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Fat profits are one of the telltale signs of an illegal monopoly
The amount of profit that Amazon makes from third-party sellers, as opposed to AWS or some other division, might sound like a technical distinction, but it’s essential to the case against the company. The FTC alleges that Amazon’s low-price image is a mirage: According to the FTC, the company actually keeps prices higher than they would be in a competitive market—not just on Amazon but across the internet—squeezing consumers and small businesses in the process. from Amazon’s Big Secret [The Atlantic; ungated]
We don’t want to categorise people, so we don’t
Sites that are for adults should cater to all of grown-ups’ interests. Lots of people who are over 18 like sex, but they also like comedy and sports and music, so [it’s about] being able to cater to our audience base and to be able to provide opportunities for creators. from Keily Blair, OnlyFans: ‘We are an incredible UK tech success story’ [FT; ungated]
Orchestral Devices in the Light
I play music covers using electric toothbrushes, credit card machines, typewriters, and other electric devices. I control the devices using a microcontroller, some wires, and my programming skills. Thanks to the ideas of my subscribers, my devices now have googly eyes, and some even wigs and pipe cleaner arms. Sometimes I also make the devices perform choreographies, by making the devices move each other. it's Device Orchestra
What’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected
The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between. from We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them by Brad Bigelow [The Neglected Books Page]
The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense
Though Bateson was never truly on board with Lilly’s project of teaching dolphins how to speak, he spoke vaguely but fervently of the institute’s work as somehow connected to his larger goal of healing a sick society through interdisciplinary science. “I hope from the dolphins we may learn a new analysis of the sorts of information which we need — and all mammals need — if we are to retain our sanity,” Bateson pronounced grandly to reporters at a fund-raising gala for the institute. Anyone observing his daily work at the lab might have been surprised by such claims. from Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab [Chronicle of Higher Education; ungated]
If It Ain't Woke, Don't Fix It
As we have seen before with other image models like DALLE-3, the AI is taking your request and then modifying it to create a prompt. Image models have a bias towards too often producing the most common versions of things and lacking diversity (of all kinds) and representation, so systems often try to fix this by randomly appending modifiers to the prompt. The problem is that Gemini’s version does a crazy amount of this and does it in ways and places where doing so is crazy. from The Gemini Incident by Zvi Mowshowitz [Part I, Part II]
"Joking in humans requires quite complex cognitive abilities"
The teasing behaviour was similar to that adopted by young human children, according to the researchers, in that it was intentional, provocative, persistent and included elements of surprise, play and checking for the recipient’s response. The human equivalent might be sticking your tongue out at someone and then running away to gauge their reaction. This style of teasing could even form the foundation for more complicated forms of humour. from Why some animals have evolved a sense of humour [BBC]
How did poetry manage to fall down the stairs of relevance?
Fast-forwarding to today, it seems that poetry no longer garners the attention that it used to. In the whirlwind of today’s society, poetry has found itself fighting for attention against newer art forms such as film and music. Movies and music have seamlessly captured the raw emotions and societal complexities that once danced within the lines of poems and they have done so in a manner that is outwardly more entertaining and approachable. All the while, poetry has taken a dramatic shift and evolved into an art form that is highly confessional and often accompanied by illustrations and other visuals. It is certainly possible that this increasingly personal style of poetry has not appealed to all enthusiasts of this genre and this may attribute to a decline in readership. from Should Modern Newspapers Publish Poetry? [The Artifice]
Not every prediction came true
The top thinkers of 1974 were gathered together in the pages of “Saturday Review,” for a special issue celebrating that magazine’s 50th anniversary. In a series of essays, each one tried to imagine their world 50 more years into the future, in the far-away year of 2024 ... The future they’d hoped for — or feared for — is detailed and debated, offering readers of today a surprisingly clear picture of the future they’d expected in 1974. from 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 [The New Stack]
The changing political cleavage structures of Western democracies
The causes of populism are at the heart of the most significant political and social science debates. One narrative contends that economic globalization resulted in real suffering among less-educated working-class voters, catalyzing populism. Another narrative contends that populism is an adverse reaction to cultural progressivism and that economic factors are not relevant or only relevant symbolically through perceptions of loss of cultural status. Even though the evidence suggests that the generational change argument suggested by the canonical book of Norris and Inglehart does not hold empirically, the cultural narrative nevertheless seems to be particularly influential. from The Populist Backlash Against Globalization: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence [Cambridge University]
Those seams we are seduced into not seeing
Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
They Should Have Sent a Porpoise
I asked Gruber himself what he would say to the whales. He said that he has been taking requests. Most people tell him that we should start by saying “Sorry,” for the bloody rampage that was industrial whaling. He agrees. “We pulled the oil out of these animals’ heads,” he said. “We used it to make lipstick.” Perhaps now we can atone. from How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold [The Atlantic; ungated]
Even with all the efforts, loopholes remain
Bowmouth guitarfish amulets are just one example of the boundless number of protected wildlife products sold online, where a global Grand Bazaar of seedy vendors hawk their wildlife wares, and anyone with internet access can find products from rhino horns to exotic orchids to tiger claws with just a few clicks. With lax regulations, even weaker enforcement, and a lack of legal culpability, not only is wildlife trafficking able to fester online, but algorithms actually amplify sales, boosting the platforms’ profits. from For Sale: Shark Jaw, Tiger Claw, Fish Maw [Hakai]
“The most neglected of American fruits”
Until the mid 1800s, pawpaws were strictly a foraged food due to their woodland abundance. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans ate them as part of their seasonal diets, and the recorded anecdotes of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Daniel Boone describe subsisting on the native fruits during their journeys through the wilderness. Eventually, pawpaws, or custard apples as they were sometimes called, were sold at market. Though cultivated by Indigenous tribes like the Shawnee, the pawpaw was relegated to a wild folk food eaten by impoverished rural people, earning nicknames like the “poor man’s banana” and the “hillbilly banana.” from Consider the Pawpaw [Belt]
“They’re noticeably different, except for a few”
Meanwhile, Rybak and Hearn say that prospective buyers regularly call or email asking for guidance in authenticating this or that painting, worried they may have sunk large sums of money on worthless imitations. Some buyers were bilked out of their life savings. For the fraudsters, of course, the scheme was nothing more than a way to make money. But the devastation to honest buyers, to Morrisseau and his legacy, to Indigenous culture, and to Canadian art writ large is incalculable. Morrisseau’s works were not meaningless paintings but precious, irreplaceable examples of the Anishinaabe experience in Canada and the world. from Inside the Biggest Art Fraud in History [Smithsonian]
The underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability
Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. from The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; ungated]
The Premonition of a Fraying
"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski]
A Moby Dick Pro-leg-omenon (But which?)
Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story. Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. from Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1, Part 2
Executors of collective falsehoods
The chief and lethal irony of Fixer is that the more William persecutes the rich, the richer he himself becomes. By the end of it all, he is stranded in meaninglessness, unsure what his mission has accomplished, or for what reasons he’d been chosen to live it. “[M]y revenge,” he says, “had nothing to do with me, but instead was something I’d walked in on at just the right moment.” from Lethal Irony: On Han Ong’s “Fixer Chao” by Zoë Hu [LARB; ungated]
The most mesmerizing, creative, shocking, sweet, and savory shorts
By any other name
What is a rose, visually? A rose comprises its intrinsics, including the distribution of geometry, texture, and material specific to its object category. With knowledge of these intrinsic properties, we may render roses of different sizes and shapes, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions. In this work, we build a generative model that learns to capture such object intrinsics from a single image, such as a photo of a bouquet. Such an image includes multiple instances of an object type. These instances all share the same intrinsics, but appear different due to a combination of variance within these intrinsics and differences in extrinsic factors, such as pose and illumination. Experiments show that our model successfully learns object intrinsics (distribution of geometry, texture, and material) for a wide range of objects, each from a single Internet image. Our method achieves superior results on multiple downstream tasks, including intrinsic image decomposition, shape and image generation, view synthesis, and relighting. from Seeing a Rose in Five Thousand Ways
A collective paranoid delusion that was beautiful in its completeness
I FEEL AT TIMES that I still live in the never-ending 20th century, that I’m stuck here, that maybe everyone is stuck here, even people born too late to have seen it happen. True, there are smartphones now, and new types of ugly buildings. Images are sharper, even when you zoom in. You can tell that time has passed because unremarkable things like Sweetheart Jazz cups have acquired the status of fetish objects. But some part of the American mindset is still in 1999, which feels substantially closer to us now than 1979 did then. from Heritage 2000, a review of Time Bomb Y2K in N+1
Everyone deserves a good death
I am an artist, and I am a death doula. Part of working with and supporting those who are grieving or dying means that you know how precious and short this life is. You don’t take it for granted and you try not to let small things stop you from taking your dreams seriously every day. That is the phenomenal up side of doing deathwork: it makes me a courageous artist, for whom it’s easier not to compare myself to anyone else, or say that I am not artist enough, and encourages me to exist in the only timeline that matters — mine. from The Importance of Art in a “Good Death” by Brianna L. Hernández in Hyperallergic [CW: death and dying]
One last cigarette with Jim Jarmusch
He calls me Paul, although Paul is not my name. He calls me Paul because he believes me to be Paul Auster, the American writer. This is why I can’t take him up on his invitations. He would see that I am somebody else. The first time he called me, I had just quit smoking. At first, I thought it was a ploy of the tobacco industry: to immediately phone up anyone who stopped smoking. from Streuselkuchen by Marc Lunghuss [European Review of Books; ungated; German original]
The primary “tell” of the artificial is now a surplus of reality
I’ve always thought of artworks as a kind of CAPTCHA test I might not pass. Am I feeling the right things at the right pitch of intensity? What if I’m discovered to be lacking in some fundamental capacity—what if I’m the avatar or replicant? When I watch Pianowork 2 I’m not only moved and discomfited by my sense that Atkins’s digital model might be developing a capacity for pain, but I’m also made to reflect on the rightness or specificity of my own responses. from The Pain Artist by Ben Lerner [NYRB; ungated]
Wrapper's Delight
While both artists individually did their part to buck those incredible odds—several films have documented their dramatic scramble to secure permission and convince an often hostile public—it was their collaborative relationship and intuitive division of tasks according to their respective strengths that made each piece possible. from Destiny United Christo And Jeanne-Claude to Wrap the World [ArtNet]
"Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that's a wise man and a fool."
For a brief moment in the Renaissance, in between the invention of the microscope, printing press, and pencils – along with other technologies that uphold modern society – upper class men were rather preoccupied with erecting another innovation: the codpiece. from How the codpiece flopped [BBC]
I realized the dangers of opera too late to be saved
I preferred these sensory and sensual phantasms to the everyday reality of school life, and I knew that fact was so shameful it needed to be hidden. Back then I couldn’t put my disability into words, but I felt it keenly. My habits were not just escapist pastimes. They were abnormal passions. I was a mutant, a monster of sensibility, a changeling with a freakish vulnerability to beauty. Years later I found a name for my debilitation—I was an aesthete. from The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir by Dana Gioia in The Hudson Review
Protection and freedom to communicate
You’d have heard it in gay pubs and bars, as well as being spoken on cruise ships where lots of gay men worked, up until the 1970s. You might also hear it in cruising areas: cinemas, Turkish baths, parks and public loos, although it might be more of a hissed warning: “Lily!” when the police were spotted. And you might hear it on public transport so that two people could have a conversation without others understanding. from The Secret Gay Language Still in Use Today [Huck Magazine]
The key word is “stress”
Crimes rates have plummeted in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. Most of the credit for this remarkable trend has been given to an enlarged criminal justice system—largely more police, tougher sentencing and a massive prison complex. But we have found a larger and much more powerful explanation: A drop in interest rates and, in particular, long-term interest rates. When interest rates go up, crime goes up. When interest rates go down, crime goes down. from The ‘Startling’ Link Between Low Interest Rates and Low Crime [The Crime Report]
Carved with curious but distinctive signs
June 1, 1952, was Whitsunday, and provided the young Michael Ventris with a convenient break from his duties as an architect. At the end of the day he would write his 20th Work Note on Minoan Language Research, with the somewhat disbelieving title, “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Responsibility was disclaimed: this was only “a frivolous digression”, that would “sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.” It became instead one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century. from Cracking the Code of Linear B by Theodore Nash
A Message from Big Book
When a reading habit becomes subservient to a "need to fit in" habit, we are not setting up America's population for the type of deep, consistent thinking the country needs as the world continues to grow in complexity; we are creating a country where being seen as a part of the conversation is the goal. To be visible to our peers is more important than the value books alone provide. But perhaps this isn't a big deal, right? People are busy after all, and why should reading books take up our precious time? from Is Being Well Read Actually a Thing? Part I - Zero to One by Bram Adams
Wrote, Read, Owned
This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap, prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs ... afraid to build products" in the United States. In fact, throughout the entire book, Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale. from Molly White's reviews Chris Dixon's Read Write Own
The right to live, to exist and to flow
This pristine Canadian river has legal personhood, a new approach to conserving nature, is a review of the documentary "I am the Magpie River".
Absolutely Fabulist
One reason that it’s so difficult to know what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London kid, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. from A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld by Patrick Radden Keefe [The New Yorker; ungated] [CW: Death of a teenager, possible suicide]
An atmosphere of total incuriosity suffuses the entire book
Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt. Elon Musk is one of those books. from Very Ordinary Men, a deliciously scathing review of Walter Isaacson's biography by Sam Kriss [The Point Magazine; ungated]
We are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been
Though the city has survived a series of local and national recessions in recent decades, San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises. from In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit [LRB; ungated]
For you, but not by us
For better or worse, the web doesn’t work like that anymore. No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos.
No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? from Where have all the websites gone?
Time for Novel Argot
Now, with cocktail culture saturating the country anew, we’re in the middle of a glittering renaissance of bar lingo. The most common terms thrown about today are both functional and fun; they also offer a vivid snapshot of the current state of the industry in the U.S. and the way it is evolving. Reflecting the increasing crossover between restaurants and bars, for instance, many of-the-moment twists of the tongue are pulled directly from the restaurant industry (think “86’d,” “heard” and “behind.”). At Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., for example, bartenders address each other as “chef,” as a sign of deference and respect, an organic evolution of their in-house language that predates The Bear. And as bars continue to adopt high-level scientific techniques, the nuances of redistilling, centrifuges, rotovaps and clarification demand their own attendant terms. from The New Vocabulary of Cocktails [Punch]
It’s all arbitrary and dumb, but they’re addicted
These games are critical to the Times’ business strategy in trying to reach users—and ideally, future paying subscribers—beyond its core news product. Of course, the Times is still competing for White House scoops with its traditional print and digital rivals and dispatching correspondents to war zones. But the company is also vying for people’s attention against every app on their home screen. So it’s developed products in recent years to satisfy the lifestyle needs of its audience: cooking, shopping (via what is now known as Wirecutter, acquired in a 2016 deal worth more than $30 million), sports (via The Athletic, the site it acquired in 2022 for $550 million), and audio, building on the success of The Daily with a slew of podcasts ... The products and the journalism coexist under what the Times calls “the bundle,” an offering that has turbocharged the company’s ambitious growth strategy. from Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games [Vanity Fair; ungated]
Time for a Fresh Drink
Arguably the most important innovation in cocktail construction over the last few decades was the reintroduction of fresh juice. from The Cocktail Revolution by Peter Suderman
A remarkably efficient way to reduce America’s international reach
The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population. In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D” for the risk of detention. Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states. from How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments [WSJ; ungated]
Time for a Drink
If we dig deep, it's all linked to the symbol of the mother, of birth
Every year, on 2 February, Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog comes out of his burrow and if the sun is shining and he sees his shadow before scurrying back into his hole, winter will last six more weeks. But if the day is cloudy, spring will come early. Curiously, Phil is not alone. A couple of other creatures do the same job across the Atlantic – and in all instances, it is a sunny day that will herald an ironic extended winter. from Groundhog Day's European creature parallels - and surprising 3000-year-old origins [BBC]
Bad News
It would be far too dramatic to extrapolate from the disastrous week that journalism itself is dying. The New York Times is healthy. Thanks to good management and demographically vigorous readerships, the Boston Globe and Minneapolis Star Tribune carry on. Cable, network and local TV news still toss off profits. But no matter how many heroic nonprofit newsrooms like the Baltimore Banner and Daily Memphian take root, no matter how many Substack-like newsletters blossom or creators emerge to drop their videos on YouTube, you can’t deny the journalism business’ decline. from The News Business Really Is Cratering [Politico]
A reminder of the relative silence of our material lives today
Like most major retailers, GAP has piped music into its stores for as long as they’ve been open. Unlike the others, however, a substantial number of GAP’s painstakingly-curated, monthly-rotating in-store playlists are accessible for all of us today thanks to the singular efforts of a Texas schoolteacher named Michael Bise. A GAP employee from 1992 to 2006, Bise has spent the last 17 years trying to re-obtain his lost collection of the paper tracklist inserts that would come with each month’s in-store CDs and cassettes. from The GAP Playlists Edition [Why Is This Interesting?]
Keeping things published online is an ongoing choice
The upshot: Readers in America, where prior restraint is forbidden and where courts won’t enforce foreign rulings that violate the First Amendment, are blocked from reading a story based on a legal complaint that would be tossed out of most American courts. That’s not the only way the case is resonating in the U.S. from How a Judge in India Prevented Americans From Seeing a Blockbuster Report
No idea what they might say to the man they believe ruined their lives
Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? from The Neighbors Who Destroyed Their Lives [The Atlantic; ungated] [CW: rape, murder]
Won't Panic
We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance. from The Myth of Panic [Palladium; from 2021]
What Is the Honey Badger Generation?
“Generation Alpha can oftentimes challenge and refuse to accept the status quo, questioning rules and customs that may seem arbitrary or hypocritical” ... “The internet and social media have created a generation that can see anything at any moment, including social injustices and influencers who voice their opinions on anything and everything” ... "This can feel empowering and liberating to a child." [Parents.com / Axios]
Gen Z is two generations, not one
In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. from A new global gender divide is emerging [Financial Times; ungated]