When Betty Friedan called attention in the 1960s to the lack of women’s rights, she described it as “the problem that has no name.” In a similar way, there isn’t a good term for the bundle of pathologies that have afflicted working-class Americans like Bill.
My “How America Heals” series has explored how to overcome these afflictions, which include stagnant incomes, addiction, homelessness, suicide, chronic pain, loneliness and early death. We still don’t fully understand how they are correlated or why most of them affect men more than women. I do believe that, as with Friedan’s probing of gender inequity, our explorations of these problems will help us chip away at them. That’s the reason for this series: A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.
“A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.”
If there’s any one sentence than could sum up my feelings about America, it is this one.
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
What an interesting idea. (And what a nerd.) I’m in.
ps. Listen to Vulfpeck. They’re great.
I woke up this morning having had very little restful sleep last night. I can't pinpoint why beyond a lingering anxiety about the future.
Are we really about to face another Biden-Trump election? What the hell is wrong with this country? Yes, I'm horrified that Trump is running and somehow gaining in popularity, particularly among the young, but I'm beyond angry that the Democratic party — a private organization, remember — has somehow anointed Biden for another run. I don't give a shit how effective he's been (and I think he's been a decent president), he is too old to run. He might be mentally present, but he appears like a doddering old man. In relief, Trump looks downright virile. What do the Democrats think is going to happen in November?
Just a few days ago, there's a woman (though to call her such feels generous) walking down the aisle of the grocery store in her mid- to late-20s, purple hair, in a full-body cow onesie, complete with tail. She's pushing a cart while talking a little too loudly to her friend, clearly desperate for the attention of passers-by. What type of person is this? I don't know her or anyone like her, and yet there she was, in real life. And in a small town, no less.
Contrast that with some of the gun-totin', bible-lovin', lifted-truck, fuck-all-taxes conservatives I'm surrounded by. What fantasy world do they live in? That without government, without pesky taxes and laws, they'd ride around in their gas guzzlers and, what? Survive off the land? Bullshit. These cowboys are just as delusional as Cow Girl, they're just far more common.
I try not to use the word 'hate' too often, but gosh, some days I get a little too close to hating people. It's a terrible place to be — corrosive, insular, and a delusion of its own. But I no longer know my place in this country. I go to Portland and I feel horribly out of place. I come out to the rural spaces and I feel more at home, but surrounded by people who are struggling and suffering, all while pretending they aren't, afraid to be vulnerable. They’re all — country folk _and_ city folk — propping up these insane delusions, the biggest being the most dangerous: that we can't trust other people.
This country is such a mindfuck, and the ever-increasing pace of technological development is making things exponentially worse. The anxiety we all feel from no longer having a tomorrow we can reasonably understand cannot be overstated. I often think of my grandparents, of how in their lifetimes, they had what all humans have had thus far: some certainty that tomorrow will be like today. Of course there were exceptions, but these days, with AI and social media, even knowing what is true and real can't be taken for granted, let alone what tomorrow might bring.
How will we survive this? In my circles — my hometown, the small town where I now live, some of the surrounding rural areas — talk of civil war isn't out of the question. Sure, the talk of one has died down since the fever pitch of 2020, but it hasn't gone away. In some way, I understand it: while most people haven't a clue what war looks like, there is some purpose to be found in a potential conflict. I was never more certain of my purpose than when I was living in Palestinian refugee camps, and if we've gotten to a point in this country where the Right and Left feel that each is an existential threat to the country? Well, then defending your way of life is a hell of a purpose. This should not be underestimated.
Some days, this all leaves me feeling helpless. Tiny and helpless.
Apple’s positive effect on my life should not be underestimated. My Mom once (lovingly, teasingly) said to me that my alternate career, had all this never happened, was “criminal genius.” Which might have been fun too, but possibly more stressful than I might have liked. At any rate, Apple has saved me from a life of crime, and I should love Apple for that.
But I need to remember, now and again, that Apple is a corporation, and corporations aren’t people, and they can’t love you back. You wouldn’t love GE or Exxon or Comcast — and you shouldn’t love Apple. It’s not an exception to the rule: there are no exceptions.
Emphasis mine.
I have long "loved" Apple. My first Mac came at a very lonely time in life (first year of college). Before then, computers were work, literally: my first job was at the local internet service provider in my small town. I had my own desktop at home where I'd play games, but thoughts about drivers and memory and storage and sound cards were never far from my mind.
With a Mac, that all changed. Apple created this functional computer in a beautifully designed enclosure. The Mac OS X was whimsical and fun in a way Windows never was (and never has been). Most of all, Apple was attentive to detail. Sure, it couldn't do everything a Windows computer did, but it sure did what it could do much more thoughtfully.
I've been in the Apple ecosystem for nearly a two decades. More than half my life. I have few regrets about entrusting the company with my data. Hell, their devices enabled me to have a career while living out of my tent. Apple devices have enabled an unprecedented amount of freedom, and for that, I'm grateful.
I am also an Apple shareholder. I became one shortly after the first iPhone was announced. That investment was, back in 2007, risky and ill-advised. But it has paid off, literally, and again, for that I'm grateful.
But Apple is still a corporation. Their computers are just things. iPhone, as central as it is to my life — to my ability to have the kind of life I live — it merely a thing. An incredibly powerful, almost god-like tool, but still just a thing.
People accuse me of loving Apple. At times, I'm ashamed to say I have. But they are a corporation. Their only loyalty is to profit, to the financial benefit of their shareholders. Corporations do not give a shit about anything other than profit.
Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers. One extreme example showed that “nearly 48,000 different companies were found in the data of a single volunteer.” In total, Facebook data archives showed that 186,892 companies had provided data on all of the study’s participants.
Surveillance capitalism. This should horrify us all.
I struggle to tell people in my life the extent to which they are being tracked. They think Facebook is it, "and what could they know about me?"
People don't realize that thousands of companies feed data to bigger tech companies like Facebook. Property records. Purchase histories. Tax payments. Health records. Online browsing history. Everything. Facebook merely collates all that data.
That this doesn't bother the hell out of people always mystifies me. When did we give up on a reasonable expectation of privacy?
It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.
If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.
He has a point. Definitions — words — matter. I do not think Israel is attempting genocide in Gaza.
But what they are attempting is still egregious. Nine thousand dead children.
These updates aren’t intended to automate audio editing entirely, but to optimize the existing process so that editors have more time to work on other projects. “As Premiere Pro becomes the first choice for more and more professional editors, we’re seeing editors being asked to do a lot more than just cut picture. At some level, most editors have to do some amount of color work, of audio work, even titling and basic effects,” said Paul Saccone, senior director for Adobe Pro Video, to The Verge.
“Sure, there are still specialists you can hand off to depending on the project size, but the more we can enable customers to make this sort of work easier and more intuitive inside Premiere Pro, the more successful they’re going to be in their other creative endeavors.”
Oof. This one’s going to hurt. Most of my audio clients prefer Premiere (I’m a Logic Pro guy) and Adobe is using AI to automate away many of the tasks that take up the bulk of my time.
The endgame is unclear. Reoccupation? Mass emigration? Who can say? Yes, Hamas can be physically destroyed. But support for it has soared since the war began; and I know of no person more committed to revenge than a parent whose child has been murdered. We were right to note how tight-knit Israeli society is, and how deep a trauma October 7 was for so many. Can we even imagine the psychological impact of 9,000 dead children? The Gazans are humans too. Am I being too sentimental in talking about infanticide rather than just civilian deaths? Not when the vulnerable population is so disproportionately young; not when just war theory would demand safety for every single one of them.
This is how it is when wars are launched swiftly, overwhelmingly, and in an understandable spasm of justified rage. Think of the position of Israel on October 8. The true evil of Hamas was exposed; most of the decent world grieved with Israel. Think of the long-term goals the Israelis could have achieved if they had taken a breath, thought deeply and strategically, and acted deliberately, in consort with their recently acquired Arab interlocutors.
Now look: a wasteland of death, a charge of genocide at The Hague, a huge propaganda loss in the wider world, 132 hostages still out of reach, and no coherent idea of what to do the day after, if the day after ever comes.
Andrew Sullivan, doing his damndest to answer my question, "Who do I want to be like when I grow up?"
This war between Gaza and Israel has been brutal. Old personal relationships have resurfaced, only to be ripped away. The subject feels incredibly fraught and tender, full of strange bedfellows and unexpected allegiances. My long-held opinions have been shaken as I watch people who had no interest in the region suddenly espouse strong and often vitriolic opinions of their own. Like anything in America, the Middle East has become a proxy for our culture wars.
A hundred days in, I find myself back where I was immediately after the attacks: Israel cannot call itself "civilized" if it permits the people of Palestine to suffer as it does. Really — what did Israel think would happen after years of an active blockade of Gaza? Sure, Egypt is party to blame, but come on. Let's not bullshit each other.
Over the last hundred days, I've been more persuaded by the principles Zionism than ever before. When I once thought the pluralism of America was proof enough that Israel did not need to exist, I now see that very pluralism threatening to fade away. And in a world with plenty of nations are explicitly and officially Muslim, why not one that is Jewish? Yes.
But this status quo cannot hold. Israel is losing — and perhaps has already lost — any moral high ground it had on October 6th.
To be able to die at peace, a philosopher needs to die to his attachments to the world. This, for Montaigne, is “true solitude,” where one’s thoughts and emotions are reined in and brought under control. “To prepare oneself for death is to prepare oneself for freedom. The one who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave.”
To die to the world is far from straightforward. “People do not recognize the natural sickness of their mind,” says Montaigne, which does nothing but “ferret about in search of something, ceaselessly twisting, elaborating, and entangling itself in its own activity like a silkworm, until it suffocates there like ‘a mouse in pitch.’ ” We rush around in a compulsive flight from death. “Every moment,” he remarks, “it seems I am fleeing from myself.” No matter how many laws or precepts we use to fence the mind in, we still find it “garrulous and dissolute, escaping all constraints.” This flight is chaotic and aimless. There is “no madness or lunacy that cannot be produced in this turmoil. When the soul has no definite goal, it gets lost.”
How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
This resonates with my own experience in academia over the last decade. What was at first a slow drift became a sudden lurch toward the Left on so many cultural issues. Generally, that’s something I support. But with that lurch, all good sense and reason was thrown out the window.
I joined an MFA program where many people thought literature by white men, straight or not, was explicitly ‘less than.’ Where I was called a fascist for not introducing myself with pronouns, a white supremacist for merely editing a paper of a fellow student (yes!), a conservative because I argued that every person, regardless of their color and class and belief, is deserving of compassion.
Nevermind that the program chair — and his successor — were both white men. And really, really nevermind that the program chair was an admitted alcoholic known for his, um, terse and abrasive communication style. Now I’m not one to get on someone for being an asshole — pot, meet kettle — but I’m also not in charge of an academic program. (Some personality traits, believe it or not, should be disqualifying.) The performative outrage and yet complete inaction on issues of race and class is maddening. I was once told, and I’m not kidding here, that I was a “colonial apologist” because I would not give a land acknowledgement at the beginning of an in-person class, nevermind that I am leaving the land I own to the local tribe in my will.
What in the actual fuck.
What pains me most about this stuff is how much of a mockery it all makes of what I consider the most venerated institution in our culture. Academics are defined primarily by their ability to think, to make sense from nonsense, and yet they fully embraced the bullshit.
I’m as guilty as the rest — I fell for it too, at least for a while. I let my natural do-gooder tendencies take me beyond the realm of common sense. I’m both embarrassed by it and not — I really do think that much of this stuff comes from a place of good intentions — but we cannot abandon logic and reason in the name of wanting to do good. And especially not in academia.
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
October 7th will define world events for longer than any of us in America expect, I think. The brutality of that day still escapes most people here. Depending on who I talk with, if they have any knowledge of the Middle East at all, they’re either completely shocked or feel the events of that day were inevitable.
I find myself caught between the two, mortified by the brutality of Hamas and seething with anger at Israel, which has occupies the West Bank and has blockaded Gaza for a generation, then wonders, with almost no introspection or reflection, why most Palestinians hate them so much.
Take it from me: as a gay man in a small town, I know some of my neighbors hate me because of what I am. But I don’t go out of my way to give them more of a reason to. Kill them with kindness, for fuck’s sake. This is the only way, the smartest way. Israel knows better.
Hamas? Well, I’ve long given up on religion — any religion, but particularly Islam — being a net good. People that kill in the name of a made-up god are a dangerous kind of crazy, but those that believe the will go to heaven if they martyr themselves are worse. That kind of thinking, both destructive and self-destructive, needs to be stamped out wherever it’s found.
Barak remembers feeling deeply frustrated when Netanyahu won the tight 2022 election, “not because he won or there had been some change from the previous electoral cycles,” he said, “but because of the typical weakness of the left, unable to see the whole picture and failing to join forces.”
Gilmore Girls looms large in the world of innkeeper-fluencing. “Have you wondered what Lorelai Gilmore actually does for a living?” says Caroline Cardamone, a 20-something innkeeper at a bed-and-breakfast in Wisconsin, in one of the dozens of TikToks she’s posted about picking up breakfast burritos for guests, dusting a lot of doily-adorned wood, and doing laundry. John Lavin, who bought a century-old bed-and-breakfast in Blue Ridge, Georgia, in early COVID and soon started posting about it on TikTok, has been described by followers as “Luke Danes and Lorelai Gilmore rolled into one person.” Lavin says he’s never watched the show, but understands what they’re getting at: “People project this kind of fairy-tale life.”
What concerns me about the audience for this shit is their shared point-of-reference. When our only touchstones are characters from a terrifically uninspiring television show from twenty years ago? When you can make a Gilmore Girls reference and that somehow conveys meaning?
Are we not through the looking glass when media becomes more real than reality?
What kind of memories could I have shared with my loved ones if I had known the difference between what I thought I wanted and what I didn’t want anymore?
I largely don’t feel lonely around my family anymore. In my twenties? Absolutely. In my early thirties? Yes. But now, I’ve come to appreciate my time spent with them, even if I know myself enough to want it in fits and starts.
Reading this piece, I’m struck by the plight of any writer in a relationship. Writing is an attempt to get at some truth, whether I arrive there or not. But how does one maintain relationships with people when doing so?
There are so many things I want to write, but don’t for fear of disrupting my relationships.
I once thought that all truths must be laid bare, the cards left to fall where they may. But now I’m not as sure. ‘Telling it like it is’ can feel both indulgent and crass. It can feel a little too good.
I still feel an insatiable need to write or say what’s real, but it’s tempered with, well, call it what you want: age, experience, cynicism, common sense, defeatism.
But a deep loneliness can reside at the heart of forced civility. What good is it if only our joys are worthy of sharing and not our struggles? Underlying that courteousness is the fear that acceptance remains conditional. We worry that if we reveal who we really are, what we really think and the difficulties we endure, then we might be rejected. No more pumpkin pie from Grandma. But what if something essential is lost when we stop telling the truth?
There is a peculiar desire to think profound thoughts on holidays. Christmas marks the emotional passage of a year, whereas new years is merely the changing of some numbers, so it's tempting to leave behind something of weight and heft. A list, a retrospective.
I have nothing like that to offer.
Merely: This is a strange and wonderful time to be alive, is it not?
Treat it like a checkpoint, rather than a continuation of the discussion. Before you continue the discussion by introducing a new idea, or presenting an opinion, stop, repeat, and confirm. Then you can be sure you’re moving forward on the same page.
Effective and useful, but I’m learning that people who don’t communicate like this do not often appreciate this communication style. Usually, they hate it. They find it pedantic (which it is — by design) and infantilizing. In our culture, we’re taught from a young age to believe that if we don’t know or understand something, we are dumb. People don’t react well when they feel dumb.
Finding people that are open to new communication styles is rare. Finding people willing to critically analyze their communication styles are even rarer.
Cherish the people willing to learn new things about themselves.
Growing up with cats could have a strange effect on your mind, new research suggests. The study, a large review of existing literature, found that cat ownership at a young age was associated with a noticeably higher risk of developing schizophrenia and related disorders—a risk possibly fueled by increased exposure to the cat-hosted parasite Toxoplasma gondii.
Some things are true, and some things feel true. This might be both.
