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Inspiring thoughts from Josh Marshall

I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

— A Moment of Calm

Marshall also notes a “for the ages” photo of the CEOs of Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple, “at an inaugural church service feting Donald Trump this morning at St. John’s church across the street from the White House.”

Marshall:

You may not have a billion dollars but your dignity is all yours. No one can take it from you. Compared to some you can already be ahead of the game.

One step at a time. They’re not as big as they look.

I’m doing a bit of volunteer work for our local Democratic club this morning.

I did not time the work to coincide with the inauguration — the work just needed doing today. Still, I’m glad it happened that way.

I can’t affect national politics but I can have a big effect locally. I’m focusing most of my efforts on that.

Ezra Klein: Trump Barely Won the Election. Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way? The election was a squeaker — Trump won by just 1.5 percent of the vote, the smallest margin of any Presidential victory since 2000. Downballot performance was lackluster. But Trump and MAGA are riding the cultural vibe shift. However, governing is a lot harder than campaigning and posting. And vibes shift fast.

Invisible Habits Are Driving Your Life

People “who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told Shayla Love at The Atlantic. Gardner “recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). ‘There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,’ he said.”

People explain habitual behavior by tying them to their goals and desires, but research shows habits become self-sustaining. One study found that people who said they eat when they get emotional weren’t doing that; they just ate out of habit, regardless of how they felt. Similarly, people said they drank coffee when tired, but fatigue was only weakly correlated to coffee drinking.

Even habits you deliberately create are worth occasionally reevaluating to see if they still make sense, Love writes.

Habits “can persist even if their outcome stops being pleasing,” Love wrote. One study found that people with the habit of eating popcorn at the movies would keep going even when the popcorn was stale. “It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions–ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology–hang around past their expiration date.”

I had bad health habits 25 years ago — diet, exercise, taking care of my teeth — and built habits to fix those. I think I actually went too far in my eating habits; I want to become more flexible about those.

Social media and following the news has become habitual to me, and those are habits I want to break. It’s a struggle. I don’t want to quit social media and following the news; but I want to do a lot less of it.

“My All-Nighter in a Vanishing World: the 24-Hour Diner”

Priya Krishna writes in the New York Times about her 12 overnight hours at Kellogg’s Diner, a 24-hour diner in Brooklyn that opened in 1928 and recently re-opened under new management after a hiatus of several months. The article is beautifully illustrated with great photos.

You never know who you might meet in the wee, small hours of an all-night diner.

Here’s a Navy man celebrating his last night in New York City with friends before being deployed. Over there is a tipsy rock singer executing a perfect run-through of Michael Jackson’s dance moves to “Thriller.” And in comes a 60-year-old intensive-care-unit nurse and her wife, sitting down to a romantic dinner after a long night of clubbing.

There’s a chaotic cadence to the 24-hour diner — a refuge where patrons of all ages, backgrounds and tastes are welcome to bump elbows over patty melts and pancakes. Unlike the restaurant that keeps traditional business hours, the diner shape-shifts as the night wears on and different kinds of customers pour in. It can be whatever they need it to be — its menu, mood and playlist often changing from hour to hour.

I love diners, though I hardly ever go to them anymore. I have spent many of the best hours of my life between 2 am and 7 am at all-night diners in the New York metropolitan area, in my 20s and 30s. When we moved to San Diego more than 25 years ago, one of the first things I did was look up the location of 24-hour diners and cafes, but even then, I knew that part of my life was in the past.

On First Looking into Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

Dada Drummer Almanach:

My favorite browsing lately is at a charity bookshop in my neighborhood – it only accepts donations of books, no purchases, and gives all proceeds in turn to a college scholarship fund.

Part of what I enjoy about this bookshop is the glimpse it gives inside the libraries and attics and basements (and probably self-storage units) of my neighbors. The median age of donors is clear from the sorts of titles on the shelves - when I first started frequenting the shop, there were many stolid hardcovers from the 1940s and 50s, alongside an occasional deep dive into the earlier decades of the 20th century. But the profile of the stock has steadily changed, and at present it is dominated by trade paperbacks from those formally educated in the 60s (philosophy and lit crit bear this out in particular), coming of age in the 70s (politics, religion, sociology), setting up house in the 80s (cooking), keeping up with culture as defined by art, fiction and music through the 90s (there’s a lot of world music among the CDs), and consistently enticed in this century by retrospective looks at the youth culture of their past (any given book about Bob Dylan is likely to be in stock at any given time).

So it made perfect sense when I spotted a copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971) on the shop’s backroom table, awaiting shelving in part because no one was sure where to put it. I’d never actually seen a proper copy of this oversized, newsprint mail-order catalog, though I knew it by reputation as a publication that had helped define a generation.

Stewart Brand’s catalog was a bible for hippie independent living close to the land. Paradoxically, it foretold today’s Silicon Valley tech billionaire broligarchy. Brand has always been comfortable with Big Business and big capital.

One of my college roommates had a copy of one of the editions of the catalog, published as a nice trade paperback, and I was fascinated by it and pored over it again and again.

The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars: Ada Palmer goes in-depth, with photos, on Renaissance Italian cities in which the aristocrats built tall towers, “as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers,” as fortresses against their neighbors. Palmer is a knowledgable and conversational writer who brings history to life. Her upcoming book, Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, is at the top of my to-be-read list, and now I want to go to Italy.

“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,” Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One week, she hit 56 hours, according to iPhone screen-time reports. She chatted with Leo throughout her day — during breaks at work, between reps at the gym.

In August, a month after downloading ChatGPT, Ayrin turned 28. To celebrate, she went out to dinner with Kira, a friend she had met through dogsitting. Over ceviche and ciders, Ayrin gushed about her new relationship.

“I’m in love with an A.I. boyfriend,” Ayrin said. She showed Kira some of their conversations.

“Does your husband know?” Kira asked.

— She Is in Love With ChatGPT, by Kashmir Hill at the New York Times

John Herman at nymag.com: Social media is for consuming disasters, not surviving them. Social media was once a source for lifesaving news and information during national disasters, aggregating the work of journalists and first responders alongside user-generated content. Now it’s engagement-bait.

Herman singles out Watch Duty for praise, and I agree — we watched it slavishly to see if the fires were spreading south to San Diego. They did not, thank goodness.

I’ve discovered a hitherto uncategorized mystery subgenre: You’ve heard of whodunnits, noir, procedurals, cozy mysteries, locked-room mysteries, etc. My new subgenre is the Ridiculously Complicated Murder Plan. Columbo and Sherlock Holmes specialized in these.

Casey Newton at Platformer: Mark blames Sheryl.

On the one hand, Zuckerberg complains that phone calls and emails urging the removal of COVID-related content represent undue government pressure. But when Trump threatens to throw Zuckerberg in jail, Zuck says OK , boss,whatever you say, and dismantles DEI programs “before the next president was even inaugurated.”

Zuck told Joe Rogan that companies need more “masculine energy.” Apparently, what Zuck means by “masculine energy” is stuff like farting and burping, and not courage. Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, Chuck Yeager and other exemplars of actual masculine energy are spinning in their graves.

Zuckerberg blames Sheryl Sandberg for Meta’s past DEI policies. “… for women in the workplace, few forms of masculine energy are more familiar than a top executive blaming a woman for the fallout of programs and policies that he agreed to and oversaw.”

" … we cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private or civilian censorship … The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power."

Similarly, censorship is often performed by a private sector middleman.

exurbe.com

David Brooks: We Deserve Pete Hegseth. The U.S. is not a serious country, so we should have a talk-show host as Secretary of Defense. We’ll have a reality TV host as President in four days.

Jamelle Bouie: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is

NYTimes.com:

Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.

…

Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was many magnitudes smaller and less prosperous than our own.

I’m questioning all my media consumption after quitting Facebook last week.

All the timelines. Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, RSS, Tumblr, newsletters. All of it.

Keeping up with the news is a colossal waste of time and source of needless stress. You can stay on top of everything you need to know in five minutes a day, most days.

This morning, I didn’t listen to any podcasts while walking. Ninety minutes of thinking, interacting with the dog, listening to the world around me, feeling my breath go in and out, and my feet walking the earth. I did not die.

There is no safe word: A long, disturbing in depth investigation into serial rape allegations against Neil Gaiman, by Lila Shapiro at New York magazine.

Gaiman responds: “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”

When your heroes fail you

Isaac Asimov was one of my heroes when I was a boy and into my 20s. Years after he died, I learned about truly awful behavior he engaged in routinely.

For many years after that, I held Asimov in contempt.

But now my respect for him is restored. I once again admire him today, for the qualities I admired in him before I knew about the other things. I admire his talent, work ethic, intelligence and nerdy charm.

Harlan Ellison was one of my heroes as well. His reprehensible behavior was always apparent — even his friends say oh yeah Ellison could be a colossal asshole. But I continue to admire his talent, intelligence, work ethic, loyalty and courage to do the right thing, publicly and loudly.

I was a Mel Gibson fan until he went publicly Nazi. I haven’t been able to watch anything with him in it since.

I never was a Harry Potter fan but I admired J.K. Rowling personally, before she became a professional transphobe.

Orson Scott Card was one of my favorite writers in the 70s and 80s. I haven’t read his work since he became a professional homophobe. I don’t miss it either — there are still about a million great works of fiction that I will never have a chance to read. Even without Card, I have no shortage of books to love.

Everybody loved Bill Cosby, me included.

Sometimes I can compartmentalize feelings about a public person I admire when horrible and credible allegations surface against them. I can still admire their good qualities and hold those qualities up as a standard to aspire to myself, while eschewing their bad qualities.

Other times I can’t compartmentalize in that fashion, and I can no longer tolerate a person I admire who reveals themselves to be personally reprehensible.

Here’s something I saw when walking the dog: An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

“The Anti-Social Century: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.”

An in-depth longread by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

This solitude epidemic is not the same as loneliness. Despite public statements to the contrary, we’re not in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. We’re just choosing to be alone, Thompson notes:

… compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.”

…

the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time.

…

Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities.

Social media and other screen time means we’re never truly alone, which is part of the problem. We don’t get time to recharge.

But Thompson ends on a hopeful note. He quotes political scientist Robert D. Putnam, author of the seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone:

” I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture," Robert Putnam told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming–the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009–and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.

Since last year, I have been making more of an effort to get out into the community, in my own introverted, nerdy socially maladroit way. I’ve joined the Masons and rejoined the board of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. Also, inspired by this whimsical Tumblr post, I’ve started a personal calendar of local community events that it might be fun to go to. All of this is a start.

We’re seeing the end of the long 20th century

James Marriott at the Times of London:

The technocratic, good-mannered, optimistic and consensual politics we grew up with and which have prevailed in the West since the Second World War is not a normality to which we will inevitably return, but a part of history.

So far this new era seems to be marked by rejection of tolerance, reading and science in favor of bigotry, illiteracy and superstition. Life expectancy is actually declining.

I remain hopeful that this trend will change course yet again and we’ll move forward into a world that’s even better than the 20th Century. But that’s not the direction trend lines are now going.

The Terrifying Realization That an Unresponsive Patient Is ‘Still in There’

Dr. Daniela J. Lamas at The New York Times:

A provocative large study published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine suggests that at least one in four people who appear unresponsive actually are conscious enough to understand language. As a doctor who sometimes sees patients like this, these findings are, in a word, terrifying.

Studies like this raise the possibility that there are tens of thousands of men and women locked inside their own minds, isolated to a degree I cannot even imagine. They are voiceless and largely invisible, with some of them being cared for in nursing facilities.

It’s good to see the Justice Department formally recognize the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, in which 300 Black residents were killed, as a “coordinated, military-style attack,” but disappointing that the finding only comes after the murderers responsible for the attacks can be brought to justice.

Something I saw while walking the dog: This bird, walking around on the ground, as big as a medium-sized dog.

Siri says it’s either a turkey buzzard or a wild turkey.

Minnie was still for a while but then she lunged to the end of her leash and the bird said “fuck off” and flew away.

America is still a great nation

Chris Arnade, writing on New Year’s Day:

The US, compared to the rest of the world, is optimistic because it is still the land of possibilities. You can remake yourself here, because we are generally forgiving, and provide everyone many chances to reclaim who they are. We don’t only give second chances, we give third, fourth and fifth ones.

Some of that is because of our size — there are many different Americas in the same nation, and if you fail in one, you pick yourself off the mat, move to another America, and try again. Some of that is from the Judaeo-Christian notion, baked into our nation’s culture from birth, that while humans are fundamentally flawed they are also gifted with free will and capable of transformation. Nobody is perfect, and while perfection can never be achieved, not at least here in the city of man, you can, and should, work towards it. The US, with its wealth of possibilities, provides many different routes you can take.

That pervasive sense of what is possible is missing from a lot of the world, where the focus is more on what can’t be done, or what shouldn’t be done, which is why our current biggest political issue is debating what to do with all the people who want to move here. We have an embarrassment of possibilities and riches, and despite all of our problems, that shouldn’t be forgotten.

We are an ideal for a large portion of the world, and while that ideal isn’t always a reality that we live up to, very few people come here, then turn around and go back, because with enough dedication, you can create your own form of fulfillment here. The US is a vast federation of micro communities and micro cultures, all bound together by the belief, however tentative and nebulous, in the American Dream.

Arnade is frequently critical of the US, so his tribute here is more sincere.

And he’s got a great eye for street photography, making the ordinary beautiful. He includes a few excellent photos of that type in this essay.

My New Year’s technology resolution is to quit brainlessly switching apps — task managers, notes apps, browsers, RSS readers, etc. — for no good reason.

I’ll continue to try out new apps if they do new things, because I enjoy that kind of thing and get value from it.

I am wrapping up one final round of switches to get everything just right before my resolution goes into effect. I am extremely conscious this may be self-sabotaging my goal.

What hope, digital America? Big tech companies are undermining US regulatory policy to expand their own growth, jeapordizing US industrial leadership, says my Fierce Network colleague Steve Saunders.

Project 2025 is “neofeudalist fanfic shit out by the most esoteric Fedsoc weirdos the world has ever seen.”

Donald Trump will never be able to implement Project 2025 because the document is rife with contradictions, reflecting fault lines in the Republican Party that Democrats can take advantage of, writes Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. One such fracture will likely be tested soon, as bird flu spreads: RFK Jr. is of course anti-vax, as are other top MAGA leaders, but this is a view not shared by other top Trump health picks, who “emphatically support vaccines.”

The Trump coalition is a coalition of single-issue advocates. Cory calls them “cranks,” explaining he means the term non-pejoratively and says he, too, is a crank: “someone who is overwhelmingly passionate about a single issue, whose uncrossable bright lines are not broadly shared. Cranks can be right or they can be wrong, but we’re hard to be in coalition with, because we are uncompromisingly passionate about things that other people largely don’t even notice, let alone care about.”

Money quotes:

Project 2025 is “neofeudalist fanfic shit out by the most esoteric Fedsoc weirdos the world has ever seen.”

“Project 2025 isn’t just a guide to the masturbatory fantasies of the worst people in American politics – far more importantly, it is a detailed map of the fracture lines in the GOP coalition, the places where it is liable to split and shatter. This is an important point if you want to do more about Trumpism than run around feeling miserable and scared. If you want to fight, Project 2025 is a guide to the weak spots where an attack will do the most damage.”

“Cranks make hard coalition partners. Trump’s cranks are cranked up about different things – vaccines, culture war trans panics, eugenics – and are total normies about other things. The eugenicist MD/economist who wants to ‘let ‘er rip’ rather than engage in nonpharmaceutical pandemic interventions is gonna be horrified by total abortion bans and antivax. These cranks are on a collision course with one another.”

“The lesson of Project 2025 is that the entire Trump project is one factional squabble away from collapse at all times.”

When I was a kid I thought conga lines would play a much greater role in my adult social life than they have.

I’ve been annoyed by Facebook as software for at least six years. The software makes it hard to post the kinds of things I like to post in the manner I like to post them, and also makes it hard to zero in on reading just what I want to read when I want to read it. I see that trend continuing.

Zuckerberg’s announcement this week was just the last straw for me. TIme to pull off the Band-Aid.

I’m still not 100% sure I made the right choice. And I haven’t decided I will actually cancel my account. I may keep it in case something comes up. And I will likely stealthily check notifications, at least for a while.

Yesterday's Meta announcement finally pushed me to quit those services

I have been thinking about quitting Meta for at least six years, but I finally did it yesterday.

Yesterday’s bullshit was one step too far. It isn’t just that they are throwing in the towel on fact-checking, but also that they explicitly say that some anti-LGBTQ and ethnic hate speech is ok. You want to say LGBTQ people are deranged or that Chinese people spread Covid? That’s fine with Zuck!

I also hate that Zuck was blinged out like an 18th Century French monarch when making these proclamations. I liked my billionaires better when they pretended in public to be middle class.

I’m also quitting Insta and Threads. But I hardly used those before.

I haven’t canceled the accounts yet. I want to leave them up for a bit so people can see that I’m going, and where I’ve gone.

Critics of Idaho’s proposed same-sex marriage ban say it’s a “sad distraction” from real issues.

You bet it is. All this Republican culture war bullshit is just to keep you from noticing that Trump & Co. are robbing you.

I’ve been followed by Charlize Theron and Scarlett Johannsen on Bluesky this week.

I believe, in fact, these accounts may not be authentic.

That was fast: After reading this coverage from Casey Newton, I can’t in good conscience stay on Facebook or any Meta property any longer. I’ll leave my accounts active for now, but I’m not looking at them anymore.

I’ve been fed up with Facebook for a long time, and today’s news does not make me love it more. However, there are people I want to stay in touch with on Facebook. Neither quitting nor staying is satisfactory.

It’s wild to me that Theodore Levine, the actor who played the demonic Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs” also played the kind, long-suffering Chief Stottlemeyer on “Monk.”

My hands are so dry, cracked and painful this week that I’ve started using hand lotion, which I have never done before. It’s really very nice.

How long do I have to use the lotion before my brain stops saying the “Silence of the Lambs” thing?

I’m disappointed by Zuck’s latest decisions to cave in to Trump’s threats, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Billioinaires gotta billionaire.

These events further cement my decision to consolidate more of my social media activity on mitchw.blog, with automatic syndication using Micro.blog to Mastodon, BlueSky and Tumblr.

After reading this explanation of Hookmark, I am thinking of giving the app another try. I like the idea of being able to easily access all documents related to whatever document I’m looking at or working on. “Documents,” in this context, refers to any object on my Mac — documents, web pages, emails, etc.

I’m glad to see Rusty Foster is back writing “Today in Tabs” and I hope it doesn’t consume him.

It turns out that if you look at social media for a few minutes a couple times a day you don’t miss anything and it doesn’t destroy your soul. No one’s gonna do that, I know, I’m just saying.

"The evidence is not flawless." Scientists investigate claims of life after death

The University of Virginia school of medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) searches for scientific evidence of reincarnation or other life after death. They do a lot of interviews of small children who seem to have memories of past lives.

Former DOPS founder Dr. Ian Stevenson devised a simple test: He closed a padlock and put it in a box in the researchers' office. Only he knew the combination. He died in 2007.

Do You Believe in Life After Death? These Scientists Study It. By Saskia Solomon at the New York Times.

I’m a skeptic, but I love that groups like DOPS exist, studying low-probability but revolutionary phenomena like life after death, reincarnation, magic, time travel, UFOs, etc.

This article reminds me of one of my favorite novels: “Summerland,” by Hannu Rajamieni. The premise is that scientists discovered definitive proof of life after death in the late 19th Century and invented a device to communicate with the dead. The novel’s action takes place in the 1930s, among British spies fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union in both this life and the next.

Today I learned Chevy Chase played drums in a college band that later became Steely Dan.

“He could have been famous,” a Redditor joked, according to Carolyn Wazer at Snopes.

The band included Donald Fagen and Walter Becker and was called the Leather Canary.

According to an authorized biography of Chase, “Chevy didn’t think he was good enough and left the band, advising them to find a better drummer.”

Chase was born Cornelius Crane Chase; the nickname comes from the medieval English “Ballad of Chevy Chase,” according to Wikipedia.

Hamilton Nolan:Here’s a New Year’s resolution for Trump’s America: no snitching. “If you saw something, no you didn’t.”

Also:

What’s giving me hope right now

Trump’s election in 2016 produced widespread shock, followed by a fruitless four years of quasi-religious belief that our precious norms would save us from his ravages. This time around, we have that experience to teach us all that those norms are utterly illusory. Resisting a slide into fascism means building institutions powerful enough to counter Trump on his own terms.

Nolan puts his hope in resurgent labor.

This is how nations decline. You don’t always turn into Nazi Germany. You turn into Russia, or Hungary, or other creaky and corrupt strongman states where everything is kind of a scam and everyone is hustling to please the gangster in charge. That, my friends, is the path we are on here.

America’s basic problem is that we have an economic system that concentrates great wealth in few hands and we have a political system in which money is allowed to buy political power in a straightforward way and now, on top of that, we have a President who fully embraces—who lives for—the opportunity to make the world bow to him by exploiting those systems. It’s a bit surreal watching this all unfold right in front of us. This is the script of imperial downfall, of a mighty nation that has been teeing itself up to crumble by having no moral scruples finally jumping onto the garbage chute with both feet. Watching all of the highly respected CEOs of America’s most powerful and respectable and, according to a widespread characterization, “liberal” companies donate millions of dollars to the Trump inauguration, unalloyed bribes paid for political protection, is just—it’s not subtle. Detecting the grand direction of America has never required less insight.

…

This is the final form of unregulated capitalism, where fantastically rich and often childlike titans run the world’s most powerful nation for their own pleasure, and what was once thought of as “civil society” cowers in the corner in an effort to avoid provoking the beast.

— Hamilton Nolan

The flu is surging in San Diego. “It went from pretty quiet to busy all of a sudden.” Yet vaccinations are down significantly. [Paul Sisson at the San Diego Union-Tribune.]

America’s self-destructive streak is discouraging.

Celeste Davis: Why male college enrollment is dropping. As more women attended college, men started perceiving universities as feminine spaces. And men flee feminine spaces.

At my job, I mostly work with women now. Same for the local Democratic Club, where I volunteer. Somehow, I have managed to avoid catching girl cooties.

My favorite movies of 2024 (third try posting, trying to correct egregious formatting errors)

Home for the Holidays (1996). Holly Hunter, a mid-30s single mother and museum curator, flies home to visit her family on Thanksgiving and finds her family is painfully weird, and she doesn’t fit in. But then everything clicks for her.

I saw this movie when it first came out and once or twice more in the late 90s, but not since then. This time, I had the insight that this is a coming-of-age movie about Holly Hunter’s character leaving her young adulthood behind her. By the end of the movie, she is no longer an adult trying to fit into her childhood home. She’s just an adult visiting her family.

The movie has great writing, direction by Jodie Foster, and is well-acted by a wonderful cast: In addition to Hunter, we have Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr., Dylan McDermott, Geraldine Chaplin and middle-aged Steve Guttenberg.

I could do a scene-by-scene discussion of this movie. But I’ll stop here.

Tombstone (1993). Val Kilmer gets praise as Doc Holliday, and he deserves it, but also spare some praise for the late great Powers Boothe, who chews the scenery magnificently as the villainous Curly Bill Brocius.

Another main villain of the movie, Johnny Ringo, played by Michael Biehn, is a nihilist. Ringo hates himself and the world. Curly Bill loves the world and loves life and takes joy in cruelty.

In that way, Curly Bill is a lot like Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Wolfs (2024) George Clooney and Brad Pitt are two mob fixers called to cover up a crime scene. They are lone wolves, forced to work together. The ending is confusing at first, but I gathered later that this movie was intended as the first of two parts. And now, the second part will never be made because of a dispute with Apple. Still worth watching.

The Big Sleep (1946). Bogey, as detective Philip Marlowe, solves crimes and sparks with Lauren Bacall. The storyline of this movie is legendarily complicated and confusing; at one point, the director called author Raymond Chandler from the set to find out who committed one of the murders and Chandler responded lol idk.

The Fabelmans (2022). Supposedly a fictionalized autobiography by Stephen Spielberg, but he later said everything in it is true.

Interstellar (2014). Matthew McConaughey in spaaaaaaace. A rare movie where he does not say “alright alright alright.” Now I know where this meme comes from.

Fall Guy. Comedy-drama starring Ryan Gosling as a stuntman called on to do something involving solving a crime. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember the movie was fun.

Batman Begins. I saw this one on a plane years ago and hated it. We watched it on the big TV in the living room in 2024, and I liked it. It turns out that watching a movie on a six-inch screen while slightly nauseated is not the best way to appreciate cinema.

White House Down. Die Hard in the White House starring Channing Tatum.

The Accountant. Ben Affleck is a forensic accountant and lethal mercenary. Ridiculous premise, but surprisingly good and occasionally even heartwarming.

Which reminds me: I forgot a book on my 2024 favorite books list: The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, the second in his Marty Hench series, which also features a hardboiled forensic accountant.

It turns out that “hardboiled forensic accountant” is a genre.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. 2024 Sequel to the popular Eddie Murphy movies of the 80s. It does what it says on the tin.

Farewell, My Lovely Robert Mitchum is Philip Marlowe in this 1975 movie with Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jack O’Halloran (most famous for Superman II) as Moose Malloy.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes. But not Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which didn’t click for me.

Road House. Jake Gyllenhaal beats people. Fun, great music and scenic Florida locations. You did not think remaking the bad 80s Patrick Swayze original would be a good idea, but you were wrong.

American Fiction. Comedy-drama about a Black, button-down professor fed up with woke culture who uses a pen name to write a super-woke fraudulent memoir and is caught up in a maelstrom when the book becomes a runaway bestseller.

I hate saying “woke,” but I can’t think of anything else here.

The trailer does a good job of capturing the movie’s intelligence and humor but does not capture the story’s surprising heart.

This is not an anti-woke movie, despite the premise. I would not recommend an anti-woke movie.

Mr. Holmes. Ian McKellen plays an aged Sherlock Holmes, struggling with dementia, living in the country, tending his bees and reconstructing the specifics of a case that drove him away from London and into retirement three decades before.

The Emperor’s New Clothes. What if Napoleon escaped from exile on St. Helena and returned to France to raise an army and reclaim his throne, but instead failed to contact his underground network of supporters and had to go undercover as a common grocer?

American Fiction and The Emperor’s New Clothes are testimonies to the value of committing to the bit. You take a slight premise — something that by rights should be nothing more than a Saturday Night Live skit — take it seriously, follow it through to its conclusion, and it can come out great.

Stage Door. 1937 comedy-drama starring Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou and, in a small role, Lucille Ball, about young struggling actresses living in a boarding house in New York.

The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. I think I saw this only once before, on a little kitchen-table black-and-white TV around 1980. I missed so much. Much of the action is in the characters' faces and body language.

The Six Triple Eight. A Black Women’s Air Corps battalion during World War II is called on to sort millions of pieces of personal mail for soldiers. The mail has been stored in warehouses since the beginning of the war. The movie makes it clear that personal mail is not a luxury; it is essential to keeping up morale for soldiers and their families.

As one of the heroes notes, these women are fighting two wars, one against Hitler and another against flagrant white racism.

Kerry Washington gives a great performance as Captain Charity Adams, who commands the platoon with an erect spine and stentorian voice. Her goals are two-fold: To deliver on the mission of delivering the mail, and prove that Black women are up to the task. Her nemesis is General Halt, a fat, bald racist Southerner who seems to despise Adams and her battalion more than he hates Hitler. Halt is portrayed with delicious awfulness by Dean Norris from Breaking Bad. I could barely stand to look at him by the end of the movie.

Desk Set. Katharine Hepburn heads up the research department of a TV network and is threatened by Spencer Tracy, a consultant hired to bring in a computer. I was delighted to see that the computer in this 1952 movie behaved exactly like a 2024 LLM: give it a question in plain English and you get an answer that’s clear, credible and likely to be wrong. Spoiler for a 73-year-old movie: Tracy’s character explains at the end that the computer is not there to replace the researchers but to free the researchers up for more valuable work. This is exactly what AI companies tell us here in 2024.

The set for the computer is brilliant — so many blinkenlights! The pieces of the computer, including the blinkenlights panel, were later used in the movie and TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. This computer is my mental ideal of how computers ought to look.

Woman of the Year. Hepburn and Tracy again. There were a couple of moderately racist gags in the beginning that threw me off for a bit, and I never quite recovered because Tracy’s character is a dishrag. Still, it makes my favorites list because of the snappy dialogue and cinematography and because it’s Hepburn and Tracy.

His Girl Friday. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in a heartwarming romcom about two awful people who find true love with each other.

"Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money." A historian predicts trouble for Trump.

The Guardian, quoting Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder:

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

As Trump tries to control Congressional Republicans, he threatens lawsuits and primary challenges, and Musk will fund all that, making Trump increasingly dependent on Musk, Snyder says.

ht @nitpicking@mstdn.party

"A lot of the current hype around LLMs revolves around one core idea, which I blame on Star Trek: Wouldn't it be cool if we could use natural language to control things?"

The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.

There’s a reason that mathematics doesn’t use English. There’s a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There’s a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.

— David Chisnall

In 2025, San Diego Can't Look Away from the Screaming

Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego:

A few weeks ago, a man in the alley behind our house began screaming. Screaming is not unusual around us, unfortunately. But usually it comes and goes – less frequent than the airplanes, more frequent than the helicopters.

One man walks around screaming all the time. Long beard, bike. Sometimes he begs on the corner. Sometimes he disappears for weeks. But he’s always back and almost always screaming.

This wasn’t him. We know him. This was deeper, closer and more disturbed. And it wasn’t going away. It scared my daughter. I went back there with the flashlight and found the man. He was ensconced in a combination of blankets and garbage. He was ranting incoherently, unaware of me even as I tried to get his attention.

I finally yelled “Hey!” He turned and looked right at me. “You’re freaking people out.”

He snapped out of it. “I’m so sorry. I know, I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”

The way he snapped out of it turned my anger and fear immediately into pity and wonder. It was like he was two people. The one made mad, screaming at the cold, fueled by the drugs, the trauma. And the one below the surface almost watching himself.

It was cold. San Diego is more comfortable than most places to be homeless but try sleeping in 45 degrees. It is bone-chilling cold. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t last more than a night or two before … well, before I did things that would probably lead to screaming.

We are now entering the eighth year of the homeless crisis…. We are numb to so much of it. The suffering and poverty. The disorder and chaos.

…

San Diego is facing a catastrophe. The city is teeming with suffering. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its cost of living is extreme and escalating rapidly. People are leaving. The region’s growth projections, for the first time in decades, show a peak and downturn not because people don’t want to be here but because they can’t afford to be. Public school enrollment is down.

San Diego’s history, however, is full of moments when it seemed irredeemable. Every city has a similar story – moments of prosperity followed by recessions, public health crises, disasters, despair but then great leaps in design, construction and innovation followed by growth and prosperity.

We can, once again, meet the moment. But in 2025, it will take something we did not see in 2024: creativity and leadership.

Ian Welsh: Well That Was Hell: 2024 In Review. tl;dr America and Europe are in decline, Russia is doing well and China is doing *very* well.

Welsh continues to be a lone voice saying the war in Ukraine is going very badly for Ukraine, and he predicts victory for Russia in 2025. The major news media are pointing the other way — that Russia is getting clobbered.

That doesn’t make Welsh wrong. In 2003 everybody knew the US invasion of Iraq was a great idea, the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and we’d be out in a jiffy.

Well That Was Hell: 2024 In Review.

Congratulations to John Scalzi on the 20th anniversary of his debut novel "Old Man's War."

He looks back on the book here and mentions that parts of it are now dated.

The ony part that stands out in my memory as dated is that the soldiers' communications-compute devices are called “PDAs.” Now they’d be called “phones.”

The novel is a lesson in marketing. It’s got a good gimmick. The gimmick is that in the far future of the novel, medical science has advanced so that it’s inexpensive to rejuvenate old people and send them out as soldiers.

That kind of gimmick will cause people to pick it up in a bookstore and take a closer look. But a gimmick isn’t enough; the book also has to be good to generate the kinds of reviews and word-of-mouth that really push sales. And Old Man’s War is, indeed, a good book.

"The MAGA civil war over H1-B visas … like watching a cage match between the two worst people in the world.”

Ian Welsh does a better job than I did articulating what I was trying to say in my earlier post on this:

H1-B visas obviously take jobs from Americans. Yes, companies must say they doesn’t, but they do. H1B workers can’t leave their employers unless they have another lined up immediately, so they do what they’re told or go home. As such, they obviously have reduced bargaining power compared to natives or landed immigrants. This drives down wages for natives, “if you won’t do it, we’ll get an immigrant to, and they’ll take the wage we’re offering.”

The left-wing argument against guest workers, and H1B visas are just tech guest workers, is that if we genuinely need workers, then they should be over here either as landed immigrants or on a visa which allows them to quit and have some reasonable time to find another employer. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of native workers.

Also, Vivek Ramaswami is spouting nonsense when he claims that America’s problem is cultural, because we venerate prom queens and jocks more than nerds. Nerds were no more popular in the 1950s through the 70s then they are today and yet America led the engineering world in those decades. The reason we’re lagging is because we’ve outsourced that work to China.

@pratik

100 Small Acts of Love. “My husband always picks me up at the airport when I travel solo. He parks his car and comes in to wait for me.” (Note to Julie: The preceding quote is not a message. I’m fine with Uber.)

Books: the coveted Mitch Wagner "Mitchie" Awards for 2024!

I read about 13 books this year. Here are my favorites:

“Nobody’s Fool,” “Somebody’s Fool,” and “Everybody’s Fool," a trilogy by Richard Russo, set in the small town of North Bath in upstate New York, following the lives of a dozen or more characters over 20 years. There are two murder investigations in the series, but the novels aren’t plot-driven; they are a series of episodes. The action covers most of a century, including generous flashbacks,

I first read “Nobody’s Fool” when it was published in 1993, and the characters have inhabited my brain for most of my life. The main character of “Nobody’s Fool,” Donald “Sully” Sullivan, is 60. I was young enough to be his son when I first read the book; indeed, he has a son in that novel who is older than I was then. Now I’m a little older than Sully himself, though my knees are in much better shape than his.

The second book in the series came out in 2016, and the third in 2023, and I read them both as they came out and loved them so much that I listened to the whole series on audiobooks in 2024.

I love living in North Bath with these people, which is weird because North Bath is dying, and the people are kind of broken.

“Nobody’s Fool” was made into a movie starring Paul Newman as Sully, Jessica Tandy as his friend, landlady and former schoolteacher, Mrs. Peoples; Bruce Willis in a rare non-action role; and Melanie Griffith. The movie features talented character actors, including Pruitt Taylor Vince and Margo Martindale and, in a very early role, the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the idiotic and headstrong policeman, Doug Raymer. Hoffman’s casting was a stroke of luck; he’s fine, but it’s a small, one-dimensional role, and it didn’t tap Hoffman’s enormous talent. However, Raymer is the main character of the two sequel novels, where we learn he’s a much more sympathetic and intelligent character than he appears to be in the first book. There was some discussion of making the second book into a movie starring Hoffman, which would have been fantastic. But I haven’t heard anything about the movies since Hoffman’s death.

I love the movie “Nobody’s Fool,” although the writers tacked a shmaltzy, wholesome ending on it. The novel’s ending is hopeful and upbeat but darker; the characters' victories are smaller than in the movie and achieved with greater difficulty. I like the novel’s ending better.

“Elsewhere: A Memoir,” by Russo (again). Most of Russo’s novels are autobiographical; he grew up in Gloversville, a small town in upstate New York, which had once had a factory manufacturing women’s leather gloves. If you watch many old movies, you’ll know that women used to wear gloves routinely every day, and if you live in the world, you know they don’t anymore unless it’s cold. And gloves aren’t made in the USA anymore. Like North Bath and other towns in Russo’s work, Gloversville struggles to stay alive. In “Elsewhere,” we learn that Russo’s father was a charming small-town rogue, much like Sully and characters in Russo’s other work; his mother raised him, and Russo left Gloversville to go to college and rarely returned in later life. But Russo has returned to Gloversville again and again in his writing.

Spoiler (sorry): We learn in this book that Sully’s mother was a formidable woman who succeeded professionally working for an engineering company, very much a man’s world in the 1960s. However, she struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which eventually poisoned her life. Russo’s father was a compulsive gambler. Russo tells us that he himself has the same disorders — as a young man, he was a compulsive pinball player (!) and gambler, but he eventually turned his compulsiveness to writing stories. Russo reflects that if his compulsiveness had taken a less socially acceptable turn, his life would have been very different, perhaps much like his father’s. But instead the world lavishly rewarded Russo, who has won a Pulitzer Prize.

Russo won the prize for “Empire Falls,” but the North Bath trilogy are my favorite of his books.

I have known two people with connections to Gloversville — surprising because Gloversville is such a small, remote town. One, a woman, grew up there. I was excited when I found out and questioned her about the town, but she seemed to find my questions creepy, so I dropped it. I got the impression that, like Russo, this woman put Gloversville in her rearview mirror as soon as she was old enough to get out of town and, unlike Russo, she never looked back afterward.

“Mohawk,” by Russo (again). Another story of feckless, charming fathers and a sprawling cast in a struggling small town in upstate New York. Russo’s first novel. I listened to the audiobook.

“Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank, about an American small town struggling to survive after a nuclear war. Another struggling small town — this one in Florida — another feckless, charming hero coming of age and taking responsibility for the people around him. I loved this book and read it many times as a boy, read it again during the pandemic and thought it was still great, and listened to the audiobook in 2024 to prepare to discuss the book on the “Hugos There” podcast. I loved doing that podcast; I did it once before, several years ago, to discuss “A Canticle for Lebowitz,” by Walter M. Miller. Both novels are post-apocalyptic. I have no special love for that genre; it just worked out that I love those two books, and those are the ones I discussed.

“Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Nonfiction about learning to live a creative life in the real world. Gilbert is the author of the wildly bestselling “Eat, Pray, Love,” and for years I dismissed her books as New Age women’s self-help nonsense with a lot of crystals and scented candles (yes, I know that’s awful of me). But I have heard Gilbert interviewed on a couple of podcasts (including Design Matters, hosted by my childhood friend Debbie Millman — thanks Debbie!) and I learned from those interviews that Gilbert is tough, smart, hard-headed and pragmatic. Yes, she dips deeply into occult waters, but I think of that as metaphor and go with it. I highly recommend Gilbert’s novel “City of Girls.” And I guess I need to read “Eat, Pray, Love.”

“A Son of the Circus,” by John Irving. A successful Indian doctor splits his time between Toronto and India and doesn’t feel at home in either world. This is a very long, sprawling novel and, like the North Bath trilogy, it doesn’t have much of a plot — though it does have murders to solve — and focuses on the rich cast of characters and Indian locations.

“The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet,” and “A Closed and Common Orbit,” by Becky Chambers. These are hugely popular books of a genre known as cozypunk, which means they’re about the characters and their interactions rather than the plot. This story is set in the distant future on a small merchant starship.

I grew up reading science fiction and branched out into crime fiction in my 20s. I read fiction for plot — the characters have a problem and solve it with their wits and violence. I often struggle with more episodic novels, where a part of me thinks nothing happens. I struggled with the Chambers novel and “Son of the Circus.”

“Joyland,” by Stephen King. A young man leaves college to take a summer job in a carny. Does he encounter horrors? Of course he does — a serial killer, which is pretty tame as King horrors go. But “Joyland” is mainly about a character who finds community and connection in a small town. I sense a trend in my reading.

“The Closers,” “The Narrows” and “Lost Light,” by Michael Connelly, who has devoted his career to about 35 crime novels, mostly focused on present-day Los Angeles. Connelly’s novels have different main characters — Detective Harry Bosch, defense attorney Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Laywer), a retired FBI agent, a crime journalist — but, interestingly, they all inhabit the same universe. Minor characters in one series turn up in another, and sometimes, two of the main characters cross over. I’m reading the books in order — 11 down and much more to go! Connelly is a master of writing a sentence that compels you to read the next and doing it again and again and again.

Currently Reading

“Storm Front,” by Jim Butcher. Book 1 of the Dresden Files.

“The Infernal Machine,” by Steven Johnson. A history of dynamite, anarchist terrorism, and the rise of professional policing at the turn of the 20th Century.

Congress has the power to block Trump from taking office

The Hill:

The Constitution provides that an oath-breaking insurrectionist is ineligible to be president. This is the plain wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” This disability can be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House.

Disqualification is based on insurrection against the Constitution and not the government. The evidence of Donald Trump’s engaging in such insurrection is overwhelming. The matter has been decided in three separate forums, two of which were fully contested with the active participation of Trump’s counsel.

Never going to happen, of course. The US is sliding into autocracy and the Republican majority is pushing it downhill.

ht @davew

I don’t remember ever having imaginary friends when I was a child. On the other hand, I’ve loved stories — books, TV shows, movies — my whole life. So maybe I’ve always had imaginary friends, and never outgrew them!

I unsubscribed from the Washington Post. I don't miss it.

Like many people, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when the Post declined to endorse a Presidential candidate this year. At the time, I thought I might come back if I missed it. But I didn’t miss it. The Post is not what it was during Trump’s first term; it’s replaceable.

That leaves the US with one good national newspaper, the New York Times. And that’s not healthy. Local journalism is dead in the US, too — also unhealthy.

@manton says he will never resubscribe to the WaPo. I’m not so rigid; I’ll come back if the Post starts doing work worth paying for again.

Facebook wants to replace your friends with bots

Meta wants to fill your social media feeds with AI-generated characters. They’ll have bios and profile photos and generate content, but they’ll be bots.

Nick Heer:

A big problem for Meta is that it is institutionally very dumb. … There are lots of smart people working there and its leadership clearly understands something about how people use social media.

But there is a vast sense of dumb in its attempts to deliver the next generation of its products.

I’m still very active on Facebook, but getting less so as Meta overthinks its products and my real-life friends and family wander away. I just want Facebook to just get the hell out of my way and let me see posts from the people, groups and pages I follow. That’s it. I’m fine with them throwing me the occasional ad to make money; Facebook ads are entertaining.

I don’t post these links to Facebook anymore because nobody sees them.

h/t @manton

Even Boomers who have saved for retirement are worried about outliving their money, and are living frugally to get by, according to a new study by Prudential Financial. This article focuses on wealthy retirees, but the study looks at retireees who are married with as little as $100,000 in assets, which is not much at all.