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4 stars
What do you do after you accidentally kill a child? | The Sunday Long Read
Addie asked him about it last year.
“Daddy, why are you sad?”
He figured she was old enough to know. He told her he didn’t do it on purpose, that it was an accident. She seemed to understand.
She comes out from the kitchen now and joins him on the porch.
She has strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes and is wearing a white shirt with printed rows of fruit, and when Ryan looks at her, he is afraid. That she is growing older. That she will one day hate him. That he might die before she hates. And worst of all: that she might die first. That he might lose her the same way Mrs. Patterson lost her daughter, five years ago next week: suddenly, in a blink, with a bright blue Nissan truck barreling into and then over her, the driver totally unaware he had just killed a little girl.
The End of Children | The New Yorker
Societies do collapse, sometimes suddenly. Nevertheless, prophets of doom might keep in mind that their darkest predictions have been, on the whole, a little premature. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population would approach infinity.
[...]
Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720.
3 stars
Lessons from a mass shooter's mother | Mother Jones
These are among the reasons Chin Rodger eventually decided to speak out about what she did and didn’t notice, or misunderstood, before Elliot’s rampage. By sharing her experience with prevention experts, and by talking with me about a trove of previously unreported case evidence and details of Elliot’s life, she hopes to help foster a clearer understanding of his attack, and, with it, greater potential to prevent violence.
“Inside I was broken into a million pieces,” she recalled about the early aftermath. “It still tears me to pieces—reading about and reliving the events, going over all the conversations I had with him and everyone around him, his writings, his personal things. It’s not just the pain of losing my son but the horrible suffering his actions caused for so many. I will carry this pain for the rest of my life.”
She had always felt close with Elliot, who was intelligent and came across as quiet and polite. Diminutive from childhood, he struggled with developmental disabilities that made him acutely shy and awkward, and his parents moved him between various schools as they sought special education and therapeutic help. He was bullied, but prior to his attack had no history of aggression known to his parents or anyone else around him. It was hard for Chin to comprehend how well he’d hidden his innermost torment, and ultimately his suicidal and homicidal intent. Even today, she hasn’t felt ready to read all of his “life story,” or to go through his two handwritten diaries, which are part of his deeper trail that until now has been almost entirely unknown to the public. She has five sealed boxes of his personal effects sitting in storage, long ago returned to her by investigators. Digging further is often still too painful and heartbreaking, she says, yet she feels compelled to keep going because she believes in the value of spotlighting missed chances to stop Elliot’s plan.
Being an Asian Southerner Means Being an Anomaly, Squared | Electric Literature
During the years my siblings and I were growing up here, my parents never seemed to take a shine to the South. They never went on hikes in the Smoky mountains like they do now, or kayaked in the flooded quarry just south of downtown, or had the time to get involved with neighborhood beautification. And yet, I don’t remember them ever complaining about feeling isolated either. “It was very simple,” Dad tells me. He had a three-point plan when he came here: study hard, get a job, raise a family in America—a plan he has executed up to this point. When I ask him if he ever felt unwelcome in Tennessee, he responds adamantly in the negative. Back then Japan was America’s main economic rival, and in his account, Americans thought of China, not Japan, as their main ally in the East. “I always think immigration is the key thing,” he says; letting migrants in should be “compulsory,” as long as the immigrants are as diligent as him.
My father became a citizen the moment he was eligible, and when money was no longer a problem, he and my mother acquired green cards for their parents so they could visit us whenever they wished. The long-term goal was always to bring the whole family over, to have my grandparents and uncles and cousins all settle in Tennessee. That never worked out—not least of which because China is no longer a place that highly-educated Chinese people feel they need to leave. Growing up, I always thought that maybe my parents were lonely here in the South, and that maybe if they’d made more of an effort to assimilate, not just in terms of citizenship, but culture, they wouldn’t have missed their family so much that they needed their family to come over here.
Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro | Smithsonian Magazine
Reams of papers, revealing how the scholar came to write his iconic biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, are preserved forever in New York. But his work is far from over.
This thing will fail | Noahpinion
Lyons thus sees Trumpism as a sort of Fight Club style reassertion of wild, unapologetic, masculine drive — only instead of directing it toward anarchism like Tyler Durden, Lyons sees Trump and Musk indulging their manly passion in the dismantling of the civil service.
But Lyons never explains exactly how this destructive impulse will bring back the return of the “strong gods” he yearns for. He sees the civil service and other American postwar institutions as obstacles to the revitalization of rootedness, family, community, and faith, but he doesn’t really look beyond the smashing of those supposed obstacles toward the actual rebuilding. He just sort of assumes it will happen, or that it’s a problem for another day.
I believe he’s headed for disappointment. Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; Christianity has stopped declining since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain well below their levels at the turn of the century. Republicans still have more children than Democrats, but births in red states have fallen too.
In Trump’s first term, the attempts at organized civic participation on the Right were almost laughably paltry. A few hundred Proud Boys got together and went to brawl with antifa in the streets of Berkeley and Portland. There were a handful of smallish right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About two thousand people rioted on January 6th — mostly people in their 40s and 50s. And none of these ever crystallized into long-term grassroots organizations of the type that were the norm in the 1950s.
For a very few people, the first Trump term was a live-action role-playing game; for everyone else, it was a YouTube channel.
And in Trump’s second term so far? Nothing.
2 stars
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends | Esquire
It’s easy to dismiss Miku and WaifuChat as a niche product for lonely, introverted men who are already somewhat on the fringes of society, disconnected from real-life relationships as it is. But that’s not looking at where the puck’s going: It’s not just Dungeons Dragons–playing “incels” who are susceptible to the allure of AI-powered connections, at least not for long. Like a lot of other virtual-world trends, what starts out as a niche can quickly become mainstream. And by the way, those introverted “nerds” who spend loads of time alone on their devices? They’re a growing percentage of the population.
“AI companionship seems primed for mass adoption given the amount of time consumers spend alone today,” says a recent report from the investment firm Ark Invest, which speculates that the market for apps providing everything from romantic love to everyday friendship could scale five-thousand-fold by the end of the decade, from $30 million in revenue today to as much as $150 billion. That’s an astounding growth projection that smacks of classic Silicon Valley hype. Is it really possible that, say, two billion people will be paying $75 per year by 2030 for AI companions? Maybe, maybe not. But what’s clear is that the potential market is vast and the technology is already advancing at warp speed.
While AI companions are expected to have widespread appeal in the near future, right now the data suggests that men are more prone to consider one than women are—twice as likely, in fact, according to an analysis by Theos, a British Christian think tank.
‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis? | The Guardian
The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, or a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November. On the contrary, it is both these things, and others beside.
It is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years: its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism; its pugnacious superiority complex; its restless seafaring and trading; its cruel imperial enrichment; its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism, its postcolonial anxiety. All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects: a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness. The museum contains, in total, 8m objects. Or maybe 6m, depending on how you count them. (A collection of 1m cigarette cards bequeathed in 2006 is counted as a single item, for instance.) Either way, the collection is vast and grows every year.
The Death of an Asylum Seeker and the Shelter Crisis in Peel | The Local
As a result, Peel has been left to respond in ways that go far beyond what a suburban government is accustomed to—trying to help some of the world’s most vulnerable people while handcuffed by forces more powerful and complicated than any one municipality can handle.
That response has been marked by tragedy. Before Delphina’s death, another asylum seeker died in a tent outside Dundas Shelter. And just this past weekend, Peel Region confirmed a third person seeking asylum had passed away in the shelter system. They had not released their identity or cause of death at the time of publication. “Our sincere sympathy is extended to this individual’s friends and family,” wrote Renee Wilson, a Peel spokesperson. “Our gratitude is also extended to staff who provide care and shelter to the most vulnerable in our Region.”
These deaths highlight the gravity of the crisis in Peel’s shelters. And with multiple conflicts half the world away and a U.S. president pledging mass deportations, more and more asylum seekers will be looking to deeply overwhelmed and bandaged shelter systems, like Peel’s, for safety.
How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s | New Yorker
The unreality of the capybara is partly responsible for its cultlike following. The past years have seen the rise of capybara TikTok and Instagram. If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo. You might have heard the catchy anthem of the capybara, which consists mostly of “ca-py-ba-ra” sung in sultry and tropical tones, along with some Russian lyrics too ridiculous to print (the song was written by a random guy from Moscow). You might have heard of $TUPI, a dubious meme coin launched to celebrate the birth of a particularly cute San Antonio Zoo capy. (The zoo denies any association with the coin.) And, if you’re like me, you might have journeyed to one of the capybara hot spots around the world, including Japan, where capybaras can be found in cafés and onsen, or hot-spring baths, which, unlike cafés, are a perfect place for the creature to enjoy immersion in water. The country even has a capybara hotel for closer communion with the animals.
The Internet’s Favorite Sex Researcher | The Atlantic
After years of following Aella’s online outrages and unexpected insights, I wanted to meet her for myself—to understand her unusual occupation as a cam girl turned sex researcher, and to hear her perspective on what the internet has done to human sexuality. But my first IRL encounter with her, one day last spring, involved staring at a closed front door.
Aella had invited me to her home in Austin, but then slept through our designated appointment time. Even my frantic knocking and texting didn’t rouse her. Eventually, though, once she had woken up and been for a swim in the local springs, her assistant let me into the house and made me a mushroom coffee. Explaining that she was gradually bringing order to Aella’s life, the assistant opened a closet to reveal a rail of neatly hung bras. This was a first in my journalism career—being invited to appreciate an interviewee’s underwear. Not that Aella would mind, because her entire appeal is based around her lack of filter. Polaroids of her, masked and topless, were stuck to the fridge.
“I can’t really get canceled,” she told me when I finally met her, “because what are you gonna do?” By then she was sitting with her legs curled up underneath her on a chair, wearing only a robe and underwear, next to a giant, curved monitor of the type beloved by crypto day traders.
Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Number? | Astral Codex Ten
Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain.
Different animals’ intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “encephalization quotient”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots).
Humans with bigger brains have on average higher IQ. AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process involves dissolving the brain into a “soup”, and maybe this is too mad-science-y for the fun-hating spoilsports who run IRBs. But common sense suggests bigger brains increase IQ because they have more neurons in humans too.
Finally, AIs with more neurons (sometimes described as the related quantity “more parameters”) seem common-sensically smarter and perform better on benchmarks. This is part of what people mean by “scaling”, ie the reason GoogBookZon is spending $500 billion building a data center the size of the moon.
All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true.
But how can this be?
The Evil Vector | Shtetl-Optimized
Last week something world-shaking happened, something that could change the whole trajectory of humanity’s future. No, not that—we’ll get to that later.
For now I’m talking about the “Emergent Misalignment” paper. A group including Owain Evans (who took my Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science course in 2011) published what I regard as the most surprising and important scientific discovery so far in the young field of AI alignment. (See also Zvi’s commentary.) Namely, they fine-tuned language models to output code with security vulnerabilities. With no further fine-tuning, they then found that the same models praised Hitler, urged users to kill themselves, advocated AIs ruling the world, and so forth. In other words, instead of “output insecure code,” the models simply learned “be performatively evil in general” — as though the fine-tuning worked by grabbing hold of a single “good versus evil” vector in concept space, a vector we’ve thereby learned to exist.
(“Of course AI models would do that,” people will inevitably say. Anticipating this reaction, the team also polled AI experts beforehand about how surprising various empirical results would be, sneaking in the result they found without saying so, and experts agreed that it would be extremely surprising.)
Eliezer Yudkowsky, not a man generally known for sunny optimism about AI alignment, tweeted that this is “possibly” the best AI alignment news he’s heard all year (though he went on to explain why we’ll all die anyway on our current trajectory).
Why is this such a big deal, and why did even Eliezer treat it as good news?
The Hallucinatory Thoughts of the Dying Mind | The MIT Press Reader
When William Brahms’s anthology of last words, “Last Words of Notable People,” came out in 2010, he encountered readers who entertained themselves by speculating what their last words might be. Initially, Brahms said, they would propose something witty and profound. Later, they admitted that they’d likely express appreciation and love, or something spiritual — if they could even manage to speak, when lucidity and intelligibility become hurdles. Brahms witnessed this firsthand at the bedside of his dying mother. Even though she’d spent years helping him edit his book, they’d never discussed what they thought their last words would be. It didn’t matter, because the reality was quite different. “In her case, due to debilitating illness, it was not a clear punctuated statement,” Brahms told me in an email, with evident surprise. “It was more of a slow and fading dialogue.” This dissonance between the idealized notion of dying speech, based on people’s expectations and cultural ideals, and the reality of final moments so often complicates our understanding of death. And when delirium enters the equation, the gap between expectation and reality widens even further.
[...]
Delirium is very common among the dying, particularly in the later stages, where that lethargic type shows up often. As a diagnosis, it covers a complex of symptoms and isn’t a single thing. Despite its prevalence, doctors don’t reliably recognize delirium.
The Walnut Tree | Dublin Review of Books
Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. Wars in the Balkans have book-ended and characterised much of the twentieth century in Europe. This one proved to be the most serious conflict on European soil since World War Two.
One story from the Yugoslav civil war connects a small valley in rural England with a mass grave in Croatia. At its heart is a dreadful crime – involving murder, betrayal and deceit – and a struggle between those who sought to reveal the truth, and those who wanted to deny and suppress it. That conflict was resolved by a most unlikely witness: a walnut tree.
[...]
When Dokmanović filed his defence, Dzuro realized that a conviction was far from certain. Although a number of witnesses could place him at the scene of the Ovčara massacre, there was no forensic evidence linking him to it. There were also eight alibi witnesses – all of whom gave sworn testimony that they were with Dokmanović and far from Ovčara on the day that the massacre took place. What is more, his defence claimed to possess material evidence which would confirm his alibi. Someone had shot a video – with a burnt-in time-code – and the tape seemed to prove that Dokmanović was not close to Ovčara at the time of the massacre. Dzuro suspected that the tape was a fake.
50 Thoughts on DOGE | Statecraft
DOGE is the most interesting story in state capacity right now. Yet although we’ve talked around it on Statecraft, I haven’t covered it directly since the beginning of the administration. In part, that’s because of the whirlwind pace of news, but also because of the sense I get in talking to other DOGE watchers, that we’re like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. And, frankly, because it’s the most polarizing issue in public discourse right now.
But we’re far enough into the administration that some things are clear, and I think it’s relevant for Statecraft readers to hear how I’m personally modeling DOGE. We’re also far enough along that it’s worth taking stock of what we expected and forecasted about DOGE, and where we were wrong. So here are 50 thoughts on DOGE, as concisely as possible.
To Raise Birthrates, Pay People To Get Married | Rob Henderson's Newsletter
Today, many Baby Boomer and Gen X women who had children outside of marriage are grandmothers without partners. Without that extra support, they’re less able to help their daughters raise kids. Many learn about this decline in pregnancy among poor, unmarried women and applaud it. There’s another way to think about this, though. Fertility among married couples hasn’t declined; overall birthrates have dropped largely because fewer young people are getting married. Thus, efforts to boost birthrates might be more effective if they focused on promoting marriage.
[...]
The idea that marriage doesn’t matter is what I call a luxury belief—an opinion that confers status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the lower classes. At a 2017 Senate hearing, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated, “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas. . . . Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.” Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom, and loose sexual norms soon spread to the rest of society. Yet, the upper class largely maintained intact families—experimenting sexually in college, perhaps, but settling down later. Lower-class families fell apart.
1 star
Mice experiment as step to create mammoth-like elephants | BBC News
Genetically engineered woolly mice could one day help populate the Arctic with hairy, genetically modified elephants and help stop the planet warming.
Those are the startling claims being made by a US company that said on Tuesday it had created mice with "mammoth-like traits". Colossal Biosciences' eventual goal is to engineer mammoth-like creatures that could help stop arctic permafrost from melting.
Human ancestors made the oldest known bone tools 1.5 million years ago | Science News
Ancient human relatives crafted sharp-edged tools out of animal bones around 1.5 million years ago, researchers say.
Discoveries at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, a famous East African fossil location, represent the oldest known evidence of systematic bone tool production by hominids, according to archaeologist Ignacio de la Torre of CSIC-Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and colleagues.
Male coaches increase the risk-taking of female teams—Evidence from the NCAA | Marginal Revolution
Women’s teams with a male head coach make risky attempts 6 percentage points more often than women’s teams with a female head coach.
The difference is persistent within games and does not change with intermediate performance.
Risk-taking has a positive effect on winning a game and teams with a female coach would win more often if they chose risky attempts more often.
Great selections, as always. I especially agree with you about "The End of Children."