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Long after we are gone, our data will be what remains of us
In this sense, the archival violence inflicted by Artificial Intelligence differs from that of a typical archive because the information stored within an AI system is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. It’s an archive built for a particular purpose, but inherently never meant to be seen—it is the apotheosis of information-as-exchange-value, the final untethering of reality from sense. The opaqueness of this archive returns us to the initial question of capitalism without humans, of an archive without a reader, of form without content. When we are gone, is it this form of control that will remain our record of existence? from An Archive at the End of the World
He was stupid. But I was already in love with him.
On average, marriages around the world don’t last terribly long. The average is eight years in the United States. Ten years in Singapore. Five years in France. And the key reasons couples cite for divorcing are always the same: extramarital affairs. Lack of intimacy. Lack of commitment. Add to that the stresses of work. Especially if your work is having sex with other people. From RIP Jose and Daniele Duval: Enduring, Forever Love [The Rialto Report] (NSFW photos and text)
"It’s not for everyone, but it’s a good life."
He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man’s fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]
The Low Spark of High Heeled Chairs
"Designing a chair is a very constrained exercise: the general dimensions and angles are very much fixed," Yovanovitch said. "Designing a shoe is even more constrained and technical." from Christian Louboutin and Pierre Yovanovitch perch chairs on legs informed by "iconic women"
Another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission
Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated (‘perfed’) and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and ’90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD’s spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as ‘commercial tokens’. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]
It becomes apparent there were at least three versions of the dough
Let’s go back to December 1942, to the corner of Wabash and Ohio, to a small abandoned basement tavern that was also once a pizzeria named the Pelican Tap. The new tenants living directly above the abandoned tavern are a recently married couple with their newborn daughter. The 39-year-old father is the painter and restaurateur Richard Riccardo, owner of the famous Riccardo’s Studio Restaurant on Rush Street. from The Secret History of the Original Deep-Dish Crust [Chicago]
“It’s really a strange town.”
There was allure beyond negation. Branson’s geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O’Neill has termed Primordial America, the “buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve.” “Wherever they hail from,” 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer went on, “they feel they are the Heartland.” No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]
History Doesn't Repeat But It Sometimes Rhymes
Slovakia’s populist prime minister shot in assassination attempt, shocking Europe before elections [AP]
The Worth of Sats in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is comprised of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin’s inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million. from Time Is Running Out in the Hunt for Rare Bitcoin [Wired; ungated]
“interesting and adventurous and exciting and beautiful”
In her essay ‘The Double Standard [PDF] of Aging,’ Susan Sontag explores how a “visceral horror felt at aging female flesh” is entrenched in our visual culture, manifested in caricatures of viragos and witches. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power,” she wrote, “the revulsion against aging in women is the cutting edge of a whole set of oppressive structures (often masked as gallantries) that keep women in their place.” Reclaiming elderly sexuality is an act of defiance, a rebellion against a youth-obsessed culture, fuelled by misogynistic gender norms. from The Untold Lives of Mature OnlyFans Performers [Huck] CW: NSFW language, it's about OnlyFans and has pictures of women in lingerie.
Uncommonly radical and eloquent history
All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests. Public spending becomes profligate, debt burdens become intolerable, inflation spirals out of control. All of which is to say that the state is subsidizing marginal lives more than it is subsidizing capital. from Extravagances of Neoliberalism, a conversation with Melinda Cooper [The Baffler; ungated]
By default art involves artifice
A comedian’s only responsibility is to make the audience laugh. If you’re not making the audience laugh, then you’re failing at your job. You want to speak truth to power, you want to make a political statement, you want to be confessional—none of that is more or less valid than doing ventriloquism or doing an impression of Christopher Walken. They’re all equal, so long as they make people laugh. If it’s more important to you to do something that doesn’t make the audience laugh, fine, but it’s not comedy. It’s something else. from Two Guys Walk into a Bar: Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy [The Sun Magazine]
Who wouldn’t want to drink like an off-duty, world-renowned chef?
Lest you believe that interest in studying the habits of unstudied coolness was limited to the world of food and drink, recall the concurrent obsession with “off-duty” beauty and style, a concept that lost its novelty with the advent of Instagram. These days, fascination with figures in the culinary world seems to be very “on-duty”—the tools they use, the shoes and jackets they wear. Today, few may remember that copas de balón were first embraced by lauded chefs rather than marketers at beverage companies ... But the allure of a choice that’s more utilitarian than aesthetic has helped the copa de balón endure. It’s unexpected and delightful, like a fancy sandwich served on a quarter sheet tray. from The Balloon Effect
Jesus Xing Musk
Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more. from I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help. [Mother Jones; ungated] [CW: Elon Musk]
TATS
Wet Work
In a state with prolonged bouts of drought and unquenching thirst, stolen water is an indelible part of California lore. But this was not Los Angeles’ brazen gambit to take water from the Owens Valley. Or San Francisco’s ploy to flood part of Yosemite National Park for a reservoir. The water grab described in a federal indictment allegedly happened cat burglar-style, siphoned through a secret pipe, often after hours, to avoid detection. from Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood [LA Times; ungated]
Snark Tank
Say there is a young writer
In the dreamworld of the arts, every inanimate thing is animate, every object contains the entire world, millions of years of history and future and feeling. As she writes her story, which is ultimately her life, it can look like anything she wants. The more she thinks about it, the greater the possibilities. The more she’s cast out, the more she must innovate. The more she will be unique, the more her voice will be untamed. Whatever she is, whoever. She has lived for literature from the beginning and so literature will be her; her indomitable will shall make it so. Our young writer, still unpublished, is the essence of the word itself. Any of her books that may, that will come, be published, read—a footnote. from Every Ship Is a Passenger Too: On Publishing Today by Chris Molnar [LARB]
Zoom in on God's Hand
In AI, it’s easy to argue about philosophical questions over-much
So please, remember: there are a very wide variety of ways to care about making sure that advanced AIs don’t kill everyone. Fundamentalist Christians can care about this; deep ecologists can care about this; solipsists can care about this; people who have no interest in philosophy at all can care about this. Indeed, in many respects, these essays aren’t centrally about AI risk in the sense of “let’s make sure that the AIs don’t kill everyone” (i.e., “AInotkilleveryoneism”) – rather, they’re about a set of broader questions about otherness and control that arise in the context of trying to ensure that the future goes well more generally. from Otherness and control in the age of AGI by Joe Carlsmith
There is no European Google, Tesla or Facebook
Europeans have more time, and Americans more money. It is a cop-out to say which you prefer is a matter of taste. There are three fairly objective measures of a good society: how long people live, how happy they are and whether they can afford the things they need. A society must also be sustainable, as measured by its carbon emissions, collective debt and level of innovation. So which side does it better? [Financial Times; ungated]
A fateful exit interview
Wherever the blame lies, at the heart of the story are humans operating, ruptured, in an institutional machine. Many of the 42 are still ‘deeply injured’ by the incident, said Simon, who acts as their unofficial spokesperson. As the whole affair unravelled, the diocese was already under immense strain. The COVID lockdowns set clergy against their bishops, with many priests livid at having to close their churches. Others were angered by moves to invest millions in a new wave of informal congregations meeting in pubs, coffee shops and cinemas. And throughout it all there was division and tension over the church-wide culture war about gay blessings. ‘There’s so little trust at the moment,’ Roger reflected. ‘And in London, all the anger and the issues have a face: that face is Martin Sargeant.’ from In the Shadow of St Paul’s [The Fence; ungated] [CW: suicide, misogyny, homophobia.]
Just who in the hell is Ray Suzuki?
From a certain angle, the review feels less like a piece of music criticism and more like a Dada-ist joke on what music criticism even is. Or at the very least like a shitpost that was prophetic in its use of the visual, flippant language people would soon be employing en masse to post about art online. Squint, and it’s a masterpiece … of some kind. But it goes down in the stats sheet as an actual review—and in that sense, it wasn’t really fair to Jet. from The Ballad of Ray Suzuki: The Secret Life of Early Pitchfork and the Most Notorious Review Ever “Written” [The Ringer]
YOU ARE YOUNGER THAN ADRIEN BRODY! BUT OLDER THAN BUFFY
Because of that decision made in Mountain View, we now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past. Awkward flirtations, drunken rants, earnest pleas; friendships fraying or rekindled, personae tried on and discarded, good jokes and bad decisions; every dumb or brilliant or anguished thing we wrote below the subject line — we have an instantly searchable record of it all. To mark the anniversary of this revolution, the editors of New York asked some of our favorite writers to excavate their individual archives and tell us — with dismay or pride or chagrin — what they saw. from How Gmail Became Our Diary [Intelligencer; ungated]
A careful analyst of the textured nature of historical repetition
Thucydides intimates that the careful art of drawing fitting analogies, honed as it may be through the diligent study of political history, will assist some to think more clearly about the present. But mastering this art should not be confused with political mastery. The power of ‘great’ events will remain too easily harnessed, and too hard to control, to serve only those who are clear-headed and well-intentioned. Specious analogies will remain a danger for as long as people stand to benefit from them, and their emotional pull will continue to knock even the most astute off balance. And yet, if there’s little chance that political life will ever be freed from distortive thinking, it may still prove less hazardous for those who look toward history as something more than a sourcebook of convenient parallels. from What would Thucydides say? [Aeon]
“Oh yes, it has the juice.”
In this video ad, the Hero Wars mascot Galahad finds himself in dire straits as but a human plough-horse upon the field. His captor, half-cow, half-human woman, brands him on the buttock with what looks like our old friend the purple devil emoji—rather a “naugty” [sic] act. Suddenly set upon by wolves, the cow lady is compromised—and Galahad steps up to become white knight, fending the beasts off with his axe. The cow lady and her new hero Galahad elope to her encampment, where she carries him around like a baby, and spots him for sit-ups. Needless to say, the episode of the bovine damsel does not occur in-game. from The Weird World of Hero Wars Ads: Sex Sells [Splice Today]
The survival of this ancient language is as mysterious as its origins
Shakespeare toys with numerous European languages throughout his work, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Often, these are spoken in thick accents, with comedic pronunciation. The same holds true for his use of the various British dialects—Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish—heard in scruffy taverns or high courts. In Henry V, soldiers fracture the King’s English while the king himself and a French princess descend into a comical Franglais courtship. Yet, no matter how garbled the speech, playgoers can usually identify distinct languages and dialects—that is, until they bump up against what scholars have called the “invented language,” “unintelligible gabble,” and “‘Boskos thromuldo boskos’ mumbo-jumbo” in his comedy "All’s Well That Ends Well." from I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare’s Gibberish [LARB]
Philosophy doesn’t only matter for the ivory tower
By leveraging a unique large dataset and new techniques for exploring this dataset, our paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life, and helps to build a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience. from A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas, in which Philosophers are studying Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” [Vox]
I'm warm, therefore I think
Why have philosophers had so little to say about Descartes’s stove, and so much to say about his dreams, his resolve, and his conception of analytic geography on that winter’s night? Suppressing the agency of the stove makes it easier to tell a simple story about the agency of the individual thinker. But it has made it that much harder to discern the subtle yet powerful ways in which modern air conditioning technologies condition thought, culture, and social experience. from Descartes’s Stove by the author of Air Conditioning, Hsuan L. Hsu
No such issue for Kermit the Frog
Menswear writer Derek Guy compares UK TV personality Piers Moron's fashion style with that of Kermit the Frog. That is all. [a thread on X]
Do you love that studios are finally using no CGI in epic action scenes?
In this episode we'll look at how production notes flat out lie about the making of a film, we'll look at two different sides of Gran Turismo, and we'll check out the history of CGI and why it fell from grace. We'll bust some common misconceptions about CGI, and we'll look at the most notorious "no CGI" project that I know of. the 4th and final episode of "NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI
“Merely a best-selling author in these parts, a rock star in Paris.”
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. [NY Times; ungated]
My life has gone off the map, it seems. Possibly also off the rails.
At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]
simultaneously beloved and overlooked
Even as stars among her contemporaries have faded into relative obscurity, Niedecker's poetry pitched resolutely between — between avant-garde experimentalism and ethnopoetics, between the gnomic and the manifest — has sustained, across the decades, stalwart devotion. Her position within the canon of twentieth-century American modernism may seem to be in flux, shifting between various contexts — Objectivism and ecopoetics, white settler colonialism, geological and geopolitical history, the artistic legacies of the New Deal and the Popular Front, midcentury feminism, Thoreauvian hermeticism transplanted to the Midwest. Her work can feel both elusive and profusive, her poetic evolution traced across fugitive volumes produced by tiny presses and now appearing in Selecteds and Collecteds rife with textual variations. In our attempts to locate Lorine Niedecker, we do not seek to pin her down but rather to let loose the frustrating delights and joyful contradictions of her art. from Locating Lorine Niedecker by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick
"There is no more business"
By all appearances, Widell certainly seemed to be thriving. She took business lunches at Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, a leading Tulsa destination. She was a member of the Summit Club — "Downtown Tulsa's Only Private Social Club" — perched atop the Bank of America Center, with its panoramic views of the Arkansas River. She hobnobbed with the local elite and claimed to have more Airbnb listings than anyone else in the city. She cut her hair short and, to her husband's annoyance, swapped out her conservative style for big sunglasses and more "flamboyant" fashions. Widell, who hadn't had much growing up, also projected an image of benevolence. She made a point of hiring people with criminal records to work in her warehouse, and she talked about buying a church that had just come on the market and turning it into a women's shelter. But then investors started asking questions. And soon enough, Widell would be turning on the very people she'd promised a second chance. from The fall of the Queen of Airbnb
The alter ego he created led a more glamorous existence
Enty’s Hollywood was a dark and messy world, uglier and more menacing than the glamorous town imagined by outsiders. The authenticity of this vision — and, in turn, the authenticity of his scoops — was bolstered by how pathetic he came across in his own accounts. Enty described himself as a 300-pound heavy-drinking entertainment lawyer who had been married six times, lived in his parents’ basement in L.A., and was bullied by his famous clientele — a zhlub with the right connections and a nose for dirt. In reality, Nelson didn’t live in his parents’ basement, and he hasn’t been married six times — only three. from The Man Who Gossiped Too Much [Vulture; ungated] [CW: well, almost everything]
The most energetic & misunderstood figure in all of speculative fiction
For generations of science fiction and fantasy aficionados, saying the name Harlan Ellison is like uttering a dark spell. Ellison’s writing — primarily in short story format — is fantastic and provocative, but his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself. And for younger genre fans, the name Harlan Ellison might not mean anything at all. If you’re into science fiction and fantasy and came of age in the new millennium (and his 2014 Simpsons cameo went over your head), there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Ellison. from The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison
There have been a lot of cowboys of color, their stories don’t get told
Wallace was Black. The men who helped him were white. One might imagine that such a scene would have been jaw-dropping in Depression-era Texas, where white hostility toward people of color was common. But the West Texas cowboy culture of the time was distinctive. Men of different races often supported and respected one another. And no cowboy was more respected than Wallace. In fact he was one of the most remarkable figures in our history. from The Former Slave Who Became a Cowboy, a Rancher, and a Texas Legend [Texas Monthly; ungated]
Hardly the attitude of the next poet laureate
I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
O povo é quem mais ordena
“I will not speak with her.”
Ophelia’s life, as much as we see of it within the boundaries of five acts, has been one of enforced silence, climaxing in a desperate call—answered too late by Gertrude—for a chance to unpack her heart with words. She comes in a full and terrible circle from her playful rebuke to Laertes for pontificating about how women should behave, but she never saw what was coming. “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.” Only in her madness, when language tumbles out uninhibitedly, does Ophelia make a direct and profound charge about masculinist privilege and culpability. “Young men will do’t if they come to’t, / By Cock, they are to blame.” Unlike Hamlet with his words, words, words, Ophelia never speaks of taking her own life. And then she does. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune strike more than one target in this play. Among its many wonders, Hamlet depicts a young woman set on a lonely path, leading to an abyss, in a lethal world of male verbal license. from The Silencing of Ophelia by Robert Crossley [Hudson Review]
It’s peculiar, in the sense that words are supposed to mean something
The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. from Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads [The Atlantic; ungated]
Parasite Aircraft
Flying aircraft carriers show up in steampunk, dieselpunk and atompunk fiction so often, we can consider them a genre trope. From Castle Wulfenbach in Girl Genius to the British aircraft carriers in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the helicarriers of S.H.I.E.L.D., here is a look at these behemoths of the sky. from Flying Aircraft Carriers [Previously]
Unwanted Sound
Implicit in the art of noise is a promise of resistance. For millennia, music has been a medium of control; noise, it follows, is a liberation. from What is Noise? by Alex Ross [The New Yorker; ungated]
In the future these will be funny stories
It’s 2008. Though a San Francisco resident, I crave “Girl in New York” stories. Felicity Porter, Lena Dunham, Eileen Myles—in books and TV shows, I’ve watched them come of age in their frothy version of Brooklyn. As a black man, I have to tell myself this fascination isn’t me idolizing whiteness. No, this must be, like Venus Xtravanganza before me, a rational envy for those society deems valuable. A desire to chase my dreams through a maze of hangovers and strange lovers and suffer mere embarrassment for my mistakes. It seems I’ve found another such fantasy in this Reagan-era relic about itinerant artists—provided I steal it. Bohemian behavior for a bohemian book. So, Slaves in hand, I keep walking. from The Time I Stole Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York and Couldn’t Stop Reading It by Elwin Cotman
Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur
One Minute Park allows you to visit parks from around the world for one minute each. These are just one minute videos, not webcams. Eventually the project will fill in all the minutes (1440) in a day. You can create your own One Minute Park to help achieve this goal.
Istanbull not Coinstantinople
Being early investors in tech wasn’t something that had historically been available to the average person in Turkey. The instant millionaires and billionaires and unicorns pretty much lived elsewhere. Now, Faruk Özer saw a possibility. People in Turkey could shelter their money in what was clearly going to be the next big tech boom. But the biggest opportunity wasn’t in trading coins—it was in running a cryptocurrency exchange. Exchanges collect people’s money and, for a commission, invest it; that gives people who don’t have the time or skills to invest directly into the blockchain a pathway to crypto. from He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared [Wired; ungated]
How easily & cavalierly the works of decades & centuries are demolished
It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action’, and that is Shock and Awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it. Ask no questions, tell only lies, and double down, triple down, quadruple down. The ineffably stupid ‘move fast and break things’ that has so much to answer for in our time. Our new ‘Innovation Hub’ has an asinine three-word slogan: ‘Grow Ignite Disrupt’. It would make just as much sense to have ‘Paper Scissors Stone’ for a motto. And rather more to have ‘Smash Grab Run’. from In Florida by Michael Hofmann [London Review of Books] [CW: DeSantis]
This trend isn’t really about food or health. It’s about performance
Hosting a lavish banquet or ordering lobster is no longer a sufficient signifier of status; today, a sign of true wealth is the ability to forgo food entirely. Eating essentially betrays a person’s most basic human needs; in an era obsessed with ‘self-optimisation’, not eating suggests that a person is somehow ‘beyond’ needs and has achieved total mastery of their body with a heightened capacity for efficiency and focus. from Why don’t rich people eat anymore?