.
[…]
Coruna’s code also appears to have been originally written by English-speaking coders, notes iVerify’s cofounder Rocky Cole. “It’s highly sophisticated, took millions of dollars to develop, and it bears the hallmarks of other modules that have been publicly attributed to the US government,” Cole tells WIRED. “This is the first example we’ve seen of very likely US government toolsbased on what the code is telling usspinning out of control and being used by both our adversaries and cybercriminal groups.”
TechCrunch reports that Coruna is definitely of US origin:
Two former employees of government contractor L3Harris told TechCrunch that Coruna was, at least in part, developed by the company’s hacking and surveillance tech division, Trenchant. The two former employees both had knowledge of the company’s iPhone hacking tools. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about their work for the company.
It’s always super interesting to see what malware looks like when it’s created through a professional software development process. And the TechCrunch article has some speculation as to how the US lost control of it. It seems that an employee of L3Harris’s surviellance tech division, Trenchant, sold it to the Russian government.
The Orion spacecraft successfully fired its main engine for 5 minutes and 50 seconds on Thursday, sending four astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. For NASA and the Artemis II crew members, this marked a point of no return for more than week.
Most Americans, indeed about three-quarters of the population around the world, have not witnessed humans leaving low-Earth orbit in their lifetimes. The last time this occurred was 1972, with the final Apollo Moon mission.
The “translunar injection” burn of Orion’s main engine occurred about one day after the successful launch of the mission on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday. This burn was the last major firing of Orion’s main engine, and sets the crew on a course to fly around the Moon on Monday, slingshot back toward Earth under lunar gravity, and splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, April 10.
Airports in chaos, Senate Republicans caving to Senate Democrats, House Republicans caving to Senate Republicans, a huge bill for Iran, the sweeping, voter-suppressing SAVE Act: there’s a lot that Congress is (in theory) handling right now with (in practice) limited success. TPM reporter Emine Yücel and I will try to make sense of it all at noon. Watch here.
There were two revealing moments during Donald Trump’s speech to the nation last night on the war in Iran, and another in a luncheon speech he gave earlier that day. The first was his threat to bomb Iranians “back to the Stone Age where they belong.” Trump was echoing, whether consciously or not, a comment that Air Force General Curtis LeMay had made in a 1965 book. LeMay advised that if North Vietnam didn’t bow to American aims in South Vietnam, the United States “should bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
LeMay’s comment violated fundamental norms of American war and diplomacy. America was supposed to be a “city on the hill,” a “moral exemplar.” Well before the mass protests against the war had started, there was outrage at LeMay’s quote, and it became a permanent stain on his reputation. I.F. Stone famously called him a “caveman in a jet bomber.” That Trump, the elected president of the United States, could use a similar threat says something about him and about the depth to which the country has sunk to tolerate this kind of rhetoric from its leader.
In his speech, Trump also ceded the responsibility for opening the Strait of Hormuz to “the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait,” which, he claimed, did not include the United States. This repeated a statement he had made on Truth Social. There are two ways to interpret Trump’s statement, and I don’t know which is right. First, Trump could be declaring defeat in the war in Iran. If Iran controls traffic through the Strait, it can threaten the world economy and, in effect, Republican electoral chances in 2026. If Trump’s principal care as president (besides plastering his name on buildings) is the state of the stock and bond market, Iran has the upper hand if it controls the Strait.
Secondly, Captain John Konrad, an expert in shipping and the editor of the website gCaptain, argues that Trump could use the military to open the Strait of Hormuz, and is using his power to do so to extract concessions from the countries, chiefly in Europe, that depend on oil and gas from the Strait. These could include control of Greenland.
Konrad notes that Trump has ordered the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to provide an insurer for Gulf shipping that would, in effect, replace Lloyd’s as the insurer of last resort and give the United States power over a key choke point in the international economy. I don’t know whether Konrad is right. His argument, as he notes, does not presume that Trump started the war to win control of the Strait in this manner, but that in the course of the war, he (and probably Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) hit upon this as an ancillary benefit of the war.
Finally, I should mention a statement Trump made in an Easter luncheon speech that day. He said:
The United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country.
As numerous posts on X noted last night, Democrats could effectively use that statement in the 2026 election to show that Trump cares more about fighting “forever wars” in the Middle East than about providing health care and daycare to Americans. It’s America Second, or in some minds, Israel First. Trump was conceding the point that his critics on the left and right have made against him. On April Fool’s Day, he was playing the fool.
I want to reiterate all the points I made about Trump’s speech last night. Just for the sake of his own political standing, the whole idea was a mistake. It wasn’t a good speech. It wasn’t delivered well. And it didn’t either make favorable news or actually address the issues that have the public or energy markets upset. I didn’t realize as I was watching the speech that his vague “two to three weeks” prediction of when the war will end was really just a restatement of what we might call the Trumpian Constant, the prescribed duration after Trump will, purportedly, always have gotten things worked out and awesome. The time before the Obamacare replacement plan is released, when infrastructure week will finally arrive. I mean, two weeks is genuinely a cliche with Trump or, in more modern parlance, a meme. Trump just tacked on another week. As you might have seen there are lots of charts floating around showing how the price of oil and oil futures spiked pretty dramatically during his speech.
This piece from Semafor reminded me that there’s really only one part of that speech that probably meant anything to energy markets: Trump’s evolving and coalescing decision that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz isn’t Trump’s problem. It’s up to a handful of importer nations in Asia, almost all of which have small regional navies and would, in any case, face vast coordination problems if they tried to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force. When Trump says that — not our problem, up to those guys — everyone knows that means it’s not going to happen. And Trump has made the decision that what his war caused isn’t his problem to fix. So expect oil prices to go a lot higher. Because it’s that throttled oil supply that is responsible for all the international economic fallout. Apart from that and the other ways tanker stoppages send shocks through the global economy, no one would care about any of this more than they care about a bunch of other regional wars.
There’s a sentence from that Semafor piece by Tim McDonnell. After a bunch of pretty dismal news about energy prices and maritime insurance rates he writes this: “Another important, and possibly more reassuring, signal is the far end of oil price futures. Crude oil to be delivered in December 2028 is now about $66 per barrel, a bit higher than it was before the war but a good 40% below the price for deliveries today.”
As he suggests, this isn’t necessarily that reassuring. Certainly not to anyone in the world of electoral politics who is on the line for these numbers. It’s a reality check to everyone in the world of politics, which has mostly been in denial about all of this. Just on the basis of what has already happened and even with a fairly quick resolution of the conflict, this is already baked in not just for this election cycle but for most of the next one.
I am curious to read more about what regional analysts make of all this. But we know that Iran wants to exercise control over the Strait of Hormuz going forward and probably exact some kind of tolls on passage. If the U.S. doesn’t try to undo that either by force or diplomacy, it seems highly unrealistic in the near term that any coalition of states with small regional navies is going to do anything about it. It seems far more likely that countries will make one-off deals with Iran for the passage of ships heading for their ports. Or perhaps China (the biggest importer of Iranian oil) will make some arrangement with Iran and thus become the guarantor of a big chunk of the global oil supply, and vastly increase its geopolitical power in the Gulf and throughout Asia.
The upshot remains a massive geopolitical defeat for the United States regardless of how much stuff the U.S. military may have blown up during the course of the war.
I think any press person who watched President Trump’s Iran cheer-up session speech on truth serum would have to concede that this was a speech he shouldn’t have given. He meandered. He looked bad and worn out. He had the requisite moments when his degenerate inner monologue creeps into the open: he said that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something for importer countries in Asia to deal with, that they should “grab and cherish” the strait, as though it were some underage beauty pageant contestant Trump was hungering to assault. What is important is that in political and public opinion terms, there was nothing new or newsworthy in this speech. They didn’t even manage to accomplish this in the narrow and cynical sense of saying anything new that could be a fresh point of public discussion. It was a rambling set of unconvincing excuses no one with any real concern or anxiety about this war (the only real audience) would find convincing. Why are you complaining, he asks? This war hasn’t gone on nearly as long as World War II! LOL.
Market watchers will note that the White House is now solidifying around the idea that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something importer countries will have to deal with, that it’s not America’s problem. That means that the economic fallout of the war will continue unabated. This is simply rebranding a massive strategic defeat as some kind of America First swagger. Of course, oil markets are global. It doesn’t really matter if the U.S. makes as much oil as it consumes. That’s not how prices work.
Iran said today that after the war with the U.S. and Israel concludes that it will “oversee” transit through the Strait of Hormuz. It says it will do so in some kind of common arrangement with Oman. (Oman is the country on the other side of narrowest point of the Strait.) This was mixed with statements that this does not mean ships will be blocked. Basically Iran and Oman will try to make it a better cargo experience for everyone. The Times reports that Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs says that this oversight “will naturally not mean restrictions; rather, they are intended to facilitate and ensure safe passage and to provide better services to ships passing through this route.”
Obviously what Iran says will happen and what will happen are not necessarily the same thing. But when Iran and the President of the United States are saying essentially the same thing it starts to seem like this is what will happen. The geopolitical impact of this whole adventure starts to seem very reminiscent of the Suez Crisis of 1956. (Simply put: the UK and France got together and with a secret agreement with Israel tried to assert control over the Suez Canal. But the plan fell apart, the U.S. refused to support the scheme and the whole thing blew up in the former colonial powers’ faces. The UK and France were the past; the U.S. was the future.)
Perhaps it’s not quite what happened to the United Kingdom and France on the global stage, the way Suez cemented the secondary status of these two former Great Powers. One of the great advantages the U.S. has always had is internal wealth, vast land mass, a massive and highly educated population, relative isolation dominating a whole hemisphere. But it still looks like what no one is quite yet willing to call a massive, almost unimaginable strategic defeat. Taking Iran, which after the events of 2024 and 2025 was weaker than it had been in almost 50 years, and allowing it to emerge from a direct military confrontation with the United States as arbiter of a quarter of 20% of the global supply of oil and gas, simply beggars belief.
In less than a week, the TPM team is heading down to Austin to hang with our Texas readers and friends at the Observer. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, now is the time!
Remember, Inside members get free access to all events. And as Prime member, you get 33% off your tickets. Forgot or didn’t receive the discount code? Just email Joe Ragazzo at joe@talkingpointsmemo.com
As a reminder, the night will begin with a conversation between TPM founder and editor-in-chief Josh Marshall and Texas Observer’s politics editor, Justin Miller. They’ll be talking the Sen. John Cornyn vs. AG Ken Paxton runoff and the Trump endorsement that wasn’t; whether James Talarico can become the first Democratic senator in Texas in more than 30 years; and the state of the redistricting wars.
Then, D.C. reporter Kate Riga and Josh will record a live episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga. After the pod, there will be an audience Q&A and then we’ll wrap up the night in the bar.
News is breaking now that Trump has fired Pam Bondifrom her job as attorney general. Some reports suggest he may replace her with EPA head Lee Zeldin.
But Fox News reports that she’s actually been out of the job for the better part of a day now:
Bondi met with Trump in the Oval Office Wednesday night ahead of his speech to the nation on the war in Iran, where she reportedly was informed of her ouster, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.
One of those sources said that by the time Trump took his place behind the podium for the address, Bondi already lost her job and was on her way back to Florida.
Todd Blanche is now running DOJ as acting attorney general, NBC reports.
Update, 1:27 p.m.: Here’s Trump’s inevitable announcement. “We love Pam,” who will be “transitioning” to an “important new job in the private sector.” Blanche is in charge.
Up by very betimes and to my office, where all the morning till towards noon, and then by coach to Westminster Hall with Sir W. Pen, and while he went up to the House I walked in the Hall with Mr. Pierce, the surgeon, that I met there, talking about my business the other day with Holmes, whom I told my mind, and did freely tell how I do depend upon my care and diligence in my employment to bear me out against the pride of Holmes or any man else in things that are honest, and much to that purpose which I know he will make good use of. But he did advise me to take as few occasions as I can of disobliging Commanders, though this is one that every body is glad to hear that he do receive a check.
By and by the House rises and I home again with Sir W. Pen, and all the way talking of the same business, to whom I did on purpose tell him my mind freely, and let him see that it must be a wiser man than Holmes (in these very words) that shall do me any hurt while I do my duty. I to remember him of Holmes’s words against Sir J. Minnes, that he was a knave, rogue, coward, and that he will kick him and pull him by the ears, which he remembered all of them and may have occasion to do it hereafter to his owne shame to suffer them to be spoke in his presence without any reply but what I did give him, which, has caused all this feud. But I am glad of it, for I would now and then take occasion to let the world know that I will not be made a novice.
Sir W. Pen took occasion to speak about my wife’s strangeness to him and his daughter, and that believing at last that it was from his taking of Sarah to be his maid, he hath now put her away, at which I am glad.
He told me, that this day the King hath sent to the House his concurrence wholly with them against the Popish priests, Jesuits, &c., which gives great content, and I am glad of it. So home, whither my father comes and dines with us, and being willing to be merry with him I made myself so as much as I could, and so to the office, where we sat all the afternoon, and at night having done all my business I went home to my wife and father, and supped, and so to bed, my father lying with me in Ashwell’s bed in the red chamber.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and one Canadian launched into orbit from Florida's Space Coast on Wednesday, flying the most powerful rocket ridden by humans on the first leg of a nine-day voyage around the Moon.
Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the four astronauts lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC).
Four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters flashed to life to push the nearly 6 million-pound rocket from its moorings at Launch Complex 39B. The engines and boosters collectively generated 8.8 million pounds of thrust, outclassing NASA's Saturn V rocket used for Apollo lunar missions.
The name of that think tank? The Heritage Foundation. Yes, the fascist-friendly think tank that is stocking the Trump Administration.
They know they are lying about the need for the SAVE Act. The question is will any of the large media organizations ask why we need the SAVE Act, when the premier rightwing think tank says otherwise. I bet I can guess the correct answer!
LOVE this icosahedron plotted by Dave Mawer, onto four layers of tracing paper. We’ve been seeing a lot* of animated plotter drawings recently, but this method of - I assume - using the z-axis to decide which layer of paper to plot onto adds another dimension.
You can see more of his work over on Instagram, go say “Hi”.
Meanwhile, LB ALLIX (IG) made this, and the sheer chunkiness of it makes me smile.
Tiny jam jars are great for adding weight to pens, but this custom 3d print is probably far more practical and allows you to adjust the weight by adding more or less nuts to the nut caddy.
vpype is correctly self described as “the Swiss-Army-knife command-line tool for plotter vector graphics.” and will solve a lot of your pen plotting troubles, so it’s worth getting to grips with.
However, sometimes you just want to do the most common optimising tasks with little fuss.
Draw Scape (IG) - who has a lot of experience dealing with kind of thing - has you covered with a web tool that handles the most common use cases.
Also handy that it shows you the commands so you can (eventually) figure out how to do it yourself.
# HEXAGON PEN HOLDERS
Those with long memories may remember a project called “Hexagones Landscape” [sic] that released on fxhash back in November 2022. It looked a bit like this…
Well, apparently a side project of mine is making pen holders. Because I always have a lot of pens kicking around, and the most efficient way of keeping them ready to go while taking up minimal space is to store the vertically. Here’s some I made to hold TWSBI Eco pens.
Now I need to do the same for my Pentel brush pens that are scattered all over the place, here’s an v.2 that allows you to both hold pens and create your own hexagon landscape.
v.3 was fun, but not practical…
…and v.4 is about to be sent to be printed next, so we’ll see how that goes.
# DARK FOREST OS
Last time I said I’d write about DFOS, and I had a few emails from people saying they were interested in hearing more.
Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to play with it much more since last time. The plan was to use it some more, set up a few things, have some content there so it’s not a ghost town, then finally send out invite links.
That and I’m waiting for a couple more features to be rolled out, that I think really need to be there to make the whole thing a lot easier for people, before really going to town with it.
Hopefully I’ll have more of an update, and an invite link either next newsletter or the one after.
# DRAWING MACHINES 101
Two more videos since last time, I wanted these to go out at the same time as they work well back-to-back.
For a lot of people who already know a bit of code, those two are going to be all you need to get up and running writing code to make your own SVG files.
I think the second one also does a good job of showing that you don’t need much code to start to do interesting things, and the code is only half of it. With different paper, pens and even moving the machine around (sometimes while it plots) you can take some simple lines quite far.
I also uploaded the March Patreon Q&A video, which answers a bunch of questions. Even if you don’t watch the whole thing, I like the longer answer about how to get yourself into an idea creating mindset at 01:44 and the brush pen plotting at 18:52.
The whole thing is here…
I’ve finally reached the virtuous circle of creating pen plots during the making of the tutorials, which’ll form the basis of what I send out to the Patreon supporters. Getting systems and processes in place is often a hard slog, but it’s nice when it finally pays off.
# THE END
LAMY, which I know a bunch of you use, have the popular SAFARI fountain pen, just introduced the SAFARI Roll-Ink, which is a rollerball pen that takes the BLUET10 ink cartridge from the fountain pen; but not the ink convertor, nor do they recommend any of the other ink cartridges.
So fuck that right, I washed out the cartridge and replaced the ink with iroshizuku to-ro ink, and so far, it’s worked just fine.
I’ll update if it’s still working in the next newsletter on Thursday 18th, catch you then!
I think it’s wrongheaded and gross and also exposes a jarring lack of self-awareness. Like, I’m 53. I’m balding. I have the body of a relatively fit-yet-aging man of my years. Sometimes I have to yank a hair from my nostril. Or ear. I suck in my gut quite regularly.
I know who I am, just as most readers (I assume) know who they are.
Which leads me to this post, via Donald Trump earlier today …
I honestly believe Donald Trump gazes into a mirror and sees Brad Pitt. Which is weird, because (in no particular order):
• Donald Trump has a vagina neck.
• Donald Trump spray tans his face and hands in a bright orange/pink glow.
• Donald Trump is probably 30 pounds overweight.
• Donald Trump (according to many people) smells of poop and wears an adult diaper.
• Donald Trump’s mouth droops.
• Donald Trump’s hair appears similar to that of the Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow.
And I just wanna say—who cares? Like, truly, who cares? Some people are attractive, some people are less attractive, most people fall into the big middle pool of meh.
But it’s beyond weird that our physically unattractive president, what with his vagina neck and his fake tan and his paperclip-sized hands, outwardly ridicules a revered rock ‘n roll icon who looks like … this.
So, seriously, just shut up and focus on Iran.
That’s the country you bombed without reason or plan.
Today, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president attended oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area, alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to observe arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara, a case under which Trump hopes to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case argued before the court today grew out of Trump’s executive order of January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.
With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.
Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.
The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.
In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.
But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned about Black Americans—there were only 4,272 Black Americans in California in 1870, while there were almost half a million white Americans—but wanted no part of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society.
Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country’s early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designed to clarify that Afro-Caribbeans and Africans—imported to be enslaved—would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only “free white persons” to become citizens.
In the late nineteenth century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins, using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage, and intermarriage.
As late as 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.
The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind upheld the argument that only “free white persons” could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens. After the Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about fifty South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens.
Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.
But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.
The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”
In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”
But one judge after another has sided against him on this issue, and he apparently showed up at the Supreme Court today to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.
Later, Wang described what it was like to argue in court today. She explained, it’s “a nerve-wracking experience to argue any case in the Supreme Court, and especially one as weighty as this one, where the president of the United States is taking aim at a cherished American tradition and individual right of citizenship based on your birth in this country. I myself am a Fourteenth Amendment citizen because my parents had not yet naturalized when I was born. So I walked in today with the spirit of my parents and so many people’s ancestors in that first generation of Americans—whether they naturalized or not, I consider them all Americans. They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”
This is the third chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!
In the previous chapter you learned how to execute a variety of queries on the products table. Interestingly, some of those queries were designed to obtain product manufacturers and not products, and this required duplicates to be removed by grouping the results.
It’s likely that artist Saul Steinberg may be best known for “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” an illustration that appeared as the well-known cover of the 29 March 1976 issue of The New… More
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Last weekend, Yonatan Touval wrote an essay in the New York Times with an explanation for the American and Israeli governments’ apparent failure to consider that if they attacked Iran, the Iranians might, you know, do things in response, making choices colored by their history, their beliefs, their culture, and their politics. “Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory,” Touval wrote.
Donald Trump in particular is incapable of empathy, the capacity to see the world from the perspective of someone else, even only for a moment. Some responded to Touval’s essay by saying Trump has no theory of mind, no capacity to imagine how someone else thinks and makes decisions. But that’s not quite true. He has a theory, it’s just that it’s one in which all other minds exist only to regard him with awe. Everyone is a member of the his audience, watching him and reading about him and shaking our heads in wonder at him.
You can see it in Trump’s obsession with the gaze of the crowd, which has gripped him all his life. The true measure of a person, an action, or an event, he believes, is that it is seen, and by how many. And the highest compliment one can pay, the greatest superlative imaginable, is that the crowd will say “We’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Take a look at some of the things he said in the speech he gave from the White House Wednesday night, the purpose of which was to convince the public that the war in Iran was a great idea and is going splendidly:
“In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few people have ever seen before.”
“I also want to thank our troops for the masterful job they did in taking the country of Venezuela in a matter of minutes. That hit was quick, lethal, violent and respected by everyone all over the world.”
“In June, I ordered a strike on Iran’s key nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
“We just learned that, we took them out, we took them all out so that no one would really dare stop them and their race for a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.”
“Our armed forces have been extraordinary. There’s never been anything like it militarily. Everyone is talking about it.”
“With our historic tax cuts, where people are just now talking about receiving larger refunds than they ever thought possible, they are getting so much more money than they thought.”
“The whole world is watching and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance, they just can’t believe what they’re seeing, they, leave it to your imagination, but they can’t believe what they’re seeing, the brilliance of the United States military.”
“Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world. And I’ll tell you, the world is watching.”
Importantly, almost all of these comments were in the ad-libbed portions of the speech, when Trump adds his own commentary and emphasis to what his aides have written for him. The picture he paints is one in which everyone — individual people, countries, the world as a whole — is an eternal spectator in a constant state of awe, slack-jawed in amazement at either events as they unfold or, more often, the greatness of Trump and his accomplishments. Everything he does is something no one has ever seen before, and our purpose is to stand back and behold him in his glory.
This is the perspective of a man whose brain has been poisoned by his life-long pursuit of fame and admiration. He exists only if he’s being watched, and his decisions are good only so far as they are seen. This is why Trump is the purest expression of this cursed moment in cultural history: He is every fame-lusting Real Housewife, every hungry influencer trying to boost their middling follower count, every looksmaxxing douchebro, taken to a terrifying extreme.
And underneath all the desperate bravado is a well of insecurity so deep and dark it would destroy the world. Way back in 2017, I wrote an article about Trump’s obsession with the idea that other countries were laughing at the United States, the most horrible fate that could befall us:
Send President Trump abroad to rub shoulders with a bunch of foreigners, and chances are somewhere around 100 percent that he’ll come back thinking about whether anyone is laughing at us. “Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News,” the president tweeted on Tuesday morning.
Before he ran for president, Trump was certainly mocked here and there in the media for his vulgar nouveau-riche excesses, but it wasn’t until he achieved his goal of conquering the world’s attention that the laughing truly began. Indeed, by now there is no figure in the world, and perhaps in all of history, who has been the object of so much laughter and ridicule. This incident was one that must have wounded him to the core:
All the cool kids making fun of him behind his back! No wonder he hates them so much.
Today, those leaders and their successors want nothing to do with his disastrous war, a reaction that has sent him into such a tizzy that he may finally try to withdraw from NATO. But in the meantime, he’ll continue to trumpet his unprecedented success, insisting that all eyes are upon him and no one can believe what they’re seeing.
Which is true. Just not in the way he means.
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The same model ID no longer needs to be repeated in both the default model and allowed models lists - setting it as a default model automatically adds it to the allowed models list. #6
I watched three TV series during the past few months, including a nine episode dramatization of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Good novels never completely translate to the screen, but I thought the acting was outstanding. I also enjoyed a 3-part series on the sax player Wayne Shorter and another 3-part series on mannerist art. The latter really needs a good TV screen, as the images are often stunningly beautiful.
I’ve also been watching a lot of Youtube videos where Michael Bartlett discusses all sorts of films. He has an excellent threepartseries on Japanese film, and many other episodes devoted to various directors such as Ozu, Tarkovsky and Lynch. But it’s not all highbrow stuff, he loves westerns and makes a strong case for Sergio Leone being underrated.
As far as books, I finally got around to reading classics like Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Woolf’s A Room of Her Own. Surprisingly (at least to me), I much preferred the feminist essay to the World’s Greatest Biography. I might do a post on the Woolf essay. Johnson’s a wonderful guy with lots of witty observations, but his political views are almost unbelievably appalling. On the other hand, he would have been an incredible blogger.
This makes me wonder what views I currently hold that will later be viewed as equally evil. I recently heard a discussion of a lawsuit in Texas where prisoners were complaining about a lack of air conditioning. For someone of my generation, those complaints sound silly. But I could imagine that in 100 years my view will be seen as cruel and inhuman. Less clear is whether that means my view is wrong in an absolute sense, or correct for today but wrong for the world of 2126.
In fiction, I read Mario Vargas Llosa’s depressing The War at the End of the World and António Lobo Antunes’s even more depressing The Land at the End of the World. In both cases, I respected the books more than I liked them. I also read Knausgaard’s Autumn and then his more recent The School at Night. The latter seems like one of Knausgaard’s best, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the protagonist. Is he an accurate portrayal of a self-obsessed male, or an unrealistic caricature? Not knowing anyone that extreme, I’m not certain. In some respects, this novel is more horrifying than anything by Stephen King. I also enjoyed Far North by Marcel Theroux and After the Flood—an excellent set of essays on the most recent 30 years of Dylan’s career by Robert Polito.
I did not enjoy Milwaukee Bucks basketball.
This post is not gated for all the new films I saw and the seven best of the older films, but then gated after that.
2026:Q1 films
Newer films:
Sirat (Spain/Morocco) 3.8 This is far more impressive (both visually and sonically) on the big screen. Must see for fans of the old French film Wages of Fear (and the equally good remake Sorcerer.) Don’t expect a Hollywood film—this is one of the most realistic depictions of fatherhood that I’ve ever seen.
Kokuho (Japan) 3.8 Halfway through I wondered “Why isn’t this a big hit?”, and then when I got home I discovered that it is the highest grossing live action film in Japanese history. The film itself is a bit too Hollywood for my taste, with some familiar drama about sibling rivalry. But the Kabuki sequences were a revelation, and are the reason I give this such a high rating. I had almost no knowledge of or interest in Kabuki and left the theatre thinking it is one of the world’s great art forms.
The film’s effectiveness is largely due to the skill of the choreographer and director at using the camera to “explain” Kabuki. It literally took just seconds into the first performance for the filmmakers to get a dunce like me to see Kabuki with fresh eyes. Indeed, I might enjoy a live performance much less that the filmed version. I find that I’m often not receptive to an art form unless it is translated in something more familiar. As a teenager, I didn’t understand what poetry was until I listened to Dylan. Another example is My Dinner with Andre, which might be boring as a stage play but was riveting as a film. Sorry, but this is another one of those films that must be seen on the big screen—the final sequence is breathtaking.
No Other Choice (Korean) 3.7 Like many Korean films, Park’s amusing black comedy finds humor in the willingness to push scenes to the absolute limit. I suppose there’s a bit of social commentary on downsizing and AI, but as with the film Parasite only a fool would take any of the politics seriously.
Naked Ambition (US) 3.5 I almost gave up on this documentary about Bunny Yeager after about 20 minutes, as it seemed to mostly consist of a series of cheesecake photos from the 1950s. But I stuck with it, and it gradually became more and more interesting.
Crime 101 (US) 3.4 At the beginning we see that the rich guy has paintings by Balthus and Gauguin, which is Hollywood’s way of signaling that he’s a pedophile. (Americans are such philistines.) I normally don’t like slick Hollywood crowd pleasers, but I make an exception for a well-made crime drama. This one has all the usual cliches—a rich white male boomer that we are supposed to hate, a black woman that is treated unfairly, a good cop in a corrupt police force, a thief from a broken home with a heart of gold, and an evil thief played by a blond Asian guy--an Ichi the Killer look-alike. It’s also way too long, with some pointless car chases. And yet despite all that, it’s quite entertaining.
The way rich boomers are now portrayed in Hollywood makes me wonder if people should start collecting that Social Security immediately and not wait until age 70. But then I recall their voting power. . . .
The Mastermind (US) 3.4 Most viewers would find this crime drama to be far more boring than Crime 101, but it’s the sort of low-key film that I generally prefer. Very little action and a somewhat pathetic protagonist, but I enjoyed how well they recreated the feel of Massachusetts back in 1970. I’ve even been to the (obscure) Framingham Art Museum. Lots of quirky humor in the margins.
Videoheaven (US) 3.1 A movie about movies that feature scenes from movie rental stores. This nostalgic documentary is occasionally amusing but runs way too long at nearly 3 hours. I had never noticed how many films feature scenes in video rental stores. Oddly, I don’t recall ever renting a video, as I used to always watch films at the theatre. So, for me it was like visiting a foreign country.
Peter Hujar’s Day (US) 3.0 My Dinner with Andre worked because it combined outstanding cinematography with a fascinating conversation. This one also has excellent cinematography, but I found the conversation to be fairly bland.
The Rip (US) 3.0 As with many modern Hollywood films the pace is so frenetic that you don’t ever become emotionally involved in the drama. There’s too much of pretty much everything, including some overacting from Ben Affleck. Nonetheless, it has an interesting plot and is passable mindless entertainment.
Islands (German) 3.0 I wish I could recommend this well-made mystery more highly, but unfortunately it has a predictable plot that becomes a bit tiresome after 2 hours and 10 minutes.
A Private Life (France) 2.7 There are just three problems with this film. It is too plot driven. It has a silly plot. And it’s about a psychiatrist. Jodie Foster gives a nice performance, but it’s totally wasted.
Mistress Disspeller (China) 2.5 This Chinese film claims to be an exercise in reality TV, a term that generally means the exact opposite—fake TV.
Older Films:
Mulholland Drive (US, 2001) 4.0 The third time through it was better than ever—which doesn’t happen very often with films not directed by Kubrick. Mulholland Drive is to the 21st century what Vertigo was to the 20th century. (I’d argue the plots are more similar than you might suspect, albeit told from radically different points of view.)
Great artists often do their best work when the subject matter is something they know very well, such as producing their own genre of art. Think about Proust and Knausgaard writing about what it’s like to become a writer. Shakespeare’s play within the play in Hamlet. Bi Gan’s Resurrection, Velazquez and Vermeer painting an artist painting a painting. Lynch is at his best when depicting the act of making a film. Consider the two scenes where Naomi Watts goes through her audition. The second is radically different from the first, despite an identical script. Lynch is showing the audience what it means to “act”. And he uses an actress that went through years of disappointment in real life, perhaps knowing that actors are also most effective when doing what they know best.
Many of the scenes that seemed “weird” the first time around, now make perfect sense—and are vastly more emotionally powerful as a result.
BTW, Is it just me, or is Justin Theroux supposed to look like Godard?
Days and Nights in the Forest (India, 1970, CC) 3.9 Satyajit Ray is in the running for the greatest director of all time (along with 20 or 30 other names), and this is one of his best films. As with Ozu’s films, it starts out seeming like a light-hearted look at a group of people and then imperceptibly moves toward scenes that show a profound understanding of how people relate to each other. Featuring the great Sharmila Tagore, who makes all the male leads look like fools. It was great to see a restored print on the big screen—when I saw it 40 years ago the film was in poor shape.
Kiki’s Delivery Service (Japan, 1989) 3.9 It’s been years since I enjoyed a film as much as this one. Takes place in a town with central European architecture where people speak Japanese but transistor radio programs are in English. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. In other words—utopia. One of my three favorite animated films (along with Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro.) When I think of the best recent films, I often see the work of directors with the eye of an artist (Spirited Away, In the Mood for Love, Uncle Boonmee, Flowers of Shanghai, Resurrection, Winter Sleep, Mulholland Drive, Grand Budapest Hotel, etc.)
I was the only person in the theatre. :(
BTW, when you are 70, “recent” means anything in the past 30 years.
Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Germany/Peru, 1972, CC) 3.8 The Heart of Darkness-style irony is laid on pretty thick, but this remains one of the classic films of the 1970s. Perhaps it’s a product of my age but as I get older, even very impressive films often seem increasingly derivative. In 1972, viewers left films like, The Godfather, Solaris, Last Tango in Paris and Aguirre with then feeling they’d experienced something new, something they’d never seen before. That rarely happens today. There were a lot of other very good films in 1972, including two Woody Allen films made before he became repetitive.
Wings of Desire (Germany, 1987, CC) 3.8 A recent list of the 30 greatest films of all time had two entries for Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Coppola, Bresson, Kurosawa and . . . Wim Wenders? Although I’m one of Wenders biggest fans, I have a hard time understanding how he can have two films on a top 30 list that excludes films like Late Spring, Persona, and Rear Window. But I’m glad to see another fan who loves his work.
It was interesting seeing Berlin in the years right before the wall came down. Hard to think of another European city that has changed so dramatically. The film has some beautiful black and white cinematography. And Nick Cave fans will definitely appreciate a couple of live performances. If you watch it on Criterion Channel, check out the excellent accompanying documentary The Angels Among Us.
The Magician (Sweden, 1958, CC) 3.8 This was made when Bergman’s style had fully matured, and the film is more entertaining than some of his more ponderous films done over the next few years. Great B&W cinematography.
Moving (Japan, 1993, CC) 3.8 You can see how the director Shinji Somai was a big influence on modern Japanese masters like Kore-eda and Hamaguchi. He combines a deep understanding of human life (especially the life of children) with a beautiful visual style.
Paid subscribers see reviews for another 29 films. You want to see them too? That’ll be 30 bucks, buddy.
I was delving around in the photo files from our book Home Work, published in 2004. This is the so-called round barn, built by cattleman Peter French and what is now in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon.
In 1872, French set out for Oregon from Sacramento, California with 1200 head of select shorthorn cattle, six Mexican vaqueros, and a Chinese cook.
He drove the cattle across the Sacramento River and then northward up into Eastern Oregon, where he settled on the west side of Steens Mountains.
Over the years, his ranching Empire grew to encompass 200,000 acres and 45,000 head of cattle, one of the largest cattle empires west of the Rockies.
In the late ’70s or early ’80s, French built three round barns for breaking horses in the winter months. This one is 100 feet in diameter, the conical roof framed with a 35-foot center pole of Juniper (about 40” diameter at the bottom, tapering to maybe 28” at the top), 14 surrounding Juniper posts and then a third wall of posts at the perimeter about 8 feet high.
This configuration provided an unbroken interior circular ring inside the barn so horses could run around and get exercise during severe weather.
He built three such barns, with this one being preserved.
It’s a breathtaking building; I spent a couple of hours there in Spring, 2003, shooting photos.
Barns are my cathedrals.
It’s a great story, with 7 more photos, told on pages 206 to 207 of Home Work.
I did over 5000 blog posts back in the day. Every once in a while I’ll drag something over to Substack, like this one.
Donald Trump doesn’t even have the courage to run away.
Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’m not going to do a regular post today — it’s Thursday morning — because I wanted to wait and see what was in the big speech from Donald Trump last night. And I thought I could just do a short video about it.
It turns out that the speech was sort of an anticlimax, although not in a good way. Many people expected Trump to pull the mother of all TACOs, to declare victory and surrender. He did not do that. He declared victory, of course, but he did not actually announce an end to hostilities. On the contrary, he said we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. So add massive war crimes to your schedule.
There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.
One of the moments that really struck me in the speech was him declaring that the whole world was extremely impressed by what happened. He said,
the whole world is watching and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. The world can’t believe what it’s seeing.
What it’s seeing is that the world’s greatest military power took on a fourth-rate power. Again, as I said the other day, Iran’s military budget is a rounding error in our military budget. And we lost. For all practical purposes, we’ve left ourselves in a much weaker position and Iran in a stronger position than it was before.
But Trump has to believe or has to claim that he believes that the whole world is extremely impressed. You might say, why do we care? Well, he cares, obviously. His whole thing is about dominance and believing that we’ve got the world awed by our strength.
If you want the real verdict on the speech, well, Brent oil futures were under $100 when Trump started speaking. They are over $108 as I record this. The oil market, I think is a more clear gauge, although the stock market has also reacted.
Basically, everybody said, oh my God, we thought that this was going to be at least the beginning of the end, and instead it looks like an endless quagmire. I still think that people are not fully taking into account the implications for global oil prices and everything else of the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed for the indefinite future.
So this is going to be really bad. But anyway, it was radically disappointing even to people who are, you know, the markets and a lot of people in the world were actually hoping that the United States would give up. I mean, it’ll be terrible. We really don’t want a medievalist theocracy empowered. But since this is heading nowhere except for, again, massive war crimes, better to end it. But we’re not getting that.
What really strikes me, and there’s obviously deeper stuff in here, but it is a question of character. It’s funny, I don’t think there’s a sort of, if you like, native English term for the Yiddish — but it’s effectively English now — word mensch. A mensch is literally a person, but it means somebody who takes responsibility for their actions, who accepts defeats as being defeats and tries to move on, who tries to improve, basically just being a mensch.
It’s hard to imagine somebody who’s less of a mensch than Donald Trump, except maybe for some of the members of his cabinet. It’s incredible that they’re so lacking in the basics of character.
The thing about what this means for America’s role in the world is not only that Trump and company are doing great damage, but the whole world is watching. They saw that this guy, and it wasn’t hard to see what kind of a person Trump was, that America elected this guy twice. It appears that the American public has completely lost sight of what it means to be a responsible, serious person.
I might say, since this masculinity posturing is such a part of it, they’ve forgotten what it is to be a man. Obviously, that applies to all genders. A country that will elect somebody like that twice is not a country anyone can rely on. And that is the ultimate lesson here.
We have Trump lecturing the world and saying, why are you cowards? Why don’t you come in and help us in this ill-conceived, disastrous war that we started without checking with you? But the reality is that the world is looking and saying, my God, what is wrong with America? They may still have a lot of bombs — although not as many as we started with — but it’s not a country anybody can trust for anything. And that, even more than the price of oil, is going to be the legacy of this war.
Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s
products starting next year, a change that comes after the
grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for
shifting to cheaper ingredients.
By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.
Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall):
Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the
office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the
world, he felt a strange kind of shock — strange because Jobs had
been sick for so long, had even refused medicine when he was first
diagnosed, instead trying to cure the disease with fruit juices,
and so there should have been no shock at all.
“By that time, unfortunately, there was an inevitability to it,”
Cook says. “But I was in denial for so long about the disease and
where it would go, because I had watched him bounce back so many
times, I assumed he always would. When I took the CEO role, I
thought he was going to be executive chairman forever — that’s
what I thought literally six weeks earlier. Looking back, I know
somebody could say, How could you think that, given the
circumstances? But that’s not the way I was wired in that moment.”
D’Agostino, fondly recalling the Apple IIe his family got for Christmas in 1983, wrongly remembers that, “When we turned it on, there was a little trash can in the corner of the screen.” Don’t let that conflation of the IIe and the Macintosh (yet to come in 1983) turn you off. It’s a good profile. Cook’s thoughts on Steve Jobs are touching, and D’Agostino gets Cook to expound upon his strategy of “engagement” with the Trump administration to a degree that I don’t think any other interviewer has. Cook’s answer is over 400 words, and Esquire, to their credit, ran the whole thing.
To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat
down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and
Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how
AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own ambitions. [...]
One of the boldest claims Apple makes for AirPods Max 2 is a 1.5×
improvement in active noise cancellation — achieved without
changing a single physical component. “Getting those improvements
to ANC and especially that 1.5 times more powerful ANC, which of
course is a feat in itself, considering we didn’t change the
actual design of the headphone at all from a form factor or
material standpoint,” says Treski.
That improvement isn’t limited to a specific frequency band
either. “We take that average at 1.5 times across an average of
all frequencies. We’re not cherry-picking individual frequencies
or a certain range,” he adds. That means AirPods Max 2 should
perform better whether it’s blocking louder, booming sounds or
higher-pitched ones — and that’s a high bar, given that the
original AirPods Max were no slouches when it came to blocking
out sound.
Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color throughout (not just, say, 16 color pages in the middle). Apple’s history is both literally and figuratively colorful, and the photos and screenshots Pogue includes are terrific.
The book is nothing short of an instant classic — simultaneously a very enjoyable read, and a meticulously-researched reference for the decades to come. Pogue covers both well-known ground and reports umpteen nuggets, anecdotes, and details that have never been told before. For example, we all know that Steve Jobs was resistant to opening the iPhone to third-party apps. But Pogue interviewed Scott Forstall and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone’s software library while not opening it to third-party developers:
“I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever
want to use,” he told Forstall. “And then the two of us will
prioritize that list. And then I’m going to write you a blank
check, and you are going to build the largest development team in
the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as
quickly as possible.”
Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he
instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an
app store into the iPhone’s software-“against Steve’s knowledge
and wishes,” Forstall says. [...]
Two weeks after the iPhone’s release, someone figured out how to
“jailbreak” the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install
custom apps.
Jobs burst into Forstall’s office. “You have to shut this down!”
But Forstall didn’t see the harm of developers spending their
efforts making the iPhone better. “If they add something
malicious, we’ll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that.
But if all they’re doing is adding apps that are useful, there’s
no reason to break that.”
Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.
Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken
phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the
coolest ones.
“You know what?” he said. “We should build an app store.”
Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in
the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac’s memory-expansion
circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He’d
disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.
The book is just under 600 pages, including a comprehensive index, and it isn’t padded. It is a veritable encyclopedia of Apple history. Just a remarkable, essential, and unique work. If you haven’t ordered a copy, you should, and if you do, here are some make-me-rich affiliate links:
When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people
lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.
I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a
music video with the participation of people standing in that
line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited
the results together and uploaded it — and for six hours, ladies
and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. (It’s
still there.)
Anyway. That night, I got a call from Jobs’s assistant. “I have
Steve on the line,” she said. “Can you take the call?”
I was out to dinner with my family, but I said yes.
“David?” Jobs said when he came on the line. “I saw that song
video you posted today.”
Oh GREAT, I thought. I steeled myself for another epic reaming
by the CEO of Apple.
“I just wanted to say, it was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever
seen,” he said.
Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big,
its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside
the ballroom.
And that’s just the portico.
This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illustrations pointing out specific problems with the design.
Such details affect how people passing by experience these iconic
places, and how each structure fits into a capital city that has
been planned around civic symbols and sightlines since the
1790s. The deliberation is also an expression of democracy,
said Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the
National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued the
administration over the ballroom.
“Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that
process has meaning to us,” Ms. Quillen said. No project belonging
to the public should be the vision of just one man, she said.
That is, however, how the ballroom has often been described.
“President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire
world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this
project is in his hands,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman,
said in a statement. Past administrations and presidents have
wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, he said, and Mr. Trump
will accomplish it.
The way that these lickspittles talk about Trump exactly the way North Koreans speak of Little Kim, or that anyone in any other cult speaks of the cult leader, is just revolting. Even the Chinese don’t speak of Xi “The Pooh” Jinping like this. No one in China pretends Xi is a genius architect.
Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and
again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been
spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his
severance package would be too expensive.
“I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college
degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said.
Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might
as well stick around until we turn the lights off.”
Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993:
But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer
and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered
that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a
full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle
wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome
to the media, kid.
60 Minutes published a short clip of a 2003 Dan Rather interview with Steve Jobs, and it’s a good one. Seems apt both regarding Apple’s continued success after Jobs’s death, and a refutation of the personality cult in The White House.
Photographers at the Press Site capture the launch of the Artemis 2 mission at 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1, 2026. Photo: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
A three-man one-woman crew blasted off on a voyage to the moon Wednesday, riding atop the world’s most powerful operational rocket as it roared away on a trail-blazing flight to help pave the way for upcoming lunar landings and an American moon base.
It was the first piloted moonshot since the end of the Apollo program 53 years ago, a flight expected to carry Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen farther from Earth than any astronauts before them.
The crew will not land on the moon or even go into lunar orbit. But they plan to thoroughly test their Orion capsule, making only its second flight — its first with a crew on board — to make sure it’s up to the task.
At the same time, the mission will test flight controllers and procedures needed to safely send astronauts back to the moon for long-duration stays as NASA sets its sights on winning a superpower space race with China, which plans to send its own taikonauts to the moon before the end of the decade.
“This is a test flight,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told CBS News. “This is the opening act in a series of missions that will send astronauts to and from the moon with great frequency as we return to stay, to build the moon base and realize the scientific and economic potential on the lunar surface.”
For the Artemis 2 astronauts, named to the mission with great fanfare in 2023, the launching came two months later than planned because of work to fix hydrogen leaks in the Space Launch System rocket’s first stage and to resolve an upper stage propellant pressurization problem.
The Artemis 2 astronauts depart for the launch pad. (left to right) Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
On Wednesday, the launch team ran into a couple of what turned out to be minor problems, extending a final planned hold in the countdown at the T-minus 10-minute mark to make sure everything was ship shape and ready to go.
Launch Director Charlie Blackwell Thompson then conducted a poll of engineers in Firing Room 1 asking Wiseman if the crew was “go” for launch. The astronauts all said yes.
“On this historic mission, you take with you the heart of this Artemis team, the daring spirit of the American people and our partners across the globe and the hopes and dreams of a new generation,” Blackwell-Thompson said to the astronauts. “Good luck, Godspeed, Artemis II, let’s go.”
From that point, the countdown ticked smoothly to zero, and the SLS rocket thundered to life with billowing clouds of steam at 6:35:12 p.m. EDT, just 11 minutes late, when its four shuttle-era main engines ignited and throttled up to a combined two million pounds of thrust.
After a lightning-fast round of computer checks, the rocket’s two extended strap-on solid fuel boosters ignited, explosive bolts holding the SLS to its launch pad shattered and the 5.7-million-pound rocket climbed away from pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center atop a combined 8.8 million pounds of thrust.
Like the Orion, it was the rocket’s second launch in three years and its first with astronauts on board.
Generating an ear-splitting roar that shook the ground for miles around, the huge rocket reached about 120 mph — straight up — in less than 10 seconds. Consuming 8,000 gallons of liquid propellant and 24,000 pounds of solid fuel per second, the SLS rapidly accelerated as it burned through propellant and lost weight.
Moments after clearing the launch pad’s gantry and lightning towers, the SLS arced away to the east over the Atlantic Ocean, putting on a spectacular show for tens of thousands of area residents and tourists who flocked to Florida’s “Space Coast” to witness NASA’s first piloted moon launch in a half century.
The SLS rocket broke through the “sound barrier” 55 seconds after liftoff and smoothly raced through the region of maximum aerodynamic pressure as it plowed out of the dense lower atmosphere.
The Space Launch System rocket thunders away from Kennedy Space Center, carrying four astronauts on a mission to loop around the moon and back. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
The twin strap-on boosters, providing two-thirds of the rocket’s liftoff thrust, exhausted their propellant and fell away about two minutes after launch. The SLS core stage continued the ascent on the power of its four RS-25 main engines.
Eight minutes and 10 seconds or so after liftoff, the engines shut down, the core stage fell away and the Orion crew capsule, the astronauts now weightless, continued coasting upward, still attached to the rocket’s upper stage, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. The spacecraft’s four solar wings unfolded a few minutes later.
At that point, the astronauts were in an elliptical orbit with a high point, or apogee, of about 1,380 miles and a low point, or perigee, of just 17 miles or so. The ICPS fired its main engine for the first time about 50 minutes after liftoff, raising the low point to a safe 115 miles.
An hour later, the ICPS engine fired a second time, raising the high point of the orbit to some 43,760 miles, higher than any astronauts have flown since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972.
The Orion capsule, attached to a European Space Agency-supplied service module housing air, water, propellant, maneuvering thrusters and a single main engine, separated from the ICPS three hours and 20 minutes after launch.
The orbit adjustments were designed to put the astronauts in a highly elliptical 24-hour-long orbit, giving them plenty of time to check out the Orion capsule, making sure the ship’s communications, navigation, propulsion and life support systems are working properly before heading to the moon.
That includes the capsule’s cramped toilet compartment, resembling a small telephone booth built into the floor of the capsule. Koch reported problems shortly after reaching orbit as she was activating the system.
“Christina, with the toilet, the fault that you reported, the toilet cannot spin up,” a flight controller radioed. “You can still use it for fecal collection, but you’ll have to use (contingency bags) for urine.”
He said engineers were working on a repair plan and within an hour or so, Koch was able to restore it to normal operation.
A major objective of the flight came a little more than three hours into the mission when Glover took over manual control of the Orion capsule, flying in formation with the spent ICPS stage that helped boost them into orbit. He said he was able to precisely re-position the capsule with no problems, approaching the ICPS and backing away as planned.
He described the sound and feel of Orion’s thrusters firing as “a little rumble, like driving on a rocky road.”
“We are essentially going to make sure that the vehicle flies the way that we think it does, that we designed it to do,” Glover said before launch. “And so we’re going to not only fly the vehicle manually, we’re going to execute the six degrees of freedom, so (moving) forward, backwards, left, right, up and down.”
He also re-oriented the capsule in roll, nose up-and-down pitch and side-to-side yaw.
“But we also want to give qualitative and quantitative feedback to the ground team, so letting them know what it feels like now that we can hear and feel the thrusters and to just understand the human experience.”
The crew will end an 18-hour day with two four-hour “sleep” periods early Thursday. They’ll get up after the first break to monitor a firing of their own service module engine to again raise the low point of the orbit and slightly boost the high point up to around 44,555 miles. At that point, the crew will get another four hours to nap.
In the meantime, NASA’s mission management team will review Orion’s performance to that point and, if all goes well, declare the spacecraft “go” for the all-important “trans-lunar injection,” or TIL, service module main engine firing.
The planned six-minute TLI burn, starting around 7:30 p.m. Thursday, will increase the spacecraft’s velocity by about 900 mph, breaking the ship out of Earth orbit to finally head for the moon.
The TLI burn will put the Orion on a free-return trajectory. From that point on, the crew’s path back to Earth will be set. As the ship loops around the moon, lunar gravity will bend the trajectory back toward a precisely targeted Pacific Ocean splashdown off the southern California coast on April 10.
The coast out to the moon will take about four days. All the while, Earth’s gravity will continue pulling on Orion, steadily slowing the ship as it flies farther away. But on Monday, the astronauts will enter the “lunar sphere of influence” and begin speeding up again as the moon’s gravitational pull finally begins exceeding Earth’s.
Later that day, the spacecraft is expected to reach a distance of 248,655 miles from Earth, equaling and then passing a record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970.
The Orion will pass behind the leading edge of the moon as seen from Earth and out of contact with mission control for about 40 minutes starting around 6:40 p.m. Monday. Sailing over the far side of the moon, the astronauts will pass within about 4,000 miles of the lunar surface at close approach and reach a maximum distance from Earth of some 252,800 miles.
During passage around the far side, about a quarter of the moon will be in sunlight, giving the astronauts a chance to observe, photograph and shoot video of features never before seen by human eyes.
“We are going to maximize every minute of looking at that far side,” Koch said. “There are launch windows where we could have illumination that will allow us to see things for the first time ever with human eyes, and that actually makes a difference to the people doing the scientific data analysis.”
Added Glover: “Twenty-four men have seen the moon, and we’re going to send the first set of woman’s eyes. They think that she can potentially see colors that we may not see. And so I think that’s also very important.”
The flyby phase of the flight is expected to come to a close Monday evening and the spacecraft will leave the lunar sphere of influence Tuesday afternoon as it heads back to Earth, steadily picking up speed as the planet’s gravity again becomes dominant.
Next Thursday, the astronauts will attempt a ship-to-ship call with the crew of the International Space Station followed by a crew news conference later that afternoon. That will set the stage for re-entry on Friday, April 10.
A critical thruster firing Friday afternoon will fine-tune the crew’s approach before they jettison the no-longer-needed service module.
Flying heat shield forward, the Orion will hit the top of the discernible atmosphere around 8 p.m. while moving at some 25,000 mph. The heat shield will experience temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees as the spacecraft rapidly slows in a blaze of atmospheric friction.
Once through the zone of maximum heating, the capsule will be descending at a much more more sedate velocity. A series of parachutes will sequentially deploy to slow the craft to a relatively gentle 15 mph splashdown. Navy crews will be standing by to help the astronauts out of their spaceship for short helicopter rides to a nearby revery ship.
“I think Jeremy said it best, when that hatch opens on the Pacific Ocean, we’ll probably be pretty ready to get out,” Koch said. “But a part of us will know that there are some moments left that we will miss forever and probably won’t ever get to have back.”
The astronauts will be extracted from Orion and flown by helicopter to a waiting recovery ship for initial medical checks and calls home to family and friends before heading home to Houston for debriefing and reunions with family. The Orion, meanwhile, will be towed into the recovery ship’s flooded “well deck” and secured for the trip back to shore.
With the Artemis 2 crew back on the ground, NASA’s focus will shift to the Artemis III mission and beyond, gearing up for another Orion crew to test rendezvous and docking procedures next year with one or both moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin.
If that goes well, NASA plans to launch one and possible two moon landing missions in 2028 using whichever landers are deemed safe and ready for flight. Agency managers say they plan to increase the flight rate to moon landings every six months to begin building a moon base near the lunar south pole.
But that will depend on steady funding from from Washington across multiple presidential administrations. The Trump administration kicked off the Artemis program, but it’s not yet known how the project will fare over the long haul.
Isaacman is optimistic.
“It’s important because we’re fulfilling a promise … for America’s return to the moon as a stepping stone for all the things that we are going to do farther out into our solar system, like some day American astronauts planting the stars and stripes on Mars,” he said in an interview with CBS News.
“So you’re doing it for the scientific potential, the economic potential as a technological proving ground to do the things on the moon that you’re going to need on Mars.
“And how about inspiring the next generation?” he added. “How many kids after this mission are going to dress up as astronauts for Halloween and want to grow up and contribute to this great adventure?”
From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.
His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.
Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.
Here is more from Erin Griffith at the NYT. Maybe Sam said “one person” running a billion dollar company, but if the two are closely genetically related still I will count this.
I have a bunch that I want to write about this month, but that'll all be in different posts. Just got back from Atmosphere Conf in Vancouver and settling into a false Brooklyn summer.
Reading
I read so much this month but have little to share here. Despite trying to keep a rich, diverse information diet, a lot of the articles blur into the same thing, and I've been reading too much on Instapaper. Saving articles for later is a powerful way to manage my time, but it produces a huge pile of content that I then feel obligated to work my way through.
No single data point better illustrates the cultural movement of youth than this: 42 percent of Gen Z watches anime weekly (compared to 25 percent of Millennials), but only 25 percent of Gen Z follows NFL football (compared to 44 percent of Millennials). Anime has transformed from niche subculture to mainstream entertainment.
From American Diner Gothic. There were parts of this article that resonated with my experiences with Gen Z, others that made the author seem like kind of a jerk, and when they discuss statistics around transgender people they either misuse or abuse the statistics. They compare the number of respondents who identified as transgender in 2017 (1.8 percent) to the number of identified as gender-diverse (trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, two-spirit) in 2022. The latter number was higher, obviously, because it counted more groups, but the article treats them as apples-to-apples and uses this as evidence that Appalachian youth are more likely to be transgender. It's stuff like this that makes me always click the link back to the study when someone tries to justify something with statistics.
With a reasonably broad definition of simulation, most simulations we can see are not on computers: they’re in consciousnesses. What we find it natural to call a computer sophisticated enough to run our universe would likely be, on our terms, alive, or of undefined animacy.
I've been revisiting old Charlie Loyd articles and this is a great one, on Simulism. They're all great, really.
Watching
Editor's note: I've become aware that YouTube embeds aren't rendering for the blog in RSS readers. This is because I switched to lite-yt-embed some months back because YouTube was the main thing slowing down pageloads on macwright.com. I will find a way to do split rendering so that YouTube embeds are iframes in the RSS feed and lite-youtube elements on the website.
Anyway, enjoy this beautiful video of riding a bike through the beautiful woods accompanied by a trail dog, if you're looking at my website.
I am still loving Ben Levin's wildly creative and weird 3D-rendered videos. They're unabashedly creative and individual.
I didn't understand ISO either! This video really changed my mind about how it worked, pretty fun watch if you have a camera with any kind of manual control.
Drawing
This month I participated in an 'art challenge' again, and made some art every day. I tweaked my workflow a bit because I was producing so many images: I created an Automator Script to add EXIF times to scanned images so that they'd sort correctly in Capture One, and started fresh with a new Capture One library with much more organization.
I learned some new habits with watercolor - I bought some artists tape to secure the paper to a flat surface and stop it from curling so much, learned to pre-wet the paper if I wanted to do large areas of consistent color, and used the tilt of the paper to direct the flow of ink.
It was fun, and I feel like I've graduated from the loomis method to a more direct way of drawing portraits.
Here's a paper in the latest PNAS that begins with this epigraph:
“Don’t tell me where
your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money, and I’ll tell
you what they are.” — attributed to James W. Frick (Vice President,
University of Notre Dame, 1965–1983)
The rest is commentary, (and a figure is worth a thousand (1,000) words).
Statues in L.A. are not as immobile as you’d think. They’re here, they’re there, they move from pedestal to pedestal. Sometimes they disappear altogether.
SpaceX has taken a key step toward going public after confidentially filing for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with the matter, in what space leaders hope is a watershed moment for the industry.
Space Force personnel supporting operations under U.S. Central Command are positioned in the Middle East, at headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina
Aspect Aerospace, a University of South Alabama spin-off, has secured $2.4 million to develop circuit-board-sized spacecraft that could be deployed from space into very low Earth orbit in swarms to monitor the space environment.
March 16, 2026, was the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s first flight of a liquid fueled rocket. It reached an altitude of 41 feet. 31 years later, in 1957, Sputnik began a lonely beep as the first satellite in orbit. In 1969, 12 years after Sputnik and 43 years after Goddard’s first flight, Neil Armstrong […]
Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.
BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?
COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.
BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.
It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.
COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.
BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.
I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.
And:
COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?
And:
COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?
BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?
Located 700 kilometers (440 miles) east of Madagascar, Réunion Island is the product of a long-lived mantle hotspot on the floor of the Indian Ocean. The island first emerged above the ocean’s surface about 2 million years ago. It remains active today, with frequent eruptions from Piton de la Fournaise, a shield volcano on the island’s eastern side.
Since the 17th century, the volcano has had more than 150 documented eruptions. The most recent began within the Enclos Fouqué caldera on February 13, 2026, with the opening of four fissures that fueled sustained lava fountains reaching 10 to 50 meters (30 to 160 feet). Throughout February and March, basaltic lava spilled down the volcano, advancing through forested and grassy areas toward its eastern side.
This thermal satellite image shows lava flowing east toward the ocean on March 28, 2026. The signal reveals the amount of heat emanating from surfaces on Earth based on detections of thermal radiation in two wavelengths. Warmer areas are mapped in yellow and cooler surfaces in blue. The thermal data were overlaid on a digital elevation model of the island.
The current activity likely marks the onset of a new cycle of frequent eruptive activity at Piton de la Fournaise
Diego Coppola
University of Turin
“The hottest areas, shown as the brightest tones, correspond to the eruptive vent, the active lava channel, and the flow front,” said Adele Campus, a University of Turin volcanologist. From the vent, lava flows downslope for several kilometers, often through lava tubes. “The places where lava re-emerges at the surface through breakouts appear as localized hotspots,” she added. Campus and colleagues analyzed more than two decades of NASA and NOAA satellite observations in a 2025 study, identifying key trends and patterns in the volcano’s thermal activity and rate of lava effusion.
On March 13, lava cut through the island’s Route Nationale 2 (RN2). By March 16, it had begun to spill into the Indian Ocean, producing acidic plumes of steam and volcanic gases, known as laze, according to the Observatoire Volcanologique du Piton de la Fournaise (OVPF). Scientists on the ground measured lava temperatures of 1,100 to 1,130 degrees Celsius (2,010 to 2,070 degrees Fahrenheit) as lava neared the ocean. Thermal surveys also showed that water temperatures exceeded 36°C (97°F) up to 600 meters from the entry point, according to OVPF. As of March 24, materials entering the ocean had created a new lava delta that extended the coastline by 190 meters.
“This eruption appears to be longer and to have produced a larger volume of lava than usual,” said Diego Coppola, a professor of volcanology at the University of Turin who coauthored the analysis with Campus. Such characteristics are often associated with the onset or end of an eruptive cycle. The most recent cycle began in 2014, culminated in 2015, and ended in July 2023. “The current activity,” he said, “likely marks the onset of a new cycle of frequent eruptive activity at Piton de la Fournaise.”
Every morning I listen to new music, and I’ve already heard several hundred albums since the start of the year. My goal is simple: I seek out the best—drawing on all genres, all styles, all regions—and dig deep to find outstanding recordings you might not hear about elsewhere.
Below are 14 gems. Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.
Spend some time with these tracks. You won’t be disappointed.
If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
River Eckert: River Eckert Debut Album from a 16-Year-Old New Orleans Piano Phenom
I’ve seen the future of New Orleans piano and it’s called River Eckert. He’s not even old enough to get a driver’s license—you must be 17 in the state of Louisiana—but has already digested all the varied flavors of his hometown keyboard tradition.
I’m quoted on the youngster’s website, so I’ll repeat here what I say there:
“They don’t teach any of that at Juilliard, not even after hours.”
And I’m not just talking about Eckert’s keyboard skills—he also shows great promise as a singer. In a better world, this kind of talent would get showcased by the media and find its way to the big screen. Maybe that will happen. In the meantime, you can savor how this River runs via his debut album.
It won’t be streaming for a few more days, but River introduces a solo piano video from the release at the 22-minute mark of this interview.
Sault: Chapter 1 Mystery Band from Britain Plays Funky Gospel
I became a Sault fan when they released five stunning albums over the course of a few months, but kept their identities top secret. Go ahead, visit their website—you will look in vain for bios or any information whatsoever. But these talented musicians perform in a range of genres, playing each style with total commitment and consummate skill.
Now they have returned from their secret hideout with a funk gospel album—it’s like Sly and the Family Stone establishing their own charismatic church. Sure, I’d like to know more about these musicians, but I will happily grant them anonymity and entrance in the Witness Protection Program if they keep delivering music of this caliber.
Ari Bragi Kárason: Unclear Family Cool Jazz in a Chet Baker Kind of Way
From the very start of my career as a critic, I championed cool jazz. That went against the grain—jazz is a hot idiom, and its leading practitioners have prized energy and intensity. But there’s also a cool tradition hiding in the wings, from Bix Beiderbecke to Lester Young and beyond. It also deserves our respect.
But if you play in this style, you almost never get grants or awards—it’s somehow un-cool to play cool. So an album like this won’t get much attention. The jazz police will make sure of that.
Listeners will be reminded of cool jazz icon Chet Baker, who continues to exert a powerful influence on European trumpeters. There’s some irony in this. Chet went overseas to avoid narcotics prosecution, and worked steadily to pay for his habit—but the result was that thousands of musicians overseas saw and learned from him at close quarters. That still has an impact today.
Icelandic trumpeter and flugelhorn player Ari Bragi Kárason was born a few months after Chet Baker died, but still keeps that tradition alive in his own work. He hits the spot on his new album Unclear Family. I also want to call your attention to saxophonist Karl-Martin Almqvist, who earns my praise with his contributions here.
My hanami (cherry blossom picnic) in Tokyo is becoming an annual tradition! This year it’ll be on a Friday instead of a Sunday, because rain is forecast for the weekend and it’ll probably knock down whatever’s left of the cherry blossoms. Here are the details:
What to bring: Please feel free to bring any snacks and drinks you like!
Unfortunately I won’t be able to do the traditional after-hanami nomikai, since I have a dinner appointment, but if other people would like to go out after the hanami, please do so!
For perhaps the first time in years, a truly interesting thing happened the other day on X. The platform began automatically translating Japanese tweets to English, and recommending them to English-speaking users. Japanese people use X at much higher rates than people in other countries, mostly because the platform’s pseudonymity offers them a chance to comment publicly on their personal lives without revealing their real identities. Because it’s mostly a platform for personal use, it’s much less toxic than the English-speaking version, which is mostly used for political arguments.
English-speaking X users were naturally delighted at the influx of sanity and normalcy, not to mention the delights of quirky Japanese online culture. I predict this honeymoon will last only a short time, until Anglosphere culture wars infect and overwhelm Japanese-speaking X. This will be the digital version of the tourism boom, in which international delight at being able to travel cheaply and easily to Japan has resulted in an epidemic of bad behavior and the complete overrunning of tourist hotspots like Kyoto and the west side of Tokyo.
But glum predictions aside, it is pretty magical for people in other countries to get a taste of Japanese culture without having to learn the language. Yes, many of the stereotypes of Japan are either exaggerated or just plain wrong — it’s not very conformist or collectivist, people behave well much more out of internalized “guilt” than externalized “shame”, and so on. But there really are quite a lot of unique and interesting things about Japanese culture, most of which developed behind the barrier of linguistic and geographic isolation. Now that those barriers are falling, a lot of people will get to experience the wonder before it, too, is subsumed by the homogenization of global online culture and ruined by flame wars between rightists and leftists.
But anyway, in honor of this moment of cultural exchange, I thought I would share some of my own personal observations of how Japan has changed over the last two decades. I first moved to Japan almost 23 years ago, and even though I haven’t lived there for a while, I try to spend at least a month out of every year in the country if I can.
Over that time I’ve seen a few things remain startlingly constant — my favorite neighborhood sushi shop from 2004 still serves the same excellent crab salad. But a whole lot has changed; though many people overseas (and even a few unobservant long-term residents) tend to think of Japan as a static, unchanging society, the truth is that in some ways, the country feels unrecognizable.
Three years ago, I wrote a post about some of these changes:
In fact, this post only scratches the surface, so I thought I should write a deeper dive. Here’s a list of some changes I’ve noticed in Japan’s society and its built environment since the mid-2000s. Keep in mind that I’ve spent most of my time in Japan in Tokyo and Osaka, so this account will leave out many of the changes that have happened in smaller cities and rural areas.
If there’s one way to summarize these changes, it’s that Japan is becoming a much more normal country than it was when I lived there. The quirky art culture, vibrant street scenes, and mosaic of small independent businesses that defined 2000s Japan are vanishing under the relentless assault of aging, economic stagnation, and social media. Japanese people have started dressing down, and their waistlines have begun to expand. But at the same time, Tokyo has become a sort of enchanted spaceship of a city, with world-beating food scenes and architecture. And Japan as a whole has become more international and open, less sexist, and less soul-crushing of a place to work.
The whole country feels poorer, even though it isn’t
Japan feels like a poorer country than it did when I lived there, but this is actually an illusion; it’s actually slightly richer:
One difference is that my standards for what counts as a comfortable standard of living have crept up, due to America’s own more rapid rate of growth since the mid-2010s — and possibly from my own income growth over that same time period. Twenty years ago, for example, the cheap quality of Japanese furniture didn’t seem that different from the more comfy but dilapidated American version; now, Americans (and my social circle) tend to have nicer and newer furniture, while Japanese furniture basically hasn’t changed.
Another factor is the depreciation cycle. In the early 2000s, Japan was just coming off of a decade-long construction boom — some of it engineered by the government in an attempt to fill the hole in aggregate demand left by the country’s “lost decade”. A lot of building facades and train stations that looked shiny and perfect in 2004 now look a little weathered and dilapidated, despite Japan’s tendency to spend a lot on maintenance and upkeep. This doesn’t mean those buildings and infrastructure function any less well than they did when they were new, but the slow depreciation creates the subtle illusion of a shabbier country. (This will, of course, be an even more pronounced phenomenon in China in the 2030s.)
A third factor is the weak yen. When I lived in Japan for the first time, a dollar was worth only about 100 to 120 yen; now it’s 160. Foreigners can really live like kings here now, thanks to the exchange rate. That makes the locals feel poorer in comparison.
Yet another subtle change is that fewer young Japanese people live with their parents than they did two decades ago. The “parasite singles” of 2004 were able to live nice lifestyles while working only a low-paying or part-time job, or even not working at all, because their parents’ high incomes and stored-up savings were footing the bill. Now, with that wealth having largely run out, and with the high-earning Boomer generation having retired, you don’t see as many young people able to afford international vacations, designer handbags, and so on. (Luxury brands have proliferated, but this is more due to population aging and the tourism boom.)
There are other factors creating the illusion of Japanese poverty, which deserve their own separate sections. These include aging, the expansion of paid employment, and the effects of social media.
Everyone is 50 years old
When I lived in Japan 20 years ago, it felt like most people around me were my own age, or maybe a little older. Now, when I go to Japan, most people around me still feel…my own age, or maybe a little older.
This is also partly an illusion; I’m less likely to go to places frequented by young people, like dance clubs. But Japanese cities are dense, and everyone walks and uses public transit. I still go to the most crowded neighborhoods, including places with plenty of bars, clubs, cafes, clothing shops, cheap restaurants, and so on. There are simply far fewer young people in the streets and in the shops.
Part of this, too, may be an illusion, driven by behavioral change — the kids may be at home on their phones watching TikTok or tweeting, while older people still go out and experience the physical world. But the statistics don’t lie. When I lived in Japan for the first time, the country’s median age was around 42; now it’s almost 50. Back in the mid-2000s, there were more than three working-age Japanese people for every person past the age of 65; now, there are fewer than two.
The country’s population pyramid shows this pretty clearly. The generation slightly older than me — now in their early and mid 50s — was actually the most populous, while the generation in their 20s right now is maybe only 60% as large:
The slow disappearance of young people from public spaces has given the country a more tired, less energetic feeling. Whole neighborhoods of Tokyo and Osaka in the mid-2000s felt like what William Gibson once called “the children’s crusade” — a mass of youth imposing their aesthetics and attitudes on society by sheer force of energy and numbers. That’s all gone now.
Aging has also meant less prominence for youth culture in the built environment — anime, fashionable clothing, pop music, and cheap trendy eateries are all less common motifs in Japan than they were decades ago. Meanwhile, nice restaurants and luxury brands — things older people consume — are steadily taking over urban spaces.
The leisure class that made Japan so quirky is vanishing
The 2026 US “Cyber Strategy for America” document is mostly the same thing we’ve seen out of the White House for over a decade, but with a more aggressive tone.
But one sentence stood out: “We will unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and scale our national capabilities.” This sounds like a call for hackback: giving private companies permission to conduct offensive cyber operations.
In warfare, the notion of counterattack is extremely powerful. Going after the enemy—its positions, its supply lines, its factories, its infrastructure—is an age-old military tactic. But in peacetime, we call it revenge, and consider it dangerous. Anyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial. The accused has the right to defend himself, to face his accuser, to an attorney, and to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Both vigilante counterattacks, and preemptive attacks, fly in the face of these rights. They punish people before who haven’t been found guilty. It’s the same whether it’s an angry lynch mob stringing up a suspect, the MPAA disabling the computer of someone it believes made an illegal copy of a movie, or a corporate security officer launching a denial-of-service attack against someone he believes is targeting his company over the net.
In all of these cases, the attacker could be wrong. This has been true for lynch mobs, and on the internet it’s even harder to know who’s attacking you. Just because my computer looks like the source of an attack doesn’t mean that it is. And even if it is, it might be a zombie controlled by yet another computer; I might be a victim, too. The goal of a government’s legal system is justice; the goal of a vigilante is expediency.
We don’t issue letters of marque on the high seas anymore; we shouldn’t do it in cyberspace.
Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk by K. Melton on cognitive security, cognitive hacking, and reality pentesting. The slides from the talk are here, but—even better—Menton has a long essay laying out the basic concepts and ideas.
The whole thing is important and well worth reading, and I hesitate to excerpt. Here’s a taste:
The NeuroCompiler is where raw sensory data gets interpreted before you’re consciously aware of it. It decides what things mean, and it does this fast, automatic, and mostly invisible. It’s also where the majority of cognitive exploits actually land, right in this sweet spot between perception and conscious thought.
This is my term for what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 thinking. If the Sensory Interface is the intake port, the NeuroCompiler is what turns that input into “filtered meaning” before the Mind Kernel ever sees it. It takes raw signal (e.g., photons, sound waves, chemical gradients, pressure) and translates it into something actionable based on binary categories like threat or safe, familiar or novel, trustworthy or suspicious.
The speed is both an evolutionary feature and a modern bug. Processing here is fast enough to get you out of the way of a thrown object before you’ve consciously registered it. But “good enough most of the time” means “predictably wrong some of the time….
A critical architectural feature: the NeuroCompiler can route its output directly back to the Sensory Interface and out as behavior, skipping the conscious awareness of the Mind Kernel entirely. Reflex and startle responses use this mechanism, making this bypass pathway enormously useful for survival. Yet it leaves a wide-open backdoor. If the layer that holds access to skepticism and deliberate evaluation can be bypassed completely, a host of exploits become possible that would otherwise fail.
That’s just one of the five levels Melton talks about: sensory interface, neurocompiler, mind kernel, the mesh, and cultural substrate.
Melton’s taxonomy is compelling, and her parallels to IT systems are fascinating. I have long said that a genius idea is one that’s incredibly obvious once you hear it, but one that no one has said before. This is the first time I’ve heard cognition described in this way.
In Emine Yücel’s newly published piece about Republicans’ struggles to pass a slew of President Trump’s priorities ahead of the midterms, she digs in on a crucial point that isn’t getting much discussion.
Since Republican leadership doesn’t want to nuke the filibuster in order to pass the SAVE America Act, they’re doing a big performance for Trump to show that they’ll figure out a way to cram all of his needs — passing the voter suppression bill and funding for his war in Iran as well as the Department of Homeland Security — into another reconciliation package. Republicans are considering paying for the new spending for Trump’s latest fixations with more cuts to the social safety net, under the guise of rooting out rampant “fraud,” the admin’s favorite new word.
But in many cases, they won’t actually have to do that. The new spending is just a convenient excuse for more cuts.
You’ll remember last summer, congressional Republicans justified the devastating cuts they made to Medicaid and other social safety net programs by shrugging at the deficit, arguing they had to do that in order to offset the cost of extending most of Trump’s individual and corporate tax cuts permanently. This time is different: Many of their priorities on this go-round — chief among them the Iran War — won’t run afoul of the same Senate rule because the increased spending is not expected to linger beyond the 10 year budget window. Nonetheless, they are already making a big show of telling everyone that they are simply required to make cuts. A key excerpt from Emine’s piece:
Republicans have been largely obfuscating when they talk about the cuts to social safety net programs that they are once again planning. They point to the national deficit, saying they will have to offset the new spending with cuts in order to balance the budget out. They hand-wring over self-proclaimed “deficit hawks,” saying those lawmakers will not support a reconciliation package unless any added spending is not offset.
But the rules of reconciliation do not require them to offset the cost of any increased spending within the budget window, which is usually a 10 year period.
“If they put together a bill that, for example, gave money to the Department of Defense and funded ICE for some number of years, there’s no requirement that it needs to be offset,” Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told TPM. “In fact, the reconciliation bill that they passed last year increased the deficit.”
I wanted to share a few thoughts on questions that are adjacent to or secondary to the question the Supreme Court is being asked to take up today. That is in part because there is no real question they are being asked to take up. Birthright citizenship is the clear, intended and unambiguous law of the federal constitution. One might as well try to complicate or question whether the document creates a federal senate. I have a source and correspondent deep in the federal bureaucracy who is a specialist in a specific area of federal law unrelated to citizenship questions. And even though I’ve written about this at length over the years, by going over developments in this person’s area of law with them it has helped me crystalize my own thinking on this topic.
Almost all of these cases are based on the premise, the working assumption of what can the U.S. Constitution mean if we decide that words or established phrases simply have no meaning and we can simply piece the individual words together based on their dictionary definitions? So what does the “law of the land” mean? Well, it turns out some guy who did a stint at the Claremont Institute and now teaches at some obscure law school has written a bracing new law review article about how it refers to agricultural policy, mineral and agricultural rights and the law of farming. That’s really where we are here.
We’re so far out on the limb of jurisprudential corruption that in cases like these there’s a different way we should frame these arguments and these decisions. Birthright citizenship is the law of the land. It has been since 1868. Nothing this corrupt body decides will change that. It may produce a period of constitutional interregnum in which the federal government refuses to recognize the rights of some American citizens. That won’t make them any less American citizens any more than Trump saying up is down changes the laws of gravity. This may seem like a theoretical or meaningless point. But it’s not. Fighting Trumpian authoritarian nationalism means that there is a high premium on keeping focused on the reality of the situation before you, not falling victim to the new day’s game of three card monty or other flimflam and razzmatazz.
Let me now mention a more practical point.
Birthright citizenship is the unambiguous and certain law of the land. It is also good policy. What is less appreciated is that it undergirds the entire citizenship system in the United States, a country that keeps very, very little record of who is and isn’t a citizen in the first place. The only people who really have any clear record of their citizenship are naturalized citizens. You or I who were born in the U.S. might appear to have those. We have a passport or maybe some other document that you can only have as a citizen. But that is almost always because we said we were a citizen or we provided some document that only had any significance on the basis of birthright citizenship. Usually, of course, that’s a birth certificate. That’s where the factual conversation ends. It is the lynchpin that makes the entire U.S. citizenship system work in the absence of really any record keeping.
Let’s imagine there’s no birthright citizenship. And to be clear, it’s a little hard (though they’ll certainly find a way) to imagine that SCOTUS would find that everything everyone (amendment writers, legislators, justices, law professors, citizens) thought for more than a 150 years was wrong. But critically, it only started being wrong today. That’s not how actual jurisprudence works. But let’s start with my birth certificate.
Born in the early hours of Feb. 15 1969. That’s the basis of my citizenship. Absent birthright citizenship, how do we know? Really we don’t. It says nothing about the citizenship status of my parents. The father listed on the document had ancestors in the U.S. going back to the 1600s, many all the way back to the 1630s. The mother listed was born to a woman who arrived in the U.S. from Poland/Lithuania as a child in May 1921 just ahead of the first wave of immigration clamp downs after World War I. I’m not certain she was ever naturalized as a citizen and I think there’s a good chance she wasn’t when my mother was born in 1943.
Mine is one of the less complicated citizenship questions — the most recent immigrant in my family tree arrived over a century ago. But there’s nothing on my birth certificate that settles the matter. There’s at least some level of ambiguity just one generation back. And everyone else, generation to generation back, is also only a citizen based on birthright citizenship. At best, clarity about citizenship, absent birthright citizenship, requires a lot of genealogical research. Certainly more than is remotely plausible for a population of almost 350 million. And it would be quite a lot of research to have to wait on while you’re in an ICE gulag.
Quite apart from the constitutional and civic merits, the whole fabric of U.S. citizenship falls apart without the anchor of birthright citizenship.
One of the most bizarre aspects of the city occupations in 2025 and early 2026 (and perhaps continuing under Markwayne Mullin? TBD) was the way in which the administration brought random social media celebrities inside its operations to produce propaganda. Through lawsuits and reporting, we’re learning more about how that all worked. Josh Kovensky takes a close look.
Up betimes and abroad to my brother’s, but he being gone out I went to the Temple to my Cozen Roger Pepys, to see and talk with him a little; who tells me that, with much ado, the Parliament do agree to throw down Popery; but he says it is with so much spite and passion, and an endeavour of bringing all Non-conformists into the same condition, that he is afeard matters will not yet go so well as he could wish.
Thence back to my brother’s, in my way meeting Mr. Moore and talking with him about getting me some money, and calling at my brother’s they tell me that my brother is still abroad, and that my father is not yet up. At which I wondered, not thinking that he was come, though I expected him, because I looked for him at my house. So I up to his bedside and staid an hour or two talking with him. Among other things he tells me how unquiett my mother is grown, that he is not able to live almost with her, if it were not for Pall.
All other matters are as well as upon so hard conditions with my uncle Thomas we can expect them.
I left him in bed, being very weary, to come to my house to-night or tomorrow, when he pleases, and so I home, calling on the virginallmaker, buying a rest for myself to tune my tryangle, and taking one of his people along with me to put it in tune once more, by which I learned how to go about it myself for the time to come.
So to dinner, my wife being lazily in bed all this morning. Ashwell and I dined below together, and a pretty girl she is, and I hope will give my wife and myself good content, being very humble and active, my cook maid do also dress my meat very well and neatly.
So to my office all the afternoon till night, and then home, calling at Sir W. Batten’s, where was Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Pen, I telling them how by my letter this day from Commissioner Pett I hear that his Stempeese he undertook for the new ship at Woolwich, which we have been so long, to our shame, in looking for, do prove knotty and not fit for service. Lord! how Sir J. Minnes, like a mad coxcomb, did swear and stamp, swearing that Commissioner Pett hath still the old heart against the King that ever he had, and that this was his envy against his brother that was to build the ship, and all the damnable reproaches in the world, at which I was ashamed, but said little; but, upon the whole, I find him still a fool, led by the nose with stories told by Sir W. Batten, whether with or without reason. So, vexed in my mind to see things ordered so unlike gentlemen, or men of reason, I went home and to bed.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA's Artemis II rocket know well.
"It is actually a very long day," said Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II. "We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there's a pretty tight schedule of things to get out there."
Glover and his three crewmates have their schedules planned to the minute throughout the nine-day Artemis II mission. If all goes according to plan, their mission will carry them more than a quarter-million miles from Earth, farther from home than anyone has ventured in human history. After looping behind the Moon, the astronauts and their Orion capsule will fall back to Earth at some 25,000 mph (40,000 km/hr), setting another record for the fastest that humans have ever traveled.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The US military has always been part of NASA's human spaceflight program. The first astronauts were nearly all military pilots, and two of the four crew members set to fly around the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission were Navy test pilots before joining the astronaut corps.
Artemis II, the first crew mission to the Moon's vicinity since 1972, is set for launch Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both Navy test pilots, will be at the controls of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the ride to space. NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen round out the four-person crew.
The mission will depart from NASA property on Florida's Space Coast, but the Space Force will play an important role in the launch. A range crew from the Space Force will track the SLS rocket as it arcs over the Atlantic Ocean. Their primary job will be ensuring public safety, with the unenviable responsibility of sending a destruct signal to the rocket if it flies off course. Thankfully for the astronauts inside the spacecraft, the Orion capsule has an abort rocket to pull it away from an exploding launch vehicle in the event of a catastrophic failure.
A month ago, when people asked whether I was worried about the election for California’s next governor coming down to two Republicans, I sorta shrugged it off.
Two weeks ago, when people asked whether I was worried about the election for California’s next governor coming down to two Republicans, I kinda just sighed.
I am now, officially concerned.
Really concerned.
As we speak, 24 Democrats remain in the race—and the (very real) fret is they will undercut one another, slice and dice the liberal vote into small fractions and clear the way for a pair of leading MAGA Republicans—Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton—to emerge from the June 2 general primary and wind up as the two men on the ballot.
If you don’t know, here’s a quick primer on how the system works …
And if you’re wondering, “Who’s to blame for this?”—well, the answer is simple: Ego.
Big …
Fat …
Obnoxious …
Ego.
It’s the one thing that’s struck me throughout the Truth OC process. From Joe Kerr and Mike Munzing to Gracey Van Der Mark and Chad Williams, it takes (with rare exception) a humongous level of ego to run for public office. It involves one believing, “I am The Person for this job—the only person for this job.” It requires cocksureness, arrogance, obscene levels of self-belief. It means not just asking for gobs of money, but asking for gobs of money—for you. Because you are the one.
If we’re being honest, politicians tend to make the worst dinner guests, because they are oxygen-sucking planets, intent on being the center of every occupied universe. And this isn’t just a Trump or MAGA or Republican thing. It applies to 98 percent of those who seek higher office. Hell, why did Joe Biden insist on competing again in 2024, until it was way too late to change course?
Answer: Ego.
And it’s exhausting.
In the case of California’s upcoming primary, the recent polling is both scary …
… and eye-opening.
There are, bluntly, just three Democrats who have a realistic shot: Eric Swalwell, Katie Porter and Tom Steyer. That’s it. Those three. I know San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan possessed some juice, but it’s over. I know Xavier Becerra has some unique experience, but it’s not resonating. I know former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is bored, but this ain’t it. Seriously, it is officially time for those polling below 10 percent to not just drop out, bt throw their support behind someone. And, as we get even closer, it’ll be time for two of the remaining three to also step aside and back the leader.
I know it’s not fun.
I know surrender sucks.
But if California winds up with a MAGA governor—especially when the national tides feel like they’re shifting against Trump’s insanity—the legacy of folks like Becerra and Mahan and Villaraigosa won’t be as accomplished, civic-minded leaders with deep resumes.
No, it’ll be as smaller-scale Bidens, allowing ego to poison everything and watching as a deep-blue state winds up in the hands of a zealot nut.
At 4:11 this morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, to to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT”
While this morning, Trump appeared to wash his hands of his Iran war, there was an undertone of panic in his post, especially coming as it did just before an exclusive story by Alexander Ward and Meridith McGraw in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump has “told aides he is willing to end the military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.”
Economist Paul Krugman noted this evening that this is essentially an admission of defeat, and Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank and an expert on Iran, called Trump’s suggestion that he is willing to leave the strait closed “unbelievably irresponsible.” Having started a war, she said, the U.S. and Israel cannot walk away from the outcome. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she told the Wall Street Journal reporters.
Nonetheless, the idea the Iran War would end soon was a signal investors wanted to see. On the strength of the hope for a short war, the stock market posted its biggest one-day gain in ten months.
Meanwhile, another aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, left its home port, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, today to head in the direction of the Middle East, although it is not clear if it will support Operation Epic Fury. According to Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes, the carrier will pick up other elements of the carrier group, including the destroyers USS Ross, USS Donald Cook, and USS Mason, as it crosses the Atlantic. The George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group also includes several aircraft squadrons and detachments that make up the 70 or more aircraft in Carrier Air Wing 7, along with more than 5,000 sailors and military personnel.
Nearly 3,500 sailors and Marines from the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in the region on Saturday.
Yesterday, host Laura Ingraham of the Fox News Channel wondered, “[W]as the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning? And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this? How complex it could actually get, and further possibilities of casualties or other damage—the difficulty of dealing with these people? Or was he told this would be relatively quick, in and out?”
Nick Hilden of AlterNet reported that MAGA leader Alex Jones speculated today that ill-health is contributing to Trump’s poor decisions on Iran. “Trump’s run off the edge of a cliff, and I don’t think he’s coming back from it,” Jones said. He urged MAGA to move on without Trump. “We cut bait on Trump and we mobilize against the Democrats,” he said. “Trump is just a minor figure.”
Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo picked up the story of another MAGA figure distancing himself from Trump. When he ran for governor in 2024, former North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson flat out denied stories about his participation in pornography forums and social media chats where he attacked Jewish, Black, gay, and transgender people as well as flirting with Holocaust denial and calling himself a “black NAZI!” He even sued CNN for $50 million for defamation, calling their story about him “a high-tech lynching” before dropping the suit after losing the election.
Walker noted that Robinson recently admitted on a podcast that he was lying all along. He “had to ignore the truth at that moment,” he said, because he was shielding Trump. “I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election,” he said. “Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election.” Asked if he would do it again, he answered: “I’d make the exact same decision. I’d fight in the exact same way.”
After Saturday’s No Kings rallies around the country and the world, and after new polls showing his job approval ratings have dropped to new lows, Trump this afternoon signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting. Although both Democratic and Republican election officials insist mail-in voting is secure and reliable, Trump claims it permits Democrats to cheat.
Ironically, earlier this month the story broke of a right-wing activist in Wisconsin who ordered ballots in other people’s names to prove that mail-in voting enabled voter fraud. Last week Harry Wait was convicted of one felony count of identity theft and two misdemeanor counts of election fraud, suggesting mail-in voting is not as insecure as he thought.
Nonetheless, Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”
“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections.” The Senate Rules Committee oversees federal involvement in elections, and its top Democrat, Alex Padilla (D-CA), called the order a “blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” adding that Trump has “no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting.” Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said that the order is “illegal, dangerous and subversive” and that “Donald Trump fears the American people and is willing to violate the Constitution to stop them from voting.”
“See you in court,” posted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “You will lose.”
Another of Trump’s executive orders was in court today, when Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that much of Trump’s order stripping NPR and PBS of funds was unconstitutional. As Brian Stelter of CNN reported, Moss quoted a Supreme Court ruling when he wrote: “The First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.” Republicans in Congress have since voted to cut federal funding from NPR and PBS, but the decision is a victory for the First Amendment.
Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.
The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”
The Department of Justice has already appealed.
Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets [sic] sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”
Tonight Summer Said, David S. Cloud, and Michael Amon of the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates is trying to get a United Nations Security Council resolution to call for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE says it will help the U.S. and other allies open the strait by force.
The Kentucky Derby remains one of the most closely analyzed events in horse racing, with past winners offering valuable insight into future contenders. As the Kentucky Derby will be run on May 2 at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, attention is already turning toward identifying leading prospects.
However, the final field for the Derby will only be announced closer to the race, leaving room for interpretation and debate. By examining how previous champions performed on race day, bettors can better understand the traits that define success. These performances reveal patterns in pace, positioning, and finishing strength that continue to shape expectations each year.
War Admiral’s Dominant 1937 Kentucky Derby Performance
War Admiral entered the 1937 Kentucky Derby with strong backing and delivered a performance that reflected that confidence. From the break, he secured a forward position, allowing him to control the pace rather than react to it. This early positioning gave him a clear tactical advantage.
As the race progressed, War Admiral maintained a steady rhythm while keeping challengers at bay. When asked to accelerate, he responded decisively, increasing his stride and creating separation from the field. His ability to shift gears at the right moment highlighted both his class and composure.
The race unfolded largely on his terms, with minimal pressure affecting his trajectory. By the final stretch, he had established a commanding lead that left little doubt about the outcome. His winning margin reflected both dominance and consistency.
For bettors, his performance aligned closely with expectations. The confidence placed in him before the race was validated by a display that combined control, speed, and authority throughout the contest.
Secretariat’s Record-Breaking 1973 Kentucky Derby Run
Secretariat’s 1973 Kentucky Derby performance remains one of the most remarkable displays in racing history. From the outset, he positioned himself comfortably within the field, avoiding early congestion while staying within striking distance of the leaders.
As the race unfolded, Secretariat began to advance with smooth, powerful strides. What set him apart was his ability to accelerate incrementally at each stage, gaining ground without appearing strained. This progression created a sense of inevitability as he moved toward the front.
In the final stretch, he surged clear and stopped the clock in a record-breaking time that still stands today. His performance not only secured victory but redefined expectations of what was possible on Derby day.
Those who backed him witnessed a performance that exceeded even high expectations. Secretariat combined speed, stamina, and fluid motion in a way that continues to serve as a benchmark for Derby excellence.
American Pharaoh’s Commanding 2015 Derby Victory
American Pharaoh entered the 2015 Kentucky Derby as a leading contender and delivered a performance that justified that status. Early in the race, he settled just behind the leaders, conserving energy while maintaining a clear position. This approach allowed him to avoid early pressure.
As the field approached the far turn, he began to move forward with purpose. His transition from tracking the pace to taking control was smooth and well-timed. Once he reached the front, he continued to build momentum.
In the stretch, American Pharoah drew clear, creating a gap that confirmed his superiority on the day. His stride remained strong and consistent, with no signs of fading under pressure.
The market’s confidence in him was reflected in his composed and authoritative performance. For those who supported him, the race reinforced his reputation as a standout contender. American Pharaoh went on to win the Triple Crown in 2015, claiming the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse in 37 years to achieve the feat, affirming his dominance across all three races.
Sovereignty’s 2025 Kentucky Derby Winning Display
Sovereignty’s 2025 Kentucky Derby victory provided a modern example of how race dynamics shape outcomes. From the start, he positioned himself mid-pack, allowing the early pace to develop without committing too soon. This patience proved crucial.
As the race progressed, he maintained a steady rhythm while tracking the leaders. His positioning allowed him to conserve energy while remaining within reach of the front-runners. This balance set the stage for a late move.
Entering the final turn, Sovereignty advanced decisively, navigating through traffic with efficiency. His ability to accelerate at the right moment gave him a clear advantage as the field began to tire.
In the closing stages, he secured victory with a strong finishing effort that reflected both timing and endurance. His performance aligned with expectations based on his pre-race profile, offering bettors a clear reference point when evaluating odds and contenders for the Kentucky Derby 2026.
What These Performances Mean for the Modern Derby
Looking at past Kentucky Derby winners reveals consistent themes that continue to shape expectations. Positioning, timing, and the ability to respond under pressure remain central to success. Each of these champions demonstrated control over the race in different ways.
These performances highlight how race-day execution often confirms pre-race perceptions. Horses that combine tactical awareness with finishing strength stand out when it matters most. Observing these traits provides valuable context for assessing current contenders.
As the next Derby approaches, these historical examples offer a framework for interpretation. They show how dominance can take different forms while still producing the same result.
By unracing these patterns, bettors and enthusiasts can better evaluate how emerging contenders may perform on racing’s biggest stage. These patterns continue to influence how contenders are assessed as the modern Derby landscape evolves each season.
He is playing in the current Candidates tournament as the lowest-rated player, a mere 2693. It is considered a semi-miracle that he qualified at all, and he is not given much chance of winning the tourney.
And yet a path to the top remains.
First, he has not lost any of his first four games (all are draws), so he is hardly a weakie.
Second, and for my purposes more importantly, the tournament has winner-take-all rewards. So many players will be taking chances to try to move into the lead. Yet in chess positive expected value big chances are hard to come by, so often players, in their determination to top the standings, will take modestly negative expected value big chances, especially in the opening phase of the game.
Now, if you are willing to take a negative expected value big chance, will you prefer to do so against the top players in the tourney, such as Caruana, or the lower-rated players, such as Blübaum? The answer is obvious.
Pedro Franceschi taught himself to code when he was eight years old. At 12, he began receiving legal notices from Apple, asking him to stop hacking iPhones. By 14, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling software and had his mom accompanying him on job interviews in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. Even among coding and hacking prodigies, Franceschi stands out.
Today, Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a financial technology company that was just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Franceschi is all of 29 years old now, so he’s done alright.
Brex led a new wave of companies that brought more modern financial tools first to start-ups and then to businesses of all sizes. Over the years, it’s had some ups and downs, and Franceschi has been remarkably open about Brex’s stumbles, his mental health struggles and about the areas where he thinks Brex got things very right.
Franceschi remains a hacker at heart and has been experimenting away with AI agents. He, in fact, says he’s running Brex – and his life – with a team of AI agents that read his e-mails and Slack messages, perform job recruiting tasks and schedule his day-to-day activities.
We get into all of this on the episode, charting Franceschi’s rise from hacking phenom to running a multi-billion-dollar company and discussing where he thinks AI and money are heading.
Do we have journalistic conflicts with this episode? Yes, we do. Brex has been the top sponsor of our podcast and video series. You can learn more about the depths of our relationship and what Brex can do for your business right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.
I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain. Competition is high between the AI models right now, and the ones that win will help developers ship reliable features fastest, which requires simple, maintainable code. Good code will prevail, not only because we want it to (though we do!), but because economic forces demand it. Markets will not reward slop in coding, in the long-term.
— Soohoon Choi, Slop Is Not Necessarily The Future
Useful writeup of today's supply chain attack against Axios, the HTTP client NPM package with 101 million weekly downloads. Versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 both included a new dependency called plain-crypto-js which was freshly published malware, stealing credentials and installing a remote access trojan (RAT).
It looks like the attack came from a leaked long-lived npm token. Axios have an open issue to adopt trusted publishing, which would ensure that only their GitHub Actions workflows are able to publish to npm. The malware packages were published without an accompanying GitHub release, which strikes me as a useful heuristic for spotting potentially malicious releases - the same pattern was present for LiteLLM last week as well.
Now uses datasette-llm to manage model configuration, which means you can control which models are available for extraction tasks using the extract purpose and LLM model configuration. #38
This plugin now uses datasette-llm to configure and manage models. This means it's possible to specify which models should be made available for enrichments, using the new enrichments purpose.
Full prompts and responses and tool calls can now be logged to the llm_usage_prompt_log table in the internal database if you set the new datasette-llm-usage.log_prompts plugin configuration setting.
Redesigned the /-/llm-usage-simple-prompt page, which now requires the llm-usage-simple-prompt permission.
The llm_prompt_context() plugin hook wrapper mechanism now tracks prompts executed within a chain as well as one-off prompts, which means it can be used to track tool call loops. #5
Although I expected the war on Iran to be a disaster, I didn’t expect the Trump administration to be implicitly conceding defeat after barely a month. Yet that’s where we are:
The stock market has soared on the news of potential U.S surrender, which tells you something about how the war is going. Unfortunately, declaring victory and running away will be a lot more difficult than Trump thinks. For one thing, thousands of U.S. ground troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, and it will be very hard to avoid succumbing to the temptation to use them, at which point we will have entered what Robert Pape calls the “escalation trap.”
At the same time, Trump’s claim that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem is whistling in the dark. Trump is telling Europeans that if they lack the “courage” to seize the jet fuel they need — funny how the vastly larger U.S. military isn’t doing the job — they can just “buy from the U.S., we have plenty.” Here’s what has happened to the average price of jet fuel at major U.S. airports:
Does this look to you as if we have “plenty”? It doesn’t look that way to airline executives:
The reality is that U.S. prices of petroleum distillates and other products in which Persian Gulf nations are key producers have soared. The rise in gasoline prices, for which the national average just hit $4 a gallon, has made headlines. But other prices are also hugely important.
Most non-electric cars run on gasoline, but most trucks are fueled with diesel. And diesel prices are up even more than gasoline prices — approximately $1.70 per gallon as opposed to $1:
The feedstocks for fertilizer are largely manufactured from natural gas, and Persian Gulf nations were major producers, shipping their production out through the Strait of Hormuz, before the war. Here’s what has happened to the price of urea:
Source: Trading Economics
And where do you think plastic comes from? Here’s the price of polyethylene:
Source: Trading Economics
How important are these non-gasoline price shocks? The Energy Information Administration has a useful chart — the data are for 2022, but the numbers will look similar for the eve of the Iran War:
Less than half of U.S. consumption of petroleum products was gasoline. And the price of distillate fuel oil — mostly diesel — is up about 70 percent more than the price of gasoline. Add in soaring costs for fertilizer and feedstocks for plastic, and the surge in gas prices, even though it dominates headlines, is well under half of the economic story.
And who pays the higher prices of diesel, jet fuel, fertilizer and plastics? The answer is that these show up initially as costs to producers but will quickly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for shipping and, indirectly, almost everything you buy.
How big is the non-gasoline price shock? We consume around 4 million barrels of diesel a day, which is about 60 billion gallons per year (there are 42 gallons per barrel.) The price of diesel is up $1.70 a gallon, so if prices were to stay at current levels, that alone would be a roughly $100 billion hit to consumers. Substantial additional hits will come from higher prices of jet fuel, fertilizer and petrochemicals.
And, of course, gasoline has gotten a lot more expensive too. Do you still think that the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem?
Now, America produces a lot of oil, and the domestic oil industry will be earning large windfall profits even as U.S. consumers suffer. But so what? We don’t have any mechanism in place to capture and redistribute those windfall gains, so ordinary U.S. families will bear the full brunt of the global oil shock even though America is a net oil exporter.
There’s an additional, technical but important reason to be even more worried about soaring prices for diesel, jet fuel and industrial materials than about gasoline prices. It involves how the Federal Reserve is likely to react.
The Fed normally bases its decisions about whether to reduce or increase interest rates on “core” inflation — inflation excluding food and energy prices. The reason it does this is that food and energy prices are highly volatile and are usually a poor indicator of what inflation will be over the next few years. So the Fed tries to “look through” inflation fluctuations driven mainly by the prices of groceries and gasoline. For example, it didn’t raise rates in 2011, when there was a temporary uptick in inflation driven entirely by oil prices.
There is a major debate among monetary policy experts about whether the Fed can safely focus only on core inflation and look through the inflationary effects of the Hormuz blockade, which if unresolved will be the worst energy crisis in history. In any case, however, core inflation only excludes energy directly purchased by consumers. Oil-related price shocks such as soaring jet fuel and diesel prices, which raise the cost of doing business, aren’t excluded, which means that they will increase the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. This will push the Fed toward raising interest rates or at least holding off on rate cuts.
The Fed could, in principle, try to look through the effects of the Strait crisis on business costs as well as direct effects on consumer prices. But given how nervous everyone is about the risk of 70s-type stagflation, it probably won’t.
So the diesel/jet fuel/plastics shock will lead, other things equal, to a more hawkish Fed — and an elevated risk of recession.
The moral here is that the United States retains a vital interest in seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Much as Trump would like to declare victory and insist that the blockade is other countries’ problem, reality won’t oblige him.
Sometimes I jog my perspective on thorny physics issues by going back to earlier work. At our all too infrequent dinners together, Claudio Maccone used to tease me about this, saying that older scientific papers had inevitably been superseded by recent work which would, in any case, incorporate the early documents. But I find that looking at an idea afresh sometimes means re-living its inception, which puts things in context. It was in that spirit that I recently revisited a key paper by Ronald Bracewell.
The name Bracewell holds a certain magic, invoking as it does the era when SETI was just beginning and speculations about extraterrestrial civilizations were getting wider circulation outside the science fiction magazines. Bracewell (1921-2007) was Australian by birth, acquiring degrees in mathematics and engineering and joining in work on World War II era radar. Following completion of a PhD in physics at Cambridge, he continued his work in the 1950s with a position as senior research officer at the Radiophysics Laboratory of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Image: Ronald N. Bracewell, Stanford, CA, March 1983. Credit: NRAO/AUI Archives, Sullivan Collection. Located through Wikimedia Commons.
Bracewell came to the U.S. in 1954 to lecture on radio astronomy at UC-Berkeley before joining the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford University. His contributions to interferometry and the calibration of radiotelescope instruments to achieve breakthrough results are substantial, as a quick look through NASA’s Astrophysics Data System under his name reveals. I’ve noticed in scanning through this body of work that his interest in interstellar probes was persistent as he continued to contribute to the science of exoplanet discovery.
Nestled within the ADS results from 1960 is the unusual paper titled “Communications from Superior Galactic Communities,” which ran in Nature in 1960. In this early era, we had just had the famous paper from Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison (citation below) that is widely regarded as the beginning of modern attempts to find extraterrestrial civilizations. Given that this paper ran in Nature, which Bracewell obviously knew well because he was writing for it, we can assume that Cocconi and Morrison triggered his decision to write about the SETI question.
I call SETI a ‘question’ in this case because what struck Bracewell about it was its impracticability. Remember, at this same time, Frank Drake had begun planning (in 1959) for the project that would become Ozma, listening to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1960, and it’s evident that Cocconi and Morrison spurred the conference at Green Bank in 1961 that led to the creation of the famous Drake Equation. So we are witnessing western (as opposed to Soviet, with its somewhat different perspectives) SETI beginning to emerge, and it seemed to Bracewell that its approach was off-center.
This comes across in the “Communications from Superior Galactic Communities” paper loud and clear. Going through the suggestion from Cocconi and Morrison that 1420 MHz was the ‘waterhole’ frequency around which radio-using civilizations in search of an audience would gather, Bracewell then mentions Drake’s plans, and points out how unlikely it is that ETI would find us. After all, we were at that time looking for a radio beacon singling us out:
Let us assume that there are one thousand likely stars within the same range as the nearest superior community. This makes it hard for us to select the right one. Furthermore, if this advanced society is looking for us, we can only expect to find them expending such effort as they could afford to expend on the thousand likely stars within the same range of them. It does not seem likely that they would maintain a thousand transmitters at powers well above the megawatt estimated by Drake as a minimum for spanning only 10 light years, and run them for many years, and we could scarcely count on them paying special attention to us. Remember that throughout most of tho thousands of millions of years of the Earth’s existence such attention would have been fruitless.
The alternative? Send probes to nearby stars designed to attract the attention of technological beings on any planets there. It is indicative of the optimism of the early space era that Bracewell should describe interstellar flight as “…what we ourselves are now discussing and are on the point of doing, probably during this century…” We now look to the possibility of an interstellar probe by the end of this century, but the physics says the idea is doable.
Unlike SETI, where we cope with the inverse-square problem of attenuation of the signal, we would be talking about a probe within no more than a few minutes or hours of communications time from its target. Travel times are obviously lengthy, but with an eye toward science delivery for coming generations Bracewell suggests ‘swarm’ strategies that would deliver probes to perhaps the thousand stars near enough to us to be of interest. Each probe could quickly learn key facts about life and technology on these worlds.
Image: Ronald Bracewell (left), with Stanford’s Von Eshleman, a major figure in early research into gravitational lensing. Here the two are examining the horn antennae that Bracewell used in 1969 to determine that the Sun is moving relative to the cosmic background radiation. Credit: Linda Cicero/Stanford University.
In 1974, Bracewell would investigate the prospect of a galactic ‘network’ of civilizations, one that we could perhaps join, but even here in 1960 he homes in on the idea. He imagines our world joining a perhaps galaxy-spanning ‘chain of communication,’ and thus dealing with civilizations that have been through the contact scenario many times on many worlds. These would, obviously, be superior technologies from which we could learn new science.
Bracewell’s probes, then, are designed for contact, and meant to be identified by ETI. He would expand these ideas in his 1974 book The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space. The version of this title most likely to be available in used book stores is the 1976 printing from the San Francisco Book Company, and it’s a good thing for any interstellar enthusiast to track down.
Here the method reminds us that not long after the time Bracewell was writing, Carl Sagan was negotiating with Russian astronomer Iosif S. Shklovskii to reprint the book that would become in its western edition Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden-Day, 1966). The story of that collaboration is itself interesting, as Shklovskii didn’t realize Sagan would not just publish his book Universe, Life, Mind in the west, but would also heavily annotate it with his own brand of science popularization. That disharmony apart, Sagan’s awareness of Bracewell becomes apparent given the method of communications that ETI uses with Earth to announce their presence in the novel Contact, the re-broadcast of radio messages from our past.
Bracewell had suggested something similar, though using radio:
Such a probe may be here now, in our solar system, trying to make its presence known to us. For this purpose a radio transmitter would seem essential. On what wave-length would it transmit, and how should we decode its signal ? To ensure use of a wave-length that could both penetrate our ionosphere and be in a band certain to be in use, the probe could first listen for our signals and then repeat them back. To us, its signals would have the appearance of echoes having delays of seconds or minutes such as were reported thirty years ago by Størmer and van der Pol and never explained.
I don’t want to get caught up in the famous delayed-echo story of the 1920s, but the short version is that amateur radio operator Jørgen Hals observed echoes of a Dutch shortwave station in 1927 and took the matter to Norwegian physicist Carl Størmer and Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol. The echoes became the subject of work by Scottish writer Duncan Lunan, who explored them as possible signs of a Bracewell probe operating in the Solar System. The claim became controversial, to say the least, and has since been refuted, although Lunan continued to investigate it. And it is also true that long-delayed echoes have been attributed to various natural sources but remain enigmatic.
In any case, Bracewell advocated remaining alert to a possible interstellar origin for signals that are unusual, for the benefits of joining in an interstellar conversation would be immense. He calculated that even if there were few civilizations that outlived their adolescence (remember, this was in the Cold War era, with nuclear destruction always on our minds), there might still be a few that survived and went on to long lifetimes. The paper continues:
Presumably such an ancient association would be very able indeed technically, and might seek us out by special means that we cannot guess. Whether they would be interested in rudimentary societies which, in their experience, would usually have burnt themselves out before they could be located and reached, is hard to say. Such communities would be collapsing at the rate of two a year (103 in 500 years), and they might already have satisfied the!r curiosity by archreological inspection made at leisure on sites nearer home. On the other hand, the prospect of catching a technology near its peak might be a strong incentive for them to reach us.
Bracewell’s place in the early SETI literature, including Michael Hart and Frank Tipler, can’t be examined without bringing in John von Neumann, whose self-reproducing machines would likewise have spurred Bracewell’s imagination, though his own concept did not include this capability. I want to try to fit some of these pieces together and likewise bring back Sagan and Shklovskii in the next essay. What we’re juggling here is the very concept of what Sagan called ‘mediocrity,’ which he described as ‘the idea that we are not unique.’ Do we sometimes stretch our Copernican understanding of the cosmos too far?
The paper is Bracewell, “Communications from Superior Galactic Communities,” Nature Volume 186, Issue 4726 (1960), pp. 670-671. Abstract. The Cocconi & Morrison paper is “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature 184 (4690) (1959), pp. 844–846. Full text.
I finally got the chance to drop by one of my favorite podcasts, The Vergecast, where David Pierce had me on to talk about the recent conversation about Apple's moves around video podcasts, as well as the much broader big-picture considerations around keeping podcasts open. We started with grounding the conversation in the idea that "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement.
The episode also starts with a wonderful look back at Apple's first half-century as they celebrate their 50 anniversary, courtesy of Jason Snell, whose Six Colors is one of my favorite tech sites, and whose annual survey of tech expert sentiment on Apple is indispensable. He's completely fluent in Apple's culture and history, and minces no words about their recent moral failures. Definitely worth the watch! I hope you'll check out the entire episode, and let me know what you think, and I'm really glad to get to continue conversations that start on my site and bring them to a broader audience.
Imagine you are processing a stream of events, of unknown length. It
could end in 3 seconds, it could run for 3 months; you simply don’t
know. As a result, storing the whole stream in memory or even on disk is
not acceptable, but you still need to extract relevant information.
Depending on what information you need, choosing a random sample of the
stream will give you almost as good information as storing all the
data. For example, consider a performance profiler, used to find which
parts of your running code are slowest. Many profilers records a
program’s callstack every few microseconds, resulting a stream of
unlimited size: you don’t know how long the program will run. For this
use case, a random sample of callstacks, say 2000 of them, can usually
give you sufficient information to do performance optimization.
Why does this work?
Slow code will result in the same callstack being repeated.
A random sample of callstacks is more likely to contain callstacks
that repeat a lot.
Thus, a random sample is more likely to include slow code, the code
you specifically want to identify with your profiler.
When you need to extract a random sample from a stream of unknown
length, a common solution is the family of algorithms known as
reservoir sampling.
In this article you will learn:
How basic reservoir sampling works.
Some problems with reservoir sampling, motivated by a profiler that
wants to generate a timeline.
A (new?) variant of reservoir sampling that allows you to ensure
samples are spread evenly across time.
The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is.
Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style “rewind” through Apple product history. This one’s more fun. There’s an absolutely exquisite audio glitch at a certain moment — chef’s kiss. Bit of a shame that it’s only on X as far I know. Update: Ah, Apple posted the same video to their homepage, linked to a “◀︎◀︎ REW” button set in bitmapped Chicago 12, but it’s seemingly only shown when you visit on an iPhone. I don’t see the button from my Mac or iPad. But you should be able to watch the video from any device at this link. (I would have awarded bonus points for making the “◀︎◀︎” triangles pixel art too. I mean, come on!)
Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+):
“Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a
CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the
company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applications,
told Business Insider.
Altman defers to Simo when he doesn’t feel strongly, she said, and
they “debate it out” when he does.
I am deeply suspicious of any company with two CEOs. It occasionally works, like at Netflix, when they’re not just co-CEOs but co-equals. Simo does not seem Sam Altman’s equal at OpenAI.
As OpenAI races toward a possible IPO later this year, Simo, who
oversees nearly two-thirds of the company, has a delicate
balancing act. She must craft a strategy to make products
profitable, while convincing staffers who joined a research-driven
organization that commercialization won’t change the mission.
The stakes are high. Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI
is expected to amass the “largest startup losses in history,”
totaling a projected $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. (An
OpenAI spokesperson said that figure is incorrect, and one person
familiar with the numbers said OpenAI’s internal projections are
in line with other reports of $111 billion cash burn by 2030.)
It’s really something when the number in the company’s favor is a loss of $111 billion.
One former Meta employee recalled a moment when, after a
contentious meeting, Simo sent a one-line follow-up saying she was
unlikely to change her mind, so the team shouldn’t waste time
trying to persuade her. She has little patience for internal
debates that lose sight of the product, the former employee said,
and she’s skilled at “being super clear in her directive so teams
don’t scramble and waste time.”
Debates that lose sight of the product quality, or lose sight of the product revenue? Given that Simo rose to prominence at Facebook, eventually running the Facebook blue app, and considering the product quality vs. product revenue balance of that app, I think we know the answer.
This whole dumb “superapp” idea that leaked last week sounds exactly like the sort of thing someone who ran the Facebook app would think is a good idea. The difference, I expect, is that Facebook is free to let product quality (and experience quality) fall by the wayside because their social platforms have such powerful network effects. People stay on Facebook and Instagram even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.
A recent viral tweet, quoted by Elon Musk, points out that bartenders can be fined or even imprisoned if they serve alcohol to patrons who later kill someone while under the influence. Judges, in contrast, enjoy absolute or qualified immunity even when they repeatedly release defendants who go on to kill.
I agree that judges should face stronger incentives to make good decisions, but the obvious problem with penalizing judges who release people who later commit crimes is that judges would then have very little incentive to release anyone—and that too is a bad decision. Steven Landsburg solved this problem in his paper A Modest Proposal to Improve Judicial Incentives, published in my book Entrepreneurial Economics.
Landsburg’s solution is elegant: we must also pay judges a bounty when they release a defendant.
Whether judges would release more or fewer defendants than they do today would depend on the size of the cash bounty, which could be adjusted to reflect the wishes of the legislature. The advantage of my proposal is not its effect on the number of defendants who are granted bail but the effect on which defendants are granted bail. Whether we favor releasing 1 percent or 99 percent, we can agree that those 1 percent or 99 percent should not be chosen randomly. We want judges to focus their full attention on the potential costs of their decisions, and personal liability has a way of concentrating the mind.
One might object that a cash bounty will cost too much, but recall that the bounty is balanced by penalties when a released defendant commits a future crime. The bounties and penalties can be calibrated so that on average the program is budget-neutral. The key is to get the incentives right on the margin.
The structure of this problem is quite general. Ben Golub, for example, writes:
There should be a retrospective reputational penalty imposed on referees who vote no on a paper because the paper is too simple technically — if that paper ends up being important. It’s an almost definitional indicator of bad judgment.
Quite right, but a penalty for rejection needs to be balanced with a bonus for acceptance. Get the marginal incentive right and quality will follow!
A few years back I read Agnès Poirier’s excellent Left Bank about Parisian clever clogs in the 1940s but I came away wishing I understood more about what existentialism was. Plodding through some Sartre and de Beauvior novels didn’t help so I looked for a brief book about it. This title, How to Be an Existentialist, is a bit cringe but as far as I can tell the book does the job well.
Here are my notes, which I’m glad I made because it took me months to get round to finishing reading this. It reminded me that when I was doing my masters, the elective class in Continental Philosophy that I took was the hardest thing I’ve tried to understand. The words so often just slide off my brain.
You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfilment. Ironically, existentialism is saying, if you want to be happy, or at least be happier, stop struggling to achieve complete happiness because that way only leads to disappointment.
p.15
Existentialists are nihilists because they recognize that life is ultimately absurd and full of terrible, inescapable truths. They are anti-nihilists because they recognize that life does in fact have a meaning: the meaning each person chooses to give his or her own existence. They recognize that each person is free to create themselves and make something worthwhile of themselves by striving against life’s difficulties.
p.16
In choosing to live, in refusing the ever-present possibility of suicide, a person confers value and significance on a life that has no value or significance in itself. In choosing to live his life rather than end it a person takes on responsibility for his life.
p.18
Mainstream existentialism, then, is anti-idealist, anti-metaphysical and atheistic. It sees mankind as occupying an indifferent universe that is meaningless to the point of absurdity.
Existentialism and consciousness
p.21. “…consciousness is nothing, a nothingness or a non-being…” Not everything is made of matter, atoms, etc. e.g. time, states of mind, numbers. They are not corporeal.
pp.22-23. Of course, consciousness relies on physical activity in the brain, but it isn’t reducible to brain activity. Someone’s desires, thoughts and expectations are aspects of their relationship with the world. “Desire is desire of something, thoughts are thoughts of something, expectation is expectation of something”.
p.24. This is the theory of intentionality, from Edmund Husserl.
The theory of intentionality states that consciousness is intentional, it always intends something, it is always directed towards something, it is always about something.
The theory of intentionality implies that because consciousness is always of or about something and nothing beyond that, any attempt to investigate consciousness always leads immediately to an investigation of whatever consciousness is of or about. Phenomenologists, including existentialists, seek to understand consciousness by investigating the way in which different phenomena, different intentional objects, appear to consciousness.
p.25 Love for someone does not exist as such, but is comprised of happiness when seeing the person, feelings of desire, things said about them, etc. A pen is a collection of appearances to consciousness: the side we can see, its size from where we are, etc.
So, according to Brentano and Husserl and their many phenomenologist followers, things are actually just collections of appearances. Things must be reduced to their appearances in order to be understood correctly.
p.26
In lots of places in his writings Sartre argues that when there is no consciousness present on the scene there is only what he calls undifferentiated being. This undifferentiated being just is, and that is really all that can be said about it. It has no properties, no features, no characteristics. … Sartre argues that undifferentiated being is differentiated and divided up into distinct phenomena by consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is a nothingness or a negation that places particular negations, negativities, lacks and absences into undifferentiated being that, so to speak, carve it up into particular phenomena – this as distinct from that, this as not that, this as external to that, here as not there, then as not now and so on.
p.27
The world we know is a product of the intimate relationship that exists between consciousness and being.
p.28
In itself an acorn lacks nothing, it is simply what it is. In order to understand it as a potential oak tree it must be judged in terms of the oak tree that is presently lacking. The meaning of the acorn is based on the non-being of the oak tree as that which the acorn presently lacks. The acorn itself does not lack the oak tree. The acorn lacks the oak tree only for a consciousness that is capable of projecting forward in time beyond the acorn towards the not-yet-being or non-being of the oak tree. … As a meaningful phenomenon, the acorn is understood as what it is by virtue of what it lacks.
p.29
A person interprets every situation according to his desires, hopes, expectations and intentions. Every situation a person encounters is understood as presently lacking something desired, expected, intended or anticipated. As said, the situation in itself does not lack anything; it lacks something only for the person whose situation it is. What a situation lacks is what I lack. If one of my car tyres is flat it is I, not the car itself, that lacks four good tyres. More to the point, it is my purposes that lack a functioning car.
Consciousness is always predisposed to find something lacking because lack is intrinsic to the very meaning of every situation for any particular consciousness. This is why, according to existentialist philosophers, a consciousness, a person, can never be completely satisfied.
p.30
In general, a person always lacks the future towards which he is constantly heading, the future which gives meaning to his present actions and beyond which he hopes in vain to be fulfilled and at one with himself. … It seems that the endless march of time constantly cheats us of what we are, prevents us from becoming one with ourselves, but really, what we are is this endless march forward in time, creatures that can never become one with themselves.
… This is not a bad thing, it is just the way it is, so you would be wrong to get depressed about it, although many people do.
Temporality
p.32
Consciousness is not just in time like an object getting older with every day that passes, it is, as the existentialists say, essentially temporalized. This means that it is always its past which is no longer and its future which is not yet. It is in constant temporal motion away from its past towards its future, so much so that there is really no such moment as the present. Consciousness does not hop from one present moment to the next. The present for consciousness is only its presence to the world as a being constantly flowing forward in time. Existentialists refer to this constant temporal motion of consciousness as temporal transcendence, temporal surpassing or temporal flight. Consciousness constantly transcends, surpasses and flees what it is - what it was - towards the future at which it aims.
p.33. Past, present and future only have “reality or meaning in terms of the other two”.
As for the present, we have already seen that it is not a fixed moment – there are no fixed moments for consciousness. The present is simply the presence of consciousness to the world as a being that constantly transcends the past towards the future. In other words, consciousness is never in the present, it is only ever present (has presence) as a being endlessly passing on towards the future.
It is consciousness that brings time into the world, consciousness that temporalizes the world.
p.34
As it is in itself apart from anyone being conscious of it, an acorn is in process of becoming an oak. Yet in doing so it is not aiming at becoming an oak. … the young acorn is not down in the good earth saying to itself, ‘Come on then little acorn, big effort, I’ve got to grow into a big tall oak tree just like my gnarled old mom.’ It is not projecting itself towards any future goal and it has no futurizing intention whereby it recognizes itself as something that presently lacks itself as an oak tree. As becoming an oak is not a project for the acorn, and definitely not a conscious project, it is correct to say that the acorn has no future. It has a future only for a consciousness that understands that the acorn is not yet an oak tree but will be an oak tree in future.
p.35
Existentialism claims that it is fundamental to what we are to want to be at one with ourselves, to be what we are instead of having always to strive to be it, to achieve a future state of total completion in which we no longer lack anything. But we never arrive at this godlike state of total smug self-satisfaction because we never arrive at the future.
This is just how things are, and “is the price you pay for existing as a conscious being at all”. Accept “this is how life is and [make] the most of it”.
Being-for-others
p.36
Each of us is what Sartre and his gang call a being-for-itself. Not only are people conscious of the world, they are conscious of themselves as conscious of the world. This self-consciousness or self-reflection is a defining feature of human beings.
p.37
However deluded a person may actually be about himself he feels he knows himself, he is the measure of himself, the judge and jury of his thoughts and actions. He experiences himself as free, as creating himself moment by moment through the things he chooses to do and the paths he chooses to take.
People are seldom if ever truly alone, especially these days with the world population spiralling out of control and everywhere getting so crowded. Each person constantly confronts the existence of other people, not simply as objects in his world, but as subjects who see him and judge him and reduce him to an object in their world. To be an object in the world of the Other, to be for the Other, to be in danger of being belittled by the Other, this is the meaning of being-for-others.
p.39
Even when a person is physically alone, miles from the shops, miles from anywhere and anyone, other people are likely to be in his thoughts. Even if, unlike most of us, he is not particularly paranoid, he may well be plagued by the actual and imagined judgements of others and be unable to stop thinking about what others think of him, of the tactless things he said at the staff meeting or the idiotic things he did at the office party. In his embarrassment he can’t help thinking that the Other has somehow got hold of a part of him, trapped him, got the better of him. The Other makes him into something he feels he is not, something he does not want to recognize or feel responsible for. Against his will, in opposition to his freedom and his joyful transcendence, other people force him to be what he is for them rather than what he is for himself.
p.40
A good deal of most people’s behaviour is directed towards seeking to influence their being-for-others, or even to gain complete control over it. People generally desire to impress and certainly go to great lengths to encourage other people to love, respect or fear them.
p.44
To be fair to existentialist philosophers it should be noted that they do in fact show some appreciation of the capacity people have for being together without conflict in their notion of Mitsein – German for ‘being-with’. The French existentialist philosophers followed the German existentialist philosopher, Heidegger, in using the term ‘Mitsein’ to refer to the phenomenon of being-with-others; to the phenomenon of ‘we’. On those occasions when a we vibe takes over a person is not transcended by other people, nor does he seek to transcend other people. Rather, his ego is transcended by some collective experience or enterprise in which he becomes submerged in an us.
This submergence in an us, however, is often maintained through conflict with a them as opponent or hate object – conflict at the group level. Heidegger’s own experience of the Mitsein was as a member of Hitler’s National Socialist Party. Even so, there are occasions when the us does not require a them in order to be maintained. For example, a group may work together on a task with a common goal that is not primarily the goal of beating or destroying the competition.
Freedom and responsibility
p.45
For existentialist philosophers freedom is not essentially about what people are at liberty to do, about what they are able to do or allowed to do and so on, but about each person’s responsibility for whatever they do or do not do in every circumstance in which they find themselves. … Freedom is not freedom from responsibility, freedom is having to make choices and therefore having to take responsibility.
p.46. Bearing in mind the explanation of consciousness from ‘Temporality‘, above:
Events, which are what they are and can never be other than what they are once they have happened, belong to a past that exists for a consciousness that is the future of that past. The past exists only for a consciousness that transcends it towards the future. Consciousness exists only as a transcendence of the past towards the future. Consciousness is the future of the past, which is to say, it is the future possibilities of the past. As nothing but a being towards the future, as nothing but the future possibilities of what it transcends, consciousness has to be these possibilities. It cannot not be an opening up of possibilities.
p.47
… we are able to be free in a world of mechanical cause and effect events because we constantly escape that mechanical world towards the future. It is in the future at which we aim that we are free.
By choosing among its possibilities, by choosing a course of action, consciousness brings some of its possibilities into actuality and abandons others. The transformation of possibility into actuality is the transformation of what existentialist philosophers call future-past into past-future.
pp.47-8
The fact that consciousness has to be a temporal transcendence in order to exist at all, the fact that it cannot not be an opening up of possibilities, implies that it cannot not be free. It is a necessary feature of human consciousness that it is not free to cease being free. People are necessarily free, or, as Sartre puts it, people are ‘condemned to be free’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 462).
p.48
A person cannot make himself determined by the world, for whenever or however he attempts to do it, he must choose to do it. A person can never not choose because, as Sartre says, ‘Not to choose is, in fact, to choose not to choose’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 503). A person’s freedom does not consist in a complete detachment from all obligations, … it consists in the constant responsibility of having to choose who he is through the actions he chooses to perform in response to the adversity and resistance of his situation. …
It is important to note that existentialist philosophers call the adversity and resistance of things and situations facticity. Facticity is what freedom works to overcome, although freedom always needs facticity in order to be the overcoming of it. … In so far as freedom is very closely linked to what we have been calling transcendence, we can say that transcendence is the transcendence of facticity.
Freedom and disability
p.49
If a disabled person considers his disability the ruination of his life then that is a choice he has made for which he alone is responsible. He is free to choose his disability positively. To strive, for example, to be a successful para-athlete or to spend the time he used to spend playing football writing a book or fundraising.
Possible limits to freedom
pp.51-2
More moderate existentialists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose great contribution to existentialism is a book called Phenomenology of Perception, think that there are sometimes limitations to freedom. … Philosophers who sympathize with Merleau-Ponty’s position list sense of humour, sexual preference, panic reactions and insanity as examples of dispositions and responses that require conscious awareness in order to occur but are not matters of choice.
Freedom and anxiety
p.54
Our freedom [can make] us anxious because there is nothing but our freedom itself to stop us from performing destructive, dangerous, embarrassing or disreputable acts at any moment.
p.55
Sartre distinguishes what can be called freedom-anxiety from fear. He takes the example of a man picking his way carefully along a narrow precipice (Being and Nothingness, pp. 53-56). The man fears he might fall but he also suffers anxiety, which manifests itself as vertigo, because he is free to jump. Sartre says: ‘Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 53).
3. How Not to Be an Existentialist
Bad faith is not self-deception
p.58
Bad faith cannot be self-deception for the simple reason that self-deception, in the sense of lying to yourself, is impossible. A person can no more succeed in lying to himself than he can get away with cheating while playing himself at chess.
pp.59-62 An example of a woman whose hand is touched by a man and chooses to leave her hand where it is and flirt, rather than pull away or take the man’s hand willingly, “instead choosing herself as a being that would-be beyond the requirement to choose”. “The flirt treats the facticity of her situation, in terms of which her choices of herself should be exercised, as though it has a transcendent power over her body. That is, she treats her facticity as though it is a transcendence.” [I don’t understand]
Waiters, actors and attitudes
pp.62-5. An example of a waiter, walking stiffly, and being too eager and attentive. Some say he’s in bad faith by over acting “his role to convince himself and others that he is not a person but an object, a waiter-thing”. But Cox says he’s not in bad faith because he’s not trying to escape his freedom. He knows what he is doing, consciously impersonating a waiter, being tongue in cheek. “He has become so good that it is like second nature to him.”
The best way to understand Sartre’s Bad Faith is to think about smokers. We’ll do this in two ways: first by emphasizing the smoker that lives in Bad Faith by adhering to his Transcendence and then by considering the smoker that lives in Bad Faith by adhering to his Facticity. Hopefully you’ll glean an answer to a few of your questions through this (I think you might).
First think about the stereotypical person who smokes here or there, that takes a puff ‘only at parties,’ or ‘only when alcohol is served’. This person views themselves as not a smoker since he takes his actions to be occasional, non-habit forming and whatever else. He says to himself, “I’m not a smoker, i’m not buying a pack every week and puffing them back”. While it may be true that this individual lacks the same smoking-frequency as someone more addicted, the facticity that he has established (ie. the concrete facts, or happenings in the world that he is directly responsible for bringing about) says that he is a smoker. There’s evidence through every one of his actions, as they all speak directly to his involvement in the world: He knows that he should put the filter end in his mouth, that he should light the white end, he knows how to draw in smoke and exhale in the appropriate way, he even knows a trick to put out a half-smoked cigarette on the edge of his boot to save for later. Each of these actions, each of these various ways he has involved himself in the world speak to his knowing what smokers do and how they behave, and yet ‘he’s not one of them’. This man lives in Bad Faith because he hides away from the facticity that he has built up and pretends its not his even though it’s all his. He is pure transcendence and lives in Bad Faith because of it.
Next think about the type of person that has smoked for 30+ years and has effectively built an identity around that lifestyle. This person differs from the first in that he doesn’t hide away from his being a smoker but rather fully assumes the role. With that said, this individual has tried many times to quit, but always ultimately says to himself that he can’t, that he’s too ‘far-gone’ and that smoking is ‘who he is’. This man lives in Bad Faith the moment he utters these words because he hides away in his established facticity (that he’s a smoker and nothing more) in denial of the reality that he is an intelligent choosing agent with the free capacity to change his life (transcendence). In this case, the man hides from his freedom to define himself and seeks safety in the identity of the smoker.
Whereas the first case lived in denial of the trail of his involvement in the world, the second case lives in denial of his capacity to have an involvement in the world of his choosing. Both are examples of Bad Faith.
§pp.65-69. A description similar to, but less clear than, the above but with a homosexual (from Sartre) rather than a smoker.
The first example above is someone attempting to be sincere, a form of bad faith.
To declare, “I am what I am,’ is to assert the fallacy that I am a fixed entity while evading the existential truth that I am an ambiguous and indeterminate being who must continually create myself through choice and action. In short, it is to declare myself a facticity when in reality I am the transcendence of my facticity – this is bad faith.
A more devious form of sincerity is using “I am what I am” not to be a thing, what you are, but to distance yourself from what you are by the very act of declaring what you are.
‘I am so lazy’ admits Fred, instantly becoming the one who admits to being lazy rather than the one who is responsible for being lazy. Unlike a person who adopts the simpler form of sincerity, Fred does not aim to be his facticity by denying his transcendence, he aims to be a pure transcendence divorced from his facticity.
How should that first smoker (or the homosexual in Cox’s/Satre’s example) escape bad faith?
Most importantly, he has to accept that he chooses his conduct. He could have chosen to behave differently but he didn’t. He is responsible for his conduct and to be authentic he has to take responsibility for his conduct. He has to accept that it is a part of himself and always will be. He has to own it.
Contingency, nausea and the Existential Alka-Seltzer of bad faith
p.71
Contingency is the state of being contingent, unnecessary, accidental. Whatever is contingent is not necessary, it need not be or be so. Sartre identifies contingency as a fundamental feature of the universe, a basic fact of existence as a whole …
… For Sartre, existence is contingent in the sense of being absurdly superfluous. It is a grotesque cosmic accident that need not exist but does …
Human consciousness is capable of a sickening and terrifying awareness of being submerged in an existence that is absurd, pointless, superfluous and contingent. Sartre calls this sickening and terrifying awareness ‘The Nausea’ – hence the title of his greatest masterpiece.
p.72
Human society … constantly aims to suppress contingency by imposing meanings and purposes on the world. This is achieved largely by naming and categorizing things.
But does naming something, like an unusual insect in the garden, really make it “less weird, less of a strange cosmic accident?” According to existentialist philosophers “things only have meaning and purpose relative to other things”.
p.73 Sartre believed…
…that an occasional or background awareness of contingency is vital if a person is to achieve any degree of authenticity and avoid living a lie. Sartre’s philosophy is characterized by an abiding hatred and distrust of people, usually middle-class (bourgeois) people, who seem totally unaware of life’s contingency; people who once glimpsed life’s contingency and were terrified by it and are now on the run from it. …
The world, they tell themselves in bad faith, is not contingent but created with humankind as its centrepiece. They assume that they have an immortal essence, that their existence is inevitable, that they exist by some divine decree rather than by accident. They believe the moral and social values they subscribe to are objective, absolute and unquestionable. They believe that society is rooted in these absolute values and that the way things are in society constitutes the only possible reality. All they have to do to claim their absolute right to be respected by others and to have the respect of others sustain the illusion of their necessity is to dutifully fulfil the role prescribed to them by society and identify themselves totally with that role. They learn to see themselves only as others see them and avoid thinking about themselves in any kind of philosophical way.
4. How to Be Authentic
p.81 “… authenticity … is the opposite of bad faith. … authenticity is distinct from sincerity. Sincerity is a form of bad faith. … the most blatant feature of inauthenticity is the attempt to evade responsibility.”
Authenticity and getting real
p.82
Inauthenticity is the denial of the fundamental existential truth that we are free and responsible, whereas authenticity … is the acceptance or affirmation of this fundamental existential truth.
Assuming freedom involves a person assuming total responsibility for himself in whatever situation he finds himself. … If he is not imprisoned he can, of course, reject his situation by running away … but this still involves a choice. … every situation is a demand to choose.
Being-in-situation
pp.83-5 From Sartre’s War Diaries p.54:
To be authentic is to realise fully one’s being-in-situation, whatever this situation may happen to be: with a profound awareness that, through the authentic realisation of the being-in-situation, one brings to full existence the situation on the one hand and human reality on the other. This presupposes a patient study of what the situation requires, and then a way of throwing oneself into it and determining oneself to ‘be-for’ this situation.
Don’t pretend to be something – a soldier in the examples given – by saying to yourself that you’re not really a soldier, just a civilian who happens to be in this situation. Throw yourself into it or else leave and face the consequences.
Like the waiter from an example earlier, who plays at the role to the full:
He absorbs himself in his performance so much that he does not reflect on the fact he is performing. He has become his performance and his attitude towards himself involves a suspension of disbelief.
Freedom as a value
pp.85-6.
Authenticity involves a person coming to terms with the fact that he will never be at one with himself, that he will never become a kind of thing that no longer has to choose what it is. Surprisingly though, authenticity does not involve a person abandoning the desire for one-ness, substantiality and foundation.
This would collapse into a project of nihilism. You cannot be nothing, because you have a relationship to the world. [I’m not convinced I’ve summarised this well but, ironically, at this point I am losing the will to live.]
The problem of being authentic
pp.87-8. You can’t be authentic. You are only authentic if you behave authentically. For someone “to think he is authentic is to think he is an authentic-thing, and as we’ve seen, for a person to think he is any kind of thing is bad faith.”
p.92
A quick summary: Authentic existence is a project that has to be continually reassumed. A person is only as authentic as his present act. Even if he has been consistently authentic for a whole week, if he is not authentic right now then he is not authentic. Given the world’s endless temptations to bad faith, the difficulties of resisting regret and imposed inauthenticity, the fact that habit and other people’s expectations shape a person’s life as much as his capacity to choose, it is very difficult for anyone to sustain authenticity for a significant period of time. Most people are probably only capable of achieving authenticity occasionally.
Nevertheless, authenticity is an existentialist ideal worth struggling for.
Authenticity and intelligence
pp.92-3 You need to be intellectually aware of certain truths of the human condition to attempt to be authentic. One can criticise someone for being inauthentic but maybe they’re simply unaware, rather than failing at something. They might believe it’s possible to achieve complete fulfilment.
Against this point of view, it doesn’t take much intelligence to recognise certain truths of the human condition, such as satisfaction being elusive, the immanence of death, etc. So if people don’t see these, maybe it’s actually because they refuse to confront them, not because they’re ignorant.
Authenticity and other people
p.95. If “authenticity involves refusing to live according to the expectations of others” how can you throw yourself into your situation, which involves other people?
p.96. “After World War II showed them how interdependent people are, Sartre and de Beauvoir began to acknowledge that authenticity involves conforming to some extent to the expectations of others.”
Nietzsche on authenticity – regret nothing
[I read it but I am all out of steam at this point.]
Heidegger on authenticity – authentic being-towards-death
p.102.
… what Heidegger recognizes is that people can have an authentic or an inauthentic attitude towards the fact that they are going to die. Heidegger refers to the being of each human being as Dasein, German for ‘being-there’. Dasein refers to a person’s unique spatial and temporal situatedness in the world. Heidegger says, ‘Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility’ (Being and Time, p. 307).
p.103.
Authentic being-towards-death involves a person fully acknowledging in the way he lives his life that his time is finite and his death inevitable. By recognizing that he himself must die, rather than merely recognizing that people die, a person ceases to view himself in bad faith as simply another Other and realizes that he exists as the wholly unique possibility of his own death.
p.104.
It is only when a person fully realizes that he must die and acts in accordance with this realization that he truly begins to exist and live in his own right. In taking responsibility for his own death he takes responsibility for his own life and the way he chooses to live it. To truly realize and affirm mortality is to overcome bad faith.
p.105. “A true existentialist should never live as though he has forever, frittering away his time and putting off indefinitely the things he really wants to do.”
5. Existential Counselling
p.113.
In one sense, existential counselling aims to show people that they do not have to put up with what they are. In another sense, it aims to show them that the very fact of being alive presents us all with certain unavoidable difficulties.
A Chinese commercial company has conducted an on-orbit demonstration of a flexible robotic arm, marking progress toward capabilities for satellite servicing, refueling and debris removal.
We completed the most comprehensive study of how economists and AI experts think AI will affect the U.S. economy. They predict major AI progress—but no dramatic break from economic trends: GDP growth rates similar to today’s and a moderate decline in labor force participation. However, when asked to consider what would happen in a world with extremely rapid progress in AI capabilities by 2030, they predict significant economic impacts by 2050:
• Annualized GDP growth of 3.5% (compared to 2.4% in 2025)
• A labor force participation rate of 55% (roughly 10 million fewer jobs)
• 80% of wealth held by the top 10% (highest since 1939)
Only 5.2% of the variance is between scenarios—attributable to disagreement about AI capabilities themselves…
Here is the full paper, over 200 pages long, I will be reading through it. The list of authors is impressive, with Ezra Karger in the lead, also including Kevin Bryan, Basil Halperin, and many more. For some while this will stand as the best set of estimates we have. Here are the related forecasts of Seb Krier.
A light-brown dust plume with a defined front spreads over northwestern Africa in the late morning.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
By afternoon, the plume has shifted southwest, partly extending over the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A light-brown dust plume with a defined front spreads over northwestern Africa in the late morning.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
By afternoon, the plume has shifted southwest, partly extending over the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Morning
Afternoon
March 30, 2026
Saharan dust spreads across northwestern Africa on March 30, 2026, in these images acquired in the morning (left) by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite and in the afternoon (right) by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on NOAA-21.
In early spring 2026, a dry, dust-laden wind known as the harmattan swept across northwestern Africa. Cold temperatures, high winds, and blowing dust prompted officials to issue an alert for several regions of Morocco due to the low visibility and harsh conditions.
Satellites tracked the wall of dust over the course of the day on March 30 as it moved southwest from the Sahara Desert and toward the Atlantic Ocean. The left image, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite, shows the dust at about 10:00 Universal Time (11 a.m. local time in Morocco). The NOAA-21 satellite captured the right image about four hours later.
Meteosat-12, a satellite operated by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), captured another view of the dust storm. The geostationary weather satellite showed the dust’s movement as it moved closer to the Canary Islands.
According to Spain’s state meteorological agency (AEMET), the harmattan winds blow from the northeast between November and April, often producing dust storms as winds lift dust particles from the Sahara. During the March 30 event, AEMET noted that conditions were right for a harmattan surge, which happens when winds get stronger near the ground with the passing of a cold front. That day, winds converged perpendicular to the High Atlas mountain range before shifting southwest.
Forecasts called for the Saharan dust to ultimately engulf the Canary Islands, triggering what islanders know as calima. The dust episode was expected to worsen air quality and visibility across the islands through April 1. A separate storm earlier in March also sent dust toward the Canaries, along with another plume that dispersed widely across Europe.
Researchers using NASA data have previously reported that the most intense Saharan dust storms occur in the spring, when dust is typically lifted from the sand seas, or ergs, of central North Africa and areas along the Mediterranean coast. In the warmer months, another peak occurs in the central Sahara.
That all sounded wonderful, and that core model and its offshoots dominated financial research for decades. The problem, however, was that it wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t nearly as true as we had thought and hoped. When financial economists refined the models with more complete specifications, it turned out Beta didn’t predict stock returns much at all. Eugene Fama and Kenneth French delivered one of the final blows to earlier approaches with a 1992 paper that showed Beta didn’t have explanatory power over expected returns at all. Since Fama himself was one of the original architects of CAPM-like reasoning, and French also was a renowned finance economist, these revisions to the model were credible. For all its original promise, marginalism, and the concomitant notion of diminishing marginal utility, no longer seemed to help explain asset returns.
Under one plausible account of intellectual history, you can date the decline of marginalism to that 1992 paper. In the most rigorous, data-oriented, and highest-paying field of economics, namely finance, marginalist constructs had every chance to succeed. In fact, they ran the board for several decades. But over time they failed. In the most prestigious field of economics, marginalism has been in full retreat for over 30 years, and it shows no signs of making a comeback.
We already know that financial practice is dominated by the (non-economist) quants. But how about financial economics research, the parts that are still done by economists? What direction is that work moving in?
I was struck by a 2024 paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the two leading journals of financial economics (Journal of Finance is the other). The authors are Scott Murray, Yusen Xia, and Houping Xiao, and the title is “Charting by Machines.” The core result is pretty simple, and best expressed in the well-written abstract:
“We test the efficient market hypothesis by using machine learning to forecast stock returns from historical performance. These forecasts strongly predict the cross-section of future stock returns. The predictive power holds in most subperiods and is strong among the largest 500 stocks. The forecasting function has important nonlinearities and interactions, is remarkably stable through time, and captures effects distinct from momentum, reversal and extant technical signals. These findings question the efficient market hypothesis and indicate that technical analysis and charting have merit. We also demonstrate that machine learning models that perform well in optimization continue to perform well out-of-sample.” Murray, Xia, and Xiao (2024, p. 1). Or consider the new paper Borri, Chetverikov, Liu, and Tsyvinski (2024). They propose a new non-linear, single-factor asset pricing model. In the abstract: “Most known finance and macro factors become insignificant controlling for our single-factor.” Yet you won’t find traditional economic variables discussed in this paper, it is all about the math, in particular a representation of the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem.
In other words, the successful approach to predicting returns is giving up on traditional portfolio theory and using the “theory-less” technique of machine learning. Although this is published in the Journal of Financial Economics, in some significant sense it is not economic reasoning at all. It is calculation, combined with expertise in math and computer science. The modeling is not economic modeling in a manner that has ties to marginalism or standard intuitive microeconomic theory. And the work is predicting excess returns in a pretty robust and successful way…
There is a recent working paper which is perhaps more striking yet, by Antoine Didisheim, Shikun (Barry) Ke, Bryan T. Kelly, and Semyon Malamud. They pick up from Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), a well-established idea from financial economics. APT typically looks for “factors” in the data which predict excess returns, and a traditional APT model might have found five or six such factors. Are “inflation” or perhaps “the term structure of interest rates” useful factors? Well, that can be debated, but if so, those results sound pretty intuitive. But those intuitions seem to be disappearing. In a paper by these authors, they apply machine learning methods to look for more factors. As we know, machine learning is very good at finding non-obvious relationships in the data. The largest model they built has 360,000 (!) factors, and it reduces pricing errors by 54.8 percent relative to the classic six-factor model from Fama and French. Bravo to the authors, but what kinds of intuitions do you think possibly can be supported by those 360,000 factors?
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft stand at Launch Complex 39B on Tuesday, March 31, ahead of the planned launch of Artemis 2. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
For the first time in more than 53 years, NASA is preparing to send humans beyond low Earth orbit. As soon as Wednesday evening, four astronauts will embark on an a more than nine-day mission with the goal of flying around the Moon and back.
The flight is called Artemis 2 and it’s the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, a key stepping stone for grand plans of a Moon Base and eventually human exploration on Mars. NASA astronaut and mission commander Reid Wiseman leads the quartet, which includes fellow NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
“The vehicle is ready. The system is ready. The crew is ready. And behind this flight stands a campaign: landings, a lunar base, a nuclear propulsion into deep space. That begins, not ends, with what happens on Wednesday,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya on Monday.
“I have complete confidence in this team and the NASA workforce.”
The more than 49-hour-long countdown officially began ticking at 4:44 p.m. EDT (2044 UTC) onMonday. Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson will give her approval to proceed into fueling the 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket at 7:34 a.m. EDT (1134 UTC) on Wednesday.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the Artemis 2 mission beginning about 10 minutes before the poll for fueling takes place. Liftoff is scheduled for 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC), which is the opening of a two-hour window.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 20 percent chance for a weather violation during Wednesday’s launch window. On Tuesday during a news briefing, Launch Weather Officer Mark Burger said there was a low risk for lightning, but noted that they were watching for the potential for interference from cumulus clouds and strong ground winds.
“The optimistic side of me says that means 80 percent chance of ‘go’ here. Again, isolated showers wandering around, but again, a lot of real estate between those showers, in all likelihood,” Burger said. “We should be able to find some clear air to launch Artemis 2.”
Regarding weather along the rocket’s ascent corridor, he said that conditions heading into the planned launch window are “very much ‘go’,” stating that the risk probability was 9 percent total, which he said was “very good.”
If all goes smoothly with the multi-hour fueling process, the four crew members will begin donning their flight suits — formally called Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) suits — about 5.5 hours before liftoff. After departing the suit-up room, they will spend a few final minutes, face-to-face with their families, before taking a 30-minute car ride out to the launch pad.
Once they arrive at Launch Complex 39B, a small team called the closeout crew will help them into their Orion spacecraft, which the astronauts named ‘Integrity.’ Onboard is all they need and more to survive and work aboard the the spaceship that they’ll call home for more than a week.
Orion has a habitable volume of 330 ft³ (9.34 m³), which NASA said is analogous to the combination of two small minivans.
After the crew is safely onboard, the side hatches to the crew module and the launch abort system will be closed and sealed sequentially. The closeout crew, which includes one of the backup astronauts for this mission, will then finish stowing their tools and clear the pad less than an hour before flight.
After achieving liftoff, the twin five-segment solid rocket boosters will separate from the rocket’s core stage a little more than two minutes into flight. The SLS rocket’s upper stage — called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage — will separate from the core stage in the eighth minute of the mission.
20 minutes post-liftoff, the four, 23-foot-long (7 m) solar arrays on the European Service Module (located beneath the crew module) will deploy and begin to provide power to Orion’s four main batteries.
The ICPS will perform its first big burn, which is called a perigee raise maneuver, 49 minutes after liftoff, putting Orion into an elliptical orbit at 1,381 x 115 statute miles. That will be followed nearly an hour later by the apogee raise maneuver, which will put Orion into a high Earth orbit at 43,730 x 0 statute miles.
Nearly two hours after that, Orion will separate from the ICPS and an hour-long manual piloting demonstration will begin. Wiseman and Glover will take the stick and bring the spaceship up to about 10 meters away from the upper stage to demonstrate the dexterity of the vehicle, which will be needed for future docking operations with landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX.
The crew will then be able to get about four hours of sleep before they’re woken up by one more perigee raising burn to close out Flight Day 1 and their return to sleep. At that point, they will be in an orbit of 44,555 x 115 statute miles.
The big decision point will come on Thursday when NASA makes the call on whether the spacecraft and the crew are ready to commit to their journey to the Moon. If so, the main engine on the Orion’s service module will fire for the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn less than two hours into Flight Day 2.
There are some abort options that would prevent the crew from going out to the Moon, if necessary, but making a u-turn becomes less optimal the further out the crew gets.
Depending on the time and day they launch, they are poised to see parts of the far side of the Moon that humans have never seen directly with their own eyes. Those unique observations will help researchers understand more about the makeup of the Moon and the journey will help NASA and its partners learn more about living in a radiation environment beyond Earth’s atmosphere and protection.
Meet the crew
Learn more about the four individuals who will be the first to live and work onboard an Orion spacecraft.
Market Design
