Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP) is a chemical that makes plastic more flexible and durable, and is found in many consumer products, including food packaging, personal care products and children’s toys. Previous studies have shown that BBP interferes with the body’s hormones and affects human reproduction and development, but the details of how it impacts reproduction have been unclear.
In the new study, researchers tested a range of doses of BBP on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and looked for abnormal changes in egg cells. They saw that at levels similar to those detected in humans, BBP interferes with how newly copied chromosomes are distributed into the sex cells. Specifically, BBP causes oxidative stress and breaks in the DNA strands, which lead to cell death and egg cells with the wrong number of chromosomes.
Based on these findings, the researchers propose that BBP exposure alters gene expression in ways that cause significant damage to the DNA, ultimately leading to lower quality egg cells with abnormal chromosomes. The study also showed that C. elegans metabolizes BBP in the same way as mammals, and is impacted at similar BBP levels that occur in humans, suggesting that C. elegans is an effective model for studying the impacts on people. Overall, the study underscores the toxic nature of this very common plastic ingredient and the damage it causes to animal reproduction.
If I had to theorize, I would suspect that plastic is behind many of the things we find so perplexing about our modern times: plummeting fertility rates, increased rates of autism, shockingly high cancer rates in ever-younger populations, unexplainable neurological disorders in the Boomer generation.
I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.
The tool, called Locate X and made by a company called Babel Street, then narrows down to the movements of a specific device which had visited the clinic. This phone started at a residence in Alabama in mid-June. It then went by a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, traveled along a highway, went past a gas station, visited a church, crossed over into Florida, and then stopped at the abortion clinic for approximately two hours. They had only been to the clinic once, according to the data.
The device then headed back, and crossed back over into Alabama. The tool also showed their potential home, based on the high frequency at which the device stopped there. The tool clearly shows this home address on its map interface.
In other words, someone had traveled from Alabama, where abortion is illegal after the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, to an abortion clinic in Florida, where abortion is limited but still available early in a pregnancy. Based on the data alone, it is unclear who exactly this person is or what they were doing, whether they were receiving an abortion themselves, assisting someone seeking one, or going to the clinic for another reason. But it would be trivial for U.S. authorities, some of which already have access to this tool, to go one step further and unmask this or other abortion clinic visitors.
Few things can change your perspective for the better more than being attacked from both sides of America’s culture war.
If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.
But there’s a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.
I’m inherently suspicious of the notion that simple ideas can solve complex problems, but what if a simple idea can help us embrace complexity? Intellectual diversity matters. Opening your mind to a wider range of perspectives is transformative. It doesn’t just protect the minority from the majority, it also helps protect the majority from itself, and the institutions that learn that lesson will be far more tolerant and successful than those that close their doors to opposing points of view.
No American faction — or party — has a monopoly on virtue or insight. For those of us who see diversity, equity and inclusion as good values, the answer is less for the right to beat the left or for the left to beat the right, but rather for the right to be open to the left, and the left to be open to the right.
David French remains one of the best political writers in the national media.
An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.”
Meanwhile, a related PAC also funded by Musk is microtargeting likely Black voters on Snapchat with ads that says Kamala Harris is trying to ban menthol cigarettes (surveys have shown that 81 percent of Black smokers use menthols, and big tobacco has disproportionately marketed menthol cigarettes to Black Americans).
The future (and the population) will be controlled by the people that know how to use computers.
If you want to treat yourself (and that’s all it is — a treat), subscribe to the print edition of New York Magazine and never read the website (so you’re always surprised by the contents of the latest issue).
It’s one of life’s great pleasures, particularly if you love print.
”I also acknowledge that in American public life, women can’t seem to apologize enough for our mistakes,” she said. “While our male counterparts’ past — or recent — mistakes are minimized as youthful indiscretions or ‘poor judgment,’ women aren’t afforded that same forgiveness. Again, the only thing I can do is to say I’m sorry and commit to doing better.”
One of her mayoral rivals, Portland Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, had his license twice suspended more than two decades ago and also received seven speeding tickets between 1998 and 2013, according to court documents first reported by Willamette Week.
While court records show numerous candidates for Portland mayor and City Council have been cited for parking or traffic violations in Oregon, Rubio’s number and repeated flagrant lapses of settling them are unparalleled. Over two decades, she had her licenses suspended six times and courts referred her unpaid parking tickets to a collection agency on at least 100 occasions, records show. Days after The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported on her driving record, Rubio damaged a parked Tesla and then left without leaving a note for the car’s owner.
No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do.
Don't.
Ever.
This is among one of those many, many privacy stances most people do not understand. "I don't have anything to hide," they say. "Let the cops have my phone — I don't care." Or alternatively, "I don't care if Google tracks me — I don't have anything to hide."
Let's be honest — most people don't understand how a computer works, let alone how databases compiled by thousands of computers put together tracking profiles that know everything about them. They don't know how invasive it all is, how they're handing over their entire lives when they hand over their phones (or consent to tracking).
He had known, of course, in an abstract sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
There’s a lot of stuff in there about YouTube virality, starting with the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for the all-important video thumbnails:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
MrBeast videos have a strictly defined formula, outlined in detail on pages 6-10.
The first minute captures the viewer’s attention and demonstrates that their expectations from the thumbnail will be met. Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result! Minutes 1-3, 3-6 and 6-end all have their own clearly defined responsibilities as well.
Ideally, a video will feature something they call the “wow factor”:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days (video) and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Technology, double-edged sword, evil intentions etc. There’s an avalanche of manipulated bullshit coming from every direction, I’m afraid, the media is horribly guilty, on a zillion levels, of selling fantasy as fact - but I’m more concerned about people’s willingness to buy into whatever they’re fed, no matter how ridiculous, if it supports what they already believe. Even worse are people who get their information from social media, which is basically an ideological glory hole; you have no clue as to the origin of the information, you just dutifully put it in your mouth and then spread it like syphilis to all your friends. I don’t know if it’s a societal shift, or the failure of schools to inspire more kids to learn & understand, or the disappearance of books, but there’s this whole, weird thing out there where people read a snippet online and feel they’re experts on any subject, and will expound, or criticize, or speak in absolutes when in fact they’re laughably ignorant. The Internet has the power to legitimize the worst kinds of idiocy. If a guy is on a soapbox, screaming gibberish on the corner of Hollywood & Highland, people ignore him; give him a Twitter account and the Los Angeles Times will quote him and dub him a “pundit.” At some point the world has to realize that the Internet isn’t an accurate barometer of anything. Social media has become such a minefield of bullshit & scam artists that I’ve pretty much abandoned it. I’m disappointed in virtually everyone, everywhere.
The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort.
A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all. Very often, such affects are the very tools of predation. Nor should any of us operate under the impression that because some men are strong in the commission of abuse then the problem is the strength and not the abuse. It would probably be more convenient if good and bad came to us labeled and prepackaged, but they don’t. Sometimes the best men are some of the least ostentatiously feminist men, but only sometimes. You just have to live with someone long enough to find out when nice is only Nice. As Little Red Riding Hood taught us, nice is different than good.
Police officers are scanning for Teslas that may have ambiently recorded nearby crimes on their external cameras — and even going as far as to attempt to tow the vehicles away to inspect the footage.
President of the Richmond Police Officers Association Ben Therriault told the Chronicle that officers usually attempt to ask for the owner's consent first, but sometimes resort to towing the vehicles anyway.
Hopper was a very popular speaker not just because of her pioneering contributions to computing, but because she was a natural raconteur, telling entertaining and often irreverent war stories from her early days. And she spoke plainly, as evidenced in the 1982 lecture when she drew an analogy between using pairs of oxen to move large logs in the days before large tractors, and pairing computers to get more computer power rather than just getting a bigger computer—“which of course is what common sense would have told us to begin with.” For those who love the history of computers and computation, the full lecture is very much worth the time.
I’ve long heard about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, often from unexpected people in disparate places.
Before he died, my neighbor, once an employee of American Satellite and IBM, mentioned her name more than once.
...back in 2021, Apple introduced a feature in iOS 15 called Live Text, which makes it possible for iPhone users to grab text, email addresses, phone numbers, and more from images. Live Text works with both handwritten and typed text and supports a variety of languages.
Once you learn to use Live Text, it becomes indispensible. This ranks up toward the top of 'best iPhone features most people don't know about.'
Perhaps your only concern is, understandably, keeping him out of office. Fine. But to defeat something, you must understand it. And treating this quite plausible political threat as a kind of strange alien which does not so much befriend as contaminate our loved ones, and which can have no other explanation than as a manifestation of our most base intolerance and bigotry, probably isn’t quite “steel-manning” the opposition.
Why has such child’s play become so politically mainstream? The answer perhaps lies in the second reason: social media. Politicians are the nervous hostages of voters, who at present are the nervous hostages of malicious algorithms designed to cultivate self-assurance and righteousness with artistic precision.
OpenAI is also using the bigger version of Strawberry to generate data for training Orion, said a person with knowledge of the situation. That kind of AI-generated data is known as “synthetic.” It means that Strawberry could help OpenAI overcome limitations on obtaining enough high-quality data to train new models from real-world data such as text or images pulled from the internet.
Using AI to create data on which to train ever-larger models of AI.
Huh.
Well, now that I know this, yeah, of course this is the next step. The whole of the internet is not nearly large enough (nor does most of it quialify as “high quality data”) to train the ever-larger models.
As the summer stretches on, I’m more in line with Gary Marcus than I’ve ever been. The anxiety I have over artificial general intelligence (AGI) — defined by ChatGPT as “a type of artificial intelligence that has the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to or exceeding that of a human being” — is waning, at least temporarily. I don’t see the path for LLMs in their current iteration to become AGI, at least not in-and-of themselves.
But will LLMs be enough to fool many, many people into thinking that they are sentient? Of course. They’ve long passed that threshold. And that’s remarkably dangerous in a populace with little to no understanding of how computers work.
There’s a short-sightedness of the AI optimists that willfully ignores just how incomprehensible this stuff is to non-tech people — the people I engage with every day, often within some form of tech support. Most everyone has no clue what AI or LLMs are, let alone how they work.
Sure, those optimists would say, but most people have no clue how a tractor works, or an alarm system or a steel mill or an elevator, either.
And while that’s true, none of those things are designed to present as human, and therein lies the danger. When computers can present as human beings convincingly enough to fool other human beings — and other computers! — we are in trouble.
We will adapt. Humans adapt. But this doesn’t condone recklessly incorporating AI into our lives in ever-more complext ways without being sure the general population understands how it works.
What (still) keeps me up at night is not the emergence of AGI, it is the disruption that regular ol’ AI will have on our lives. Just look at the release of the ‘Reimagine’ feature on the new Google Pixel 9 phones. John is correct to point out that “this technology becoming ubiquitous feels inevitable,” but does it have to be? I’m not saying that it isn’t inevitable, I’m saying why isn’t there more of a conversation around these things?
Here I am, bemoaning the loss of the old ways in the face of an inevitable future. Sure. But at any juncture, humans have the ability to question the ethical implications of new technology and to not be held prisoner by its "inevitability."
Right?
To use an example the AI industry itself so often uses: nuclear weapons! We’ve seemed to reach consensus as a species that using them is too dangerous…after we tried them out…and used them on other humans twice…and keep them around as deterrent…for the last 80 years. (That's a lot of caveats!) And nukes, unlike AI, were not given to the masses.
While I’m privy to simmering conversations of how AI will change our lives, the nuances of the subject are nowhere near mainstream. And until it is, I’m unsure of how ethical it is to deploy this technology.
And now we’ve arrived at the very obvious: of course we’re going to release this technology upon the masses, consequences be damned. This is the very story of humanity! This is how progress and innovation happen.
Up until now, most people would argue this ‘progress’ has been a net positive. I have my doubts.
But my doubts aside, let’s presume that technological progress has been a net good for us all. Who’s to say there’s not some tipping point, some innovation that frays the fabric of society, that hot-wires our neurology so thoroughly that we can’t help but trigger a collapse? Things can be good…until they aren't. And to assume progress will always tend toward benefit is just as delusional, just as grounded in confirmation bias, as infinite economic growth.
When we won’t be able to agree on the veracity of a photo, of anything printed, of what we saw in a video, what then? When a shared truth can no longer be shared, then what? When we cannot agree on anything, how do we progress as a species?
I'm either a cynic or an optimist — I do not believe any future is inevitable.
Companies have always had to deal with choice and customization versus the complexity that comes with it. In many businesses, including food and grocery, the 80/20 rule applied. You’d get 80 percent of your business from 20 percent of the product line, but it was still worth giving customers more choice to hang on to as many of them as possible. But we know that too much choice can be paralyzing.
Simplification is generally the privilege of privately held companies that do not have to answer to Wall Street’s quarterly earnings demands and, like Patagonia, are free to pursue goals beyond profits, such as sustainability.
These days, there are vanishingly few companies from whom I can make a purchase and know I won't be disappointed, regardless of price/cost: Mack Weldon, REI, Patagonia, Anker, Eve, and Apple. That kind of brand loyalty is hard-earned, rare, and impossible to put a price on.
Though some of these are public, I find my preference tends toward products sold by companies that are privately held, free from Wall Street's infinite-growth-at-all-costs demands. This often comes at a higher price, yes, but the products are of better quality and usually last substantially longer.
Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place.
…the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.
No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?
My AI anxiety is high this week, as I’ve been following the release of the Pixel 9. Embarrassingly, I have extended family (that I rarely see) that work not just for Google, but specifically in Pixel marketing.
What the hell are they thinking?
Say what you will about Apple Intelligence, the new set of AI features due to be released on iPhones, iPads and Macs in the fall, but it doesn’t do anything like this by design. In fairness, I’m unsure Apple has the compute power (they want to do much of their AI on-device, whereas Google does theirs in the cloud) to do this kind of thing, but I’m almost certain they wouldn’t want to if they could.
Google is being extraordinarily reckless here. The lack of guardrails around this technology speaks volumes, and their terms of service is typical corporate legalese bullshit that avoids any and all responsibility for how this feature will be used.
Famously, Google’s corporate motto was once “don’t be evil,” but somehow that’s become “don’t blame us.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to end his troubled independent presidential campaign this week, according to three people briefed on his plans, and is in talks to throw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump.
Three of the people briefed on Mr. Kennedy’s plans emphasized that nothing was final, and that the iconoclastic Mr. Kennedy could still change his mind, but said that plans were in the works for him to appear alongside Mr. Trump on Friday. Some people close to Mr. Kennedy were still arguing against an endorsement, according to two of the people.
Biden dropping out of the race changed my personal calculations. Not being a straight-ticket voter, between Trump, Biden, and RFK, my choice was RFK. Trump is deranged, Biden is unfit for four more years, and RFK was the only candidate talking about the role of corporate profit in our politics.
But given his position on corporate control of our politics, that he’s even considering a Trump endorsement at this stage is unconscionable.
And while I’m still a bit unsure about Kamala, I’m way more comfortable with her than I am Trump or RFK. Hell, I don’t have to preface every comment about her with “I don’t agree with everything she says, but…”
But that’s more of a commentary on public sentiment than anything else, and I’ve long been wary of public sentiment.
I’ll work out my thoughts on Kamala another time, though it’s clear that my problems with Kamala aren’t with her at all, but with the Democratic Party. If they hadn’t spent the Trump era reacting to Trump by swinging out wide to appeal to the Nonsense Left (of which, don’t forget, I was a member!), desperate to make Kamala’s centrist, moderate record as a prosecutor seem like a negative, I wouldn’t feel so much whiplash around her nomination.
This is why I’m so uneasy about the Democrats: there’s a profound lack of reckoning with their own decisions. For years, I’ve heard how Hillary wasn’t elected because Americans hate women, but almost nothing about how she A) insulted half the electorate, B) refused to travel to certain key swing states, C) carried a profound sense of entitlement that her time had come, and D) was the obvious corporate candidate. (Though Trump turned out to be one, too, as they almost all do.) Rather than reckon with some of their own irrational decisions on covid, George Floyd, even Trump himself, most Democrats exclaim how stupid, hateful, and ignorant Trump voters must be to present any criticism of the Left at all.
Believe me, that’s a very tempting, addictive narrative. But it’s too easy. There’s zero introspection involved, and that is always dangerous.
The panic of the Trump era gripped us all — Right, Left, and everyone else — in different ways, but the Democratic Party suffered acutely. Any criticism of the party line and suddenly you were tantamount to a fascist.
And while I believe that the Left’s heart is in the right place, we cannot abandon logic and reason when we get scared. As a country, we’ve made this mistake too many times — Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
It’s the reticence of the Democrats to grapple with their own fear that I find unsettling. That fear motivated them to insist that Joe Biden was fit for another term.
“He’s wearing clothes!” they’d shout of their emperor, furious if you said otherwise.
That same fear has motivated them to turn on a dime to Kamala. Her narrative changed from ‘ineffectual’ to ‘savior’ overnight.
Let’s be honest: she’s neither of these things. But the way the Democrats have treated her in the last month has me deeply unsettled by the sentiments and excitations of the party.
The Republicans have scared me for a while now, but the Democrats, in their inability to introspect, are dutifully following along behind.
