1. California’s Crowded Ballot
Usually, Astral Codex Ten covers all candidates in the California gubernatorial race. This year, however, there are sixty candidates on the ballot. So instead of doing individual profiles, the blog analyzes and taxonomizes the entire cohort. One example: the candidates who legally changed their names purely for ballot appeal:
If you’re running for city council or something, then people really will only see your name on the ballot – there might not even be a party next to it, since sufficiently local offices might be nonpartisan by fiat. The trick is to change your name not to LovesAmerica Smith, but to John Smith (or Sarah Smith if you’re a woman). If you’re John Smith, and your opponent is Mohammed Kryzscyzbski, then voters who may not technically consider themselves racist will still think to themselves “John Smith – now there’s a man who sounds like he probably has good all-American values!” and it’s probably worth a 5 or 10 percentage point boost.
The blog points out that one of the candidates is listed as “Barack D. Obama Shaw.”
2. The Tonight Show Charade
Jon Greenway’s masterful evisceration of late-night funny man Jimmy Fallon is long overdue. Greenway understands that The Tonight Show is not television programming in the traditional sense, but rather “a show precision-crafted for algorithmic engagement”:
Fallon presides over his rituals of play like a vampire, feeding not on blood but on enthusiasm. He doesn’t really converse with any of his guests; they all know what they are there for. Rather, he extracts. He demands “relatability” from them, draining the authenticity from the interaction until only the husk of a “viral moment” remains. The horror lies in the repetition: the feigned shock, the hysterical laughter at unfunny mishaps, the relentless “Golden Retriever energy.” It is a performance of joy so excessive, so desperate, that it reveals the void it attempts to cover. It is the logic of the assembly line applied to human connection. What Fallon offers is a standardized production of “fun” that feels increasingly like a desperate plea to ignore the crumbling world outside the studio walls.
3. The Contradictions of the Modern University
Amarda Shehu, a professor of Computer Science and the Chief AI Officer at George Mason University, is besieged by parents asking her what their children should major in to be employable after they graduate. Her answer points to a bigger issue:
The parents who write to me asking which disciplines are safe deserve a more honest answer than the one the institution has been giving them, and I have come to believe that the institution’s inability to give that answer is the problem, not a regrettable feature of an otherwise functional system.
The honest answer is not a list. There is no list. Anyone who gives you a list is selling you something, and the institution that has been gesturing at one has been complicit in a pretense that is no longer sustainable. The truth is simpler and harder. If a job is a task that can be fully digitized, it is done.
Also, Princeton announced that it has abandoned its 133-year-old honor code. All exams will now be taken with human proctors.
4. Who Moved My Cheese?
According to the World Trade Organization, food crime costs $50 billion annually. Olivia Potts provides an inside look at cheese, the comestible that thieves value most:
Cheese crime is an international problem. In 2016, Wisconsin dubbed their dairy thieves “cheese pirates”: 20,000 lbs of cheese worth $46,000 was stolen from a parking lot. Just a few months earlier, 100 wheels of Comte were stolen from a warehouse in Goux-les-Usiers—each wheel would cost around $2,500 today. In 2019, $187,000 worth of cheese was stolen from Saputo Dairy Products in Tavistock, Ontario: A man arrived at the business, presented paperwork, and the cheese was loaded onto a truck, only to disappear into the ether.
5. Britain Is Not Ready for the Future
Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister, remains a contentious figure inside the Labour party. Twenty years after leaving office, he offers a withering critique of his party and Britain’s declining politics:
The challenge of democracy is not transparency, honesty or conspiracy theories about the hidden power of elites…It is efficacy. It is the ability to get big things done. To have leaders who are not problem-managers but problem-solvers…This, not the absence of ‘better communications’ or of a ‘charismatic’ leader has been the defining problem of the government. Too often they seem to totter in the breeze. To lack ballast. There are two epochal changes happening in the world today – one geopolitical, the other technological – and Britain is not prepared for either.
6. It’s Not This, It’s That
“If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you,” declares Sam Kriss. His latest essay on GPT writing may be the best dissent on AI yet. Kriss shows how the same, contrived rhetorical tricks and sentence structures appear everywhere. He isn’t fooled:
[AI] does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work. When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say.
Websites Worth Reading
250 Best Documentaries: Ranked by Letterboxd Members
AI Eats the World: Ben Evans’s Semi-Annual Presentation on AI
Open AI’s Consumer Data: How ChatGPT Is Being Used
Feeds We Follow
@daniel_dsj2110: Best Intellectual Biographies – Nominations from Commenters
@DKThomp: A Miracle Month in Medicine – Derek Thompson’s List of Progress
@Zenpersuasion: Zen and the Art of Persuasive Writing – A Judge Shares Opinions