Stop merely predicting a shorter workweek and make happen.

Joanne Lipman, Sorry, A.I. Is Not Giving Us a Four-Day Workweek, NYTimes, July 6, 2027.

Some of the brightest minds in business believe that artificial intelligence will spell the end of the 40-hour workweek. The financier Steve Cohen has said we will work four days per week soon, while Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, predicts it will be three. Bill Gates foresees a two-day workweek within a decade, and Elon Musk says work will ultimately become optional altogether, akin to a hobby, like “playing sports or a video game.”

Don’t count on it.

The truth is, any one of these executives could have shortened the workweek years ago, long before A.I.

Studies have proved that a four-day workweek with the same pay is not only possible, but superior. A 2015 trial in Iceland was so successful — productivity remained the same or better, while employee satisfaction soared — that it has since expanded throughout the country. A 2022 study in Britain involving 61 companies and almost 3,000 employees found that revenue increased, while employee stress and burnout plunged. Experiments in New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Brazil have also been home runs.

Americans overwhelmingly favor a four-day workweek, too. Yet it has largely been a non-starter here. In my four-plus decades as a journalist and editor, I’ve written and assigned multiple articles about workplace trends. Almost every expert prediction on the demise of the five-day workweek has been wrong.

Why? Because we consistently underestimate executives’ ferocious attachment to face time. [...]

Moreover:

Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners.

A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload.

It sounds like these folks are committed to long hours for (pseudo)moral reasons but can't bring themselves to admit it.

Notably, while the chorus of leaders predicting a shorter workweek continues to grow, most are vague about when that change might happen. None of them appear to be setting things in motion now. Admittedly, a wholesale shift to a shorter workweek would be highly complex for large companies — and far more so for a society that’s built around the five-day cadence, encompassing everything from school hours to infrastructure projects.

A shorter workweek would also require a significant shift in America’s workaholic culture, which views busyness as a status symbol. [...] There’s a reason that one of the most quoted lines from “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is the workaholic editor Miranda Priestly cooing, “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”

Exactly. Homo economicus strikes again.

Return to a table top at Turning Point

Once more into the breech: The problem with the humanities (not quite)

That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:

I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

There was never an official  “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.

As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.

But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”

Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.

What can we learn from Nordic happiness?

Nicholas Kristof, What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness, NYTimes, July 4, 2026.

You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.

“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.” Image

Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.

Yet the Nordic countries are themselves facing significant challenges, including fiscal pressures, immigration, widening inequality and perhaps some breakdown in the social consensus. Some doubt whether the model can survive here, let alone be exported to countries that are larger, less homogeneous and more suspicious of taxation.

On the other hand, it’s not an alien model but, for Americans, a path we once blazed. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told me that the United States and Scandinavian nations pursued similar policies from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was the period when the United States rapidly expanded educational opportunities, had strong unions and, in the 1940s, experimented with universal child care. The post-World War II period is sometimes thought of as a golden age, for the economic pie both grew and was sliced more equally.

“The U.S. in the mid-20th century was sort of like Scandinavia today,” Katz said. But America changed course in the 1970s and eventually embraced the Reagan revolution.

One reason for the retreat, I’ve argued, was racialized political rhetoric that characterized some safety-net programs and investments in opportunity — used by Americans from all walks of life — as handouts primarily benefiting Black people, with a particular emphasis on caricatures of the “welfare queen.”

Three misunderstandings:

When Americans discuss the Nordic system, they sometimes suffer from three misunderstandings.

The first is that these are socialist countries. While they are often run by social democrats, they have market economies. Sweden did experiment in the 1970s and ’80s with quasi-socialist policies, but the upshot was an economic crisis. As Johan Norberg, a Swedish writer, put it: “We have been socialists and we’ve been successful — but never at the same time.”

The second misunderstanding is that because of their strong welfare systems, citizens of Nordic countries lie around while collecting benefits. Sure, some people do manipulate the system, but the labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the United States.

The third is that in the case of Norway, its success is mostly a reflection of its oil wealth. Oil has given Norway a nice cushion, but the country has also managed the cushion unusually well — putting it in what is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Moreover, according to Geir Axelsen, the director-general of Statistics Norway, the increase in female labor force participation in Norway since the early 1970s appears to have added roughly as much to the country’s gross domestic product as oil has.

How it came about:

To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling.

That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by.

Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries.

There's more at the link.

Fireboats spraying their way up the Hudson River

AI is in the market for philosophers

Benjamin Wallace, The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors, NYTimes, July 5, 2026.

After a capsule presentation of the intellectual itinerary of Robert Long, who teamed up with a colleague to start Eleos AI Research, which presumably provides philosophy to the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem, Wallace tells us this:

But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

“I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now,” said David Chalmers, a philosophy professor at N.Y.U.Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

“When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” says Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.”

This makes sense to me though, to the extent that Chalmers is representative of the kind of philosophy these folks bring to the AI table, I am less than enthusiastic about the move. But, sure, philosophy, something like it, is badly needed.

“Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year. “I think we’re going to need that to help navigate society to that next step, because I think A.G.I. and artificial superintelligence are going to change humanity and the human condition.” Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

DeepMind’s staff cogitators have specialties ranging from moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of science to the ethics of genomics and A.I. ethics and animal cognition. [Geoff Keeling, whose Ph.D. focused on “The Ethics of Automated Vehicles,” has spent part of his time at DeepMind running “moral imagination” workshops, helping engineering and product teams to think through the ethical implications of their work, and then come up with “concrete actionable steps they can actually take, whether that’s doing more user experience research or implementing a feature in a particular way.”]

Anthropic’s salary-drawing thinkers are trained in everything from decision theory to ethics to philosophy of mind to epistemology.

Anthropic had Amanda Askell draft a constitution for Claude:

In Anthropic’s early years, a lot of what Ms. Askell did was technical, running machine-learning experiments. “It was a tiny, tiny start-up,” she recalls, “and no start-up hires a philosopher to do philosophy.” Only after Anthropic was much larger was she able to spend more time applying her philosophical expertise. The first version of Claude’s constitution took a principles-based approach, incorporating precepts and guidelines from documents such as the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s Terms of Service. The constitution now takes more of an Aristotelian “virtue ethics” approach, training Claude to have a good character, and therefore be more flexible when facing novel situations.

There's much more at the link.

Pope Leo and St. Augustine discuss the mind and A.I. with Kurt Gödel

I crafted the prompt and Claude drafted the dialog using a passage about memory from Augustine’s Confessions as the catalyst for the imaginary conversation. I asked for some changes, Claude made some suggestions, and I executed them.

Note this passage toward the end:

Gödel said, “Disordered love?”

“Yes. To love a lower thing as though it were higher. To love one’s own power more than truth. To love the image more than the living being. To love the tower more than the city.”

The reply is by Augustine and it amounts to a definition of idolatry. The tower, presumably, is the Tower of Babel.

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the full dialog and asked from an image based on the passage from Augustine’s Confessions. That began an iterative process resulting in the image immediately below. The dialog follows.

I want you to create an imaginary conversation between St. Augustine, Kurt Gödel, and Pope Leo XIV. It should take place in Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the men introduce themselves – assume Augustine can understand and speak English, and perhaps wonder a bit how they became gathered together, Pope Leo leads off, saying that, while working on his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of his colleagues pointed out a passage in Augustine’s Confessions (to follow) that resonated with Gödel’s proof of incompleteness. Given the role that arithmetic plays in Gödel’s proof we should note that Augustine wouldn’t have known about arithmetic. Nor, for that matter, would he have known about computers. He is likely to have known about sophisticated mechanical devices like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Sphere of Archimedes, but never have seen one. But he would have seen complex water clocks (clepsydrae).

Here’s the passage from the Confessions (Book Ten, Chapter VIII). Perhaps Leo reads it aloud.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?

A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.

Perhaps sometime late in the conversation Albert Einstein might drop in to see what they were talking about.

Here is a first pass. I’ve kept it staged, conversational, and conceptually explicit, with Einstein entering late as a useful destabilizer.

The Mind Too Narrow to Contain Itself A conversation in Kurt Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study

Gödel’s office was narrow, orderly, and dim. Books stood in ranks along the wall, interrupted by folders, loose papers, and a blackboard covered with marks whose austerity made them seem less written than engraved. Outside the window the trees of Princeton trembled slightly in the wind. The afternoon light had the washed patience of late autumn.

Kurt Gödel stood beside his desk, thin and formal, dressed in a dark suit. He had the air of a man who had been expecting visitors and yet was not at all reassured by their arrival.

The first visitor was an African bishop in ancient dress, compact and alert, his face alive with inquiry. He looked about the room with frank astonishment, then settled his gaze on the blackboard.

The second was an elderly man in white, gentle but grave, wearing a small pectoral cross. His eyes moved from Augustine to Gödel and then to the papers on the desk.

“I believe,” the man in white said, “that introductions are in order.”

Gödel inclined his head. “Kurt Gödel. Institute for Advanced Study.”

The bishop smiled faintly. “A place for contemplation?”

“For research,” said Gödel.

“Then it may be the same thing, if rightly ordered. I am Augustine, bishop of Hippo.”

Gödel blinked once. “Yes. I had inferred as much.”

The man in white bowed slightly. “And I am Leo, servant of the servants of God.”

Augustine turned to him. “Bishop of Rome?”

“Yes.”

Augustine’s face softened. “Then I greet you as a brother, though I confess I do not understand how we have been gathered. This room is strange to me. These lamps burn without flame. These marks”—he gestured toward Gödel’s symbols—“are neither Greek nor Latin, though I suspect they are meant to compel the mind.”

“They are logical formulae,” Gödel said.

“Ah,” said Augustine. “Then they are meant not merely to persuade, but to bind.”

Leo smiled. “That is well put.”

Gödel gestured toward the chairs. “Please.”

They sat. Augustine examined the chair before trusting his weight to it. Leo remained composed, as though papal audiences in the offices of dead mathematicians were not wholly outside the bounds of pastoral duty.

Leo opened a folder.

“Professor Gödel, Saint Augustine, I will explain why I wished for this conversation, though the means by which it has been granted are beyond my competence. While I was working on my recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of my colleagues pointed out a passage from Augustine’s Confessions. It seemed to him to resonate with your incompleteness theorem.”

Gödel looked sharply interested.

Augustine looked from one to the other. “Incompleteness?”

“A result in mathematical logic,” said Gödel. “Roughly speaking, in any sufficiently strong formal system capable of expressing arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proven within that system, assuming the system is consistent.”

Augustine was silent for a moment.

“You say: a structure of reasoning may contain truths that it cannot reach by its own lawful motions?”

Gödel’s expression altered, almost imperceptibly. “That is not an inaccurate first formulation.”

“But I must be careful,” Augustine continued. “You speak of arithmetic. I know number, of course. I know that three is not five, and that if two men enter a room where two already sit, there are four. I know arithmetic as number, measure, and reckoning. But you seem to speak of arithmetic as though it were also a mirror in which reasoning may behold its own form. That I do not know.”

Gödel nodded. “Exactly. The novelty is not number alone, but the coding of statements, proofs, and rules as numbers. Nor would you know the modern notion of a formal system: axioms, rules of inference, recursive procedures, symbolic codings of syntax.”

“I know rules,” said Augustine. “And I know the temptation to mistake the rule for the truth it serves.”

Tall ships on the Hudson River, July 4, 2026

Four Propositions about Intelligence in Animals, Humans, and AIs

Some quickies.

1. Intelligence cannot be reduced to computation

All animal perception and cogitation take place in a complex world where animals have finite resources. Therefore the principles of intelligence, as an aspect of perception and cogitation, cannot be reduced to the principles of computation as the principles of computation assume unbounded resources.

Let’s call this Yevick’s First Law, as it is a consequence of her 1975 paper, “Holographic or fourier logic” (Pattern Recognition, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 197-213).

David Hays and I formulated what we called “Yevick’s Law” in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence” (Journal of Social and Biological Structures). Let’s call that Yevick’s Second Law:

The world consists of geometrically simple and geometrically complex objects. Simple objects are best computing with sequential logic (aka symbolic systems). Complex objects are best computed with holographic logic (aka distributed neural nets). Some objects are such that they require the interaction of both computational regimes. Let us say that fluency in that interaction is intelligence. (See my working paper, What Miriam Yevick Saw: The Nature of Intelligence and the Prospects for A.I., A Dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 2025).

2. Intelligence in animals

Let us consider a relatively simple animal, a vertebrate, likely a marine animal. One the one hand, it must navigate the world, moving from place to place. This is mediated by the hippocampus, which is a so-called “cognitive map.” This is basic sequential cogitation.

As it moves from place to place it senses things, good things, bad things, other things. Olfaction is perhaps the most basic sense. For what it is worth, it’s the sensory mode that the late Walter Freeman used in his investigations of complex neural dynamics. Olfaction works via a holographic or gestalt process.

Taken together, moving about the world and sense things involves the two modes specified above.

Now let’s consider vision in vertebrates, where the eye is mobile and scans the world. Visual identification is a holographic process. However, the (human) eye scans the scene rapidly and unconsciously. This is a sequential process. Therefore vertebrate vision involves the two modes internally. (I suspect that vision in invertebrates does not, but I don’t actually know).

3. Natural language is its own metalanguage

Humans differ from animals in many and various ways. It is the capacity for language that has allowed humans to move into a different relationship with the world from that characteristic of animals. What makes human language particularly powerful is that it can serve as its own metalanguage, Roman Jakobson’s metalingual function.

This does not involve any deep mystery or logical conundrum. Rather it is a direct consequence of that fact that natural language is physically embodied, initially in sound and gesture, later as written symbols. This embodied is a sensory object out there in the world among all the other sensory objects.

Initially the metalingual function operates in direct, perhaps superficial, but useful ways. Think of how we refer to language as a means of negotiating conversation: “What did you say? I didn’t hear you?” But the metalingual function can be used to define new terms, something that interested my teacher and colleague, David Hays. It can even be used to define other, more restricted languages (e.g. chess and arithmetic), and serve as metalanguages for them.

Thus it is the foundation of the succession of cognitive ranks that David Hays and I began investigating in the 1990s starting with our paper, “The Evolution of Cognition” (Journal of Social and Biological Systems, later becoming the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems). That process has, in time, led to the development of digital computers and, now, to so-called artificial intelligence.

That leads us to our fourth and last note.

4. The last frontier of intelligence

Is not an autonomous artificial system of some kind, though such systems are important and will be increasingly so. here’s the upshot of a conversation I recently had with Claude:

If that's right, then the last frontier isn't more capability in the pattern-matching sense — bigger weight spaces, richer latent connections, better approximations of the associative regime. It's the specific, non-scalable, non-parallelizable fact of an individual mind's biography, which generates paths through possibility space that are real, productive, and genuinely inaccessible to any system that hasn't lived a life.

You should read the whole post to see the logic behind that conclusion.

Note that that is my current best response to the idea of super-intelligence or artificial-superintelligence (ASI). I do not see the future bringing us as AI system that outthinks humans in every way and either creates a world in which we are coddled pets or one in which we are slaves, if we are allowed to exist at all. Those ideas are subjective fantasy.

I note as well that the process that brings us to that point or, if you will, through which we arrive at the point, will be one in which we have a much deeper understanding of that brain and its processes than we now have. For what it’s worth, that understanding is what I have been seeking all these years, starting with my initial investigation of “Kubla Khan”: Xanadu, GPT, and Beyond: An adventure of the mind.

Patriotic skies over the Hudson

My action at Academia.edu over the last 6 months

Has been pretty interesting. Look at these charts, for January 2026 through June, in order from top to bottom:

January is pretty even, with a peak just below 50 near the end of the month. February shows a steady rise through the month, topping out just over 60 at the end of the month. March tops out just over 70 at the beginning of the month then takes a wild ride though the middle finally evening out a bit at the end of the month, with two peaks just above 60 and on just below. April has its ups and downs but on the whole seems pretty steady, with values between just above 20 to just above 60; 40 seems to be the middle value. May shows a definite downward trend, with a high of about 55 about a week in and then dropping through the end. And then we have June, which starts out low rises to 60 in four days, hangs in there a bit and then starts dropping down until the last day (June 30) it has a steep rise until well above 90. Then an apparent steep drop to July 1, though that’s an illusion. I took that last screen shot very early in the day.

I have no idea what that steep rise is about. My guess is someone somewhere put out notice about me – email, social media, website, who knows? – others picked up on it and came by. The question is: what’s next. It’s now early in the morning on July 4 (7:30) and here’s what we’ve got:

We’ve dropped way down, down to the region where things were for the middle through June 29. Note though, that we’re well above 15, which is pretty high for this time of day. Still, I don’t expect a steep rise through July. Beyond that, who knows?

Overhead light, again

The South Dakota Symphony and the Lakota Music Project

Joseph Horowitz, At 250, Has America Delivered on Its Classical Music Promise? NYTimes, July 4, 2026.

The article is a general review of classical music in America starting with Henry Lee Higginson and the Boston Symphony. It's interesting throughout, but I want to present a single excerpt, from the end.

In the Midwest, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (for which, full disclosure, I serve as scholar in residence) likewise fulfills the credo pronounced long ago by Theodore Thomas when he crusaded for symphonic music across the United States: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.”

In fact, the concert orchestra, to a remarkable degree, proved an American invention — a civic hub comparable to the opera house abroad. The South Dakota Symphony enjoys a music director, Delta David Gier, who moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago and has raised a family there. Gier has at all times insisted that an orchestra aspire to serve a specific community in specific ways. His signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which binds the orchestra to Native American reservations throughout the state. Beyond that, all the proposals now controversial in Boston, including thematic festivals and “affinity programing,” have already been implemented in Sioux Falls.

Do the South Dakota Symphony musicians, in Eagle Hawk’s words, “feel it”? The orchestra maintains a nine-member, full-time core consisting of a string quartet and wind quintet, both self-governing. They perform more than 100 times per season. At the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservations, they play with Lakota drummers and singers, and mentor young musical aspirants. The remainder of the orchestra’s members, many of whom come from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are self-selecting: They do not trek to Sioux Falls for the income, but are enticed by the repertoire, which is brave, and the vibe, which is exhilarating.

The history of the Lakota Music Project tracks the South Dakota Symphony’s larger trajectory. It is an exercise in building trust and mutual understanding. Early on, the symphony members and the Porcupine Singers would play for each other. Personal and musical relationships evolved. Then there were fledgling attempts to make music together. The most recent Lakota Music Project tour, last October, premiered two compositions: one by Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s extraordinary principal oboist, and one by Bermel, with whom I conferred about those Met Opera broadcasts. The performers included symphony musicians alongside Pine Ridge’s Creekside Singers and the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa.

In both pieces, elements of Native American and Western classical music merged triumphantly. Bermel has recast his composition to include the entire South Dakota Symphony; it premieres in November as part of a two-week festival considering “Native American inspirations” in classical music, beginning with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (accompanied by visuals exploring his indebtedness to Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”). Given the intellectual heft of this exercise, tracking the “Indianist” movement Dvorak inspired and its more recent aftermath, the festival will reach beyond the concert hall not only to local high schools, but to classrooms and concerts at four universities in four South Dakota cities.

Overhead light

This is no way to develop advanced A.I. [Remember the bomb?]

Dan Rockmore, We Didn’t Build the Atomic Bomb This Way, NYTimes, July 3, 2026.

Artificial intelligence, funded overwhelmingly by private capital, has careened forward despite immense concerns about the effects it will have on labor, education, science, defense and civic life. A.I. companies have outpaced public oversight and, at times, successfully lobbied against it. The central achievements of the industry, the proprietary “frontier models” developed by companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, are guarded intellectual properties even as they are incorporated into schools, offices, hospitals, courts, commerce and our everyday devices. The public did not ask for these A.I. tools and now can hardly opt out of them.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing the impacts that may be coming. But the scale of the concerns requires ambitious responses that serve the public. The United States can start by building a national A.I. laboratory.

Think about the atomic age. The early work in the United States was carried out across a classified but federally accountable archipelago with national laboratories in four sites: Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Hanford and, most famously, Los Alamos. They were expensive and sometimes secretive, but connected to universities as well as the rest of our nation’s research apparatus.

From its inception, the nuclear enterprise was regulated, imperfectly but deliberately, by the federal government. [...] Research in applied nuclear physics continues apace both in the open and in secret.

Imagine if, instead of a national effort to make an atomic bomb, a small number of private companies had gotten there first and began selling powerful nuclear technologies back to the nation, with the government trying to catch up afterward. Would we have accepted that arrangement? Would we have said that because innovation was fast, regulation should wait? Would we have trusted a few executives and technologists to decide what the public needed to know?

The analogy is imperfect — A.I. is not a bomb and we’re not fighting a world war. But like all technologies, it can be exploited for dark purposes. Yet the United States apparently has no public institution capable of building, testing and understanding frontier A.I. at the same scale as the companies that now define it.

A federal A.I. lab could change this by ensuring that the American public has at least one institution that can build, see and test the most advanced A.I. systems in the public interest. Such a lab should be built by, and provide controlled access for, university researchers, and it would be a training ground for our next generation of A.I. architects. It could publish research openly where possible, while classifying work only where necessary. It could study risks without needing to protect a new product launch. It could build models for science, education, medicine and national security — not as corporate afterthoughts, but as public missions that aren’t subverted by investor concerns.

The article goes on from there.