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3 stars
How Trump Worship Took Hold in Washington | The New Yorker
16-minute read
Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington. “Shame is for sissies,” the late lobbyist Edward von Kloberg used to say. (He referred to his clients, among them Saddam Hussein, as “the damned.”) In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been more plain: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself. “You are the leader of the world,” Archbishop Elpidophoros, of the Greek Orthodox Church, said, at a recent celebration in the White House’s East Room. “You remind me of the great Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” The crowd cheered. Elpidophoros presented Trump with a gold cross—the symbol, he remarked, that led Constantine to victory. “Wow,” Trump replied, as he cradled the cross. “I didn’t know that was going to happen, but I’ll take it.”
The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State).
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The Five Big Lies about Venezuelans Sent to El Salvador | Richard Hanania's Newsletter
10-minute read
For what it's worth, Hanania voted for Trump and still considers himself well right-of-centre.
Over the first few months, it’s become clear on several issues that one of the things that makes the Trump movement so difficult to criticize is that it engages in multidimensional lying. They will lie about the “problem” they are trying to solve. They will lie about the effects of their policies. They will lie about the justification for that policy, and its legal basis. They will then pick examples of things they have done to solve the problem that will also be lies. They will lie about how the policy is working, and even what the courts have been saying about their policy. These aren’t misrepresentations that leave out context. We are talking about bald-faced lies by any definition, any one of which would be a scandal in most other administrations. It’s difficult to prove in most cases whether any particular official knows that he is lying, but the inference can often be made, and whether someone is a liar or a true-believing cultist in any particular instance, the effects are usually the same.
One of my failures in not seeing before the election how bad Trump would be was not grasping the extent to which moral nihilism now characterizes his movement. The casual political observer might find himself with a similar problem. Imagine the Trump administration has five talking points on issue X. A critic says that each one of those is a lie. That on its face may be difficult to believe. Surely the Trump administration could find one or two things that are true to say about its policy! It can’t just all be lies from top to bottom. The critics telling us that the Trump administration lies all the time, and that conservative media repeats these lies no matter how absurd, must just be hysterical.
REVIEW: The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
13-minute read
This insight answers a number of mysteries about the world, like: why it is that management books and military strategy books sound so eerily similar? Or why it is that if you read a war memoir and let your eyes lose focus like you’re doing one of those Magic Eye puzzles, you suddenly find yourself reading a business memoir? To be sure, war and business are very different activities, but they attract a similar sort of personality. This was especially true back when war was a more independent and entrepreneurial affair, as it was when most of the great military classics were written.
Every society offers official avenues of advancement that look like a complex game with byzantine rules, a cross between a ballroom dance and one of those incredibly fiddly board games. Most people take the deal: they put energy and excellence into learning all the moves, all the weird interactions and all the exceptions. But actually, the game is for show. The true game that moves the wheels of history is Nomic. Some people break through to this new level of reality after a long and distinguished career of a more conventional sort; others hear it as boys in the call of the kóryos. Both war and business, at least in their rawest and most elemental forms, offer direct manipulation of this deeper layer of the simulation. Rather than pour your ingenuity and craft into brilliantly following the rules set by others, you aim to brilliantly devise new rules and new scenarios and a new playing field that ensure you always win. This obviously isn’t quite true in the civilized world, where military commanders and entrepreneurs alike have to obey certain laws, but the flavor of it remains.
To Steal a Whale Bone | Switchyard
6-minute read
“Wildness cannot be collected and still remain wild,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book Gathering Moss. “By the very act of owning, the thing becomes an object, no longer itself.”
I’m not alone in the impulse to collect tokens of wonder. During Europe’s Scientific Revolution, the wealthy curated wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, which often included animal specimens. In his Noema essay, “Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor,” journalist Henry Wismayer writes that these displays “. . . were partly an ostentation: a show of their owner’s discernment. But they were also a cognitive tool. Awe, and its milder cousin ‘wonder,’ had come to be seen as an aesthetic prompt for the inquiring mind.” These objects were an attempt to make tangible the quicksilver consistency of awe. To turn it into something that could be contained or accessed at will.
Encountering a whale, even a dead one, can summon a swell of awe. The sheer size of whales recalibrates our sense of scale, the blood vessels of an average blue whale so considerable a mature trout could swim through them.
For me, the Long Beach whale dredged up a deep ache—maybe because whale populations have dwindled so considerably. Or maybe because it reminded me that someday I, too, will be gone.
2 stars
All That Glitters | The Atavist Magazine
35-minute read
It was like something out of a fairy tale—or the Los Angeles society pages. As a crowd of celebrities and reality-show cast members mingled near displays of diamond jewelry at the five-star Hotel Bel-Air, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ben Talei got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend. “Congratulations!” a bewildered Kim Kardashian said to the couple. Then she looked at the stone. “Come on, now’s your time,” she joked about the ring. “You want it thicker.”
[...]
Yet, despite a decade of legal troubles, Rechnitz to date has escaped serious consequences. He has yet to spend a single day in prison, even for the New York conviction. In reporting this story, I reviewed thousands of pages of legal documents and spoke to 15 associates, former friends, and lawyers involved in more than a dozen lawsuits against Rechnitz. Many of them think Rechnitz avoided justice because he cooperated with federal authorities in New York, and may still be acting as a government informant—something Rechnitz himself is said to have claimed. Whatever the truth, nothing seems to stick to him.
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Does a Magician Really Never Reveal Their Tricks? AO Wants to Know. | Atlas Obscura
5-minute read
There is a well-known American magician, Jim Steinmeyer, who would say that “magicians guard an empty safe.” It’s empty because our secrets, more often than not, are confoundingly simple.
If I don’t tell you how something is done, I hope that for the next few days, maybe even weeks or months, you’ll be thinking about this thing, wondering “How did he do that?” But if I tell you, [you’ll think], Oh, it’s easy!” We magicians do not reveal our secrets for the audience’s benefit, not for our own. Of course, I want to keep working, I want people to hire me. But it’s mainly for your benefit.
The Anglo-Nazi Global Empire That Almost Was | Global Delinquents
6-minute read
In reality though, from Britain’s perspective, the Munich Agreement was intended to be just the start of a wider process that would culminate in “world political partnership” between London and Berlin. Two months prior, the Federation of British Industries (FBI), known today as the Confederation of British Industry, made contact with its Nazi counterpart, Reichsgruppe Industrie (RI). The pair eagerly agreed their respective governments should enter into formal negotiations on Anglo-German economic integration.
Representatives of these organisations met face-to-face in London on November 9th that year. The summit went swimmingly, and a formal conference in Düsseldorf was scheduled for next March. Coincidentally, later that evening in Berlin, Kristallnacht erupted, with Nazi paramilitaries burning and destroying synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany. The most infamous pogrom in history was no deterrent to continued discussions and meetings between FBI and RI representatives. A month later, they inked a formal agreement on the creation of an international Anglo-Nazi coal cartel.
[...]
In mid-July 1939, Horace Wilson - an extremely powerful civil servant and Chamberlain’s right hand man - approached Göring’s chief aide Helmuth Wohlthat during a visit to London. Wilson “outlined a program for a comprehensive adjustment of Anglo-German relations” to him, which amounted to a radical overhaul of the two countries’ “political, military and economic arrangements.
Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class | Noahpinion
6-minute read
And yet at the same time, I think there’s a misguided narrative about globalization, manufacturing, and the American middle class that has taken hold across much of society. The story goes something like this: In the 1950s and 1960s, America was a smokestack economy. Unionized factory jobs built a broad-based middle class, and we made everything we needed for ourselves. Then we opened up our country to trade and globalization, and things started going downhill. Wages stagnated due to foreign competition, and good manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. American cities hollowed out, and we became a nation of winners and losers. The college-educated upper middle class thrived in their professional jobs, while regular Americans were forced to fall back on low-wage service work. Eventually the rage of the dispossessed working class boiled over, resulting in the election of Donald Trump.
[...]
But the master narrative of protectionism is simply much more myth than fact. Yes, Chinese import competition hurt America a bit in the 2000s. But overall, globalization and trade deficits are not the main reason that manufacturing’s role in the U.S. economy has shrunk. Nor has globalization hollowed out the middle class — because in fact, the middle class has not been hollowed out. Once we accept that this common protectionist narrative is deeply flawed, we can begin to think more clearly about trade policy, industrial policy, and a bunch of other things.
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field | Quanta Magazine
16-minute read
The goal of natural language processing is right there on the tin: making the unruliness of human language (the “natural” part) tractable by computers (the “processing” part). A blend of engineering and science that dates back to the 1940s, NLP gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. It was also ground zero for the emergence of large language models — a technology that NLP helped to invent but whose explosive growth and transformative power still managed to take many people in the field entirely by surprise.
Thoughts on Sinofuturism | Noahpinion
10-minute read
In other words, China’s real estate era may have ended in tears for some developers and local governments, but it left behind the physical edifice of a very futuristic-looking country. When people go to China and see the future, what they’re really seeing is the country’s recent past.
[...]
This, ultimately, is what Sinofuturism is lacking — the promise of ennoblement. People now make fun of the American suburbs of the 1950s, or use them as an object of misplaced nostalgia. But if you were to look at that lifestyle — the house, the car, the TV, the telephone — you could see the seed of a way of life so appealing and so free that it would eventually become the global standard. Right now, China is a beautiful place to visit, but the Sinofuturists who gush about its neon cities and its magnificent technology demonstrate a notable reluctance to move there.
Borstal Boys | The Fence
12-minute read
This is where his institutional career would begin: Rochester Borstal, the original children’s detention centre in Britain, where borstals themselves would later acquire their name. Opened in 1902 beside the Kentish village of Borstal, now swallowed up by the town of Rochester, it’s the sort of place you’d expect Miss Trunchbull to be nutting about in, terrorising the kids with maniacal joy. Heading the experimental scheme was the prison commissioner, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, who was seeking an alternative to the usual treatment of putting children directly into adult prisons. Ruggles-Brise introduced borstal as a place of moral reform. He had travelled to America in 1897 to study their system, visiting the Elmira Reformatory School in upstate New York. ‘I was impressed by all that I saw… the elaborate system of moral, physical and industrial training of these prisoners… a human effort was being made for the rehabilitation of the youthful criminal.’ Ruggles-Brise was inspired. And upon his return, he got the go-ahead from the Home Secretary, Viscount Ridley, to create the first borstal. Ruggles needed inmates, so he carefully selected prisoners aged 16–21 from Rochester adult prison for the experiment. Ruggles-Brise himself had attended Eton, and his new prisons mirrored the Victorian boarding school system – early rises, physical drills and strict classroom education.
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Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games | Rob Henderson's Newsletter
9-minute read
A useful distinction:
Experts are people who know things. They’re judged by other experts—people who speak the same language, use the same methods, and know the same details. You can spot experts by their credentials, their technical precision, or just the way they argue. They care about being right. They’re evaluated on whether their work holds up—whether it can be tested, measured, replicated, or defended under scrutiny. They debate each other, go deep into the weeds, and let the details decide who’s correct.
Elites are different. They’re not judged on technical knowledge but on being impressive across a broader range: wealth, looks, taste, social fluency, connections, charisma, and cultural feel. Elite institutions tend to screen for such qualities, which is why educational pedigree is also often important. This is why you can major in anything at Harvard and still get an elite job. No need for narrow expertise in, say, engineering or mathematics.
What Was Food Like Before the FDA? | Popular Science
5-minute read
We have a tendency to romanticize the past. Think about the food your great grandparents (or even their parents) ate in childhood and you might imagine farm fresh produce, pure milled grains, and pristine meat and dairy. But if they were living in the United States during the mid-to-late 19th century, that vision of food utopia wasn’t likely reality.
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But then, Wiley shifted tactics. He began conducting a series of experiments that he called the “hygienic table trials” with a group of USDA employees, later dubbed “the poison squad.” All of the dozen or so participants willingly and knowingly signed up to receive three freshly prepared meals, seven days a week, for six months from the newly created USDA test kitchen. Yet, along with their nourishing meals, a subset of the participants were also fed additives commonly found in adulterated food. “You could never have gotten this sort of study approved today,” says Blum. “He poisoned his co-workers.”
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The fervor, paired with the public outcry in response to Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, about Chicago’s meatpacking plants, led politicians to change their tune. In 1906, Congress passed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Act (colloquially known as “Wiley’s Law”). Later, the Food and Drug Act would be replaced by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics act of 1938, which has been extensively revised and updated since.
1 star
The trouble with dangling modifiers | Sentence first
4-minute read
Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.
The Great Conclave Secret: What Do Would-Be Popes Eat? | BBC
4-minute read
The code of conclave secrecy goes back to 1274, when Pope Gregory X established the regulations that still partly dictate how papal elections are run today. As with the coronation of many popes, his was controversial. It also had the distinction of being by far the longest, taking almost three years (1268-1271) to reach the majority consensus required to appoint a new pope. According to Italian canonist Henricus de Segusio, who served in that conclave, local residents threatened to restrict the cardinals' food to hasten a resolution.
Pope Gregory X's new rules included isolation of the conclave – a rule that is still in effect today – and rationing of the cardinals' food. After three days without consensus, the cardinals received only one daily meal; after eight days, only bread and water. In the mid-1300s, these rules were relaxed by Clement VI, who permitted three-course meals consisting of soup; a main dish of fish, meat or eggs; and dessert, which could include cheese or fruit. While the rationing didn't stick, tight control over conclaves remains.
Our Solar System May Indeed Have 9 Planets, Paper Finds | Nice News
2-minute read
Scientists believe our solar system may have a mysterious ninth planet — and no, it’s not Pluto (which was demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006). For about a century, astronomers have had a hunch that another planet has been waiting to be discovered. And one group of researchers recently gathered some celestial clues indicating that this “Planet Nine” is more than hypothetical, per a new paper accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.