Ezra Klein and Annie Galvin, The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own, NYTimes, Apr. 10, 2026.

Here's the beginning of the interview:

Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.

Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure.

I want to start with Trump’s now infamous post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What did you think when you saw that?

I was horrified. But it goes beyond that.

It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while — which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.

Not to sound too corny about it, because, of course, we made mistakes, and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different.

After 1945, it said: We’re not going to be another imperial hegemon. We’re not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We’re actually going to try to build them, and we’re going to give them foreign aid.

That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away.

I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.

It just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been so distinctive in its world mission — a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an immigrant — that its leader could threaten to annihilate an entire people.

And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract: “civilization.” What we are talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people. You’re talking about 93 million people.

One thing that has always felt core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels, to me, on a deep level, like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual human lives were just understood as pawns in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests.

I’m not saying that there has not been disrespect or disregard for human life in the postwar era. That would be absurd.

But there was a commitment and a structure of values in which you didn’t threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing.

You see this in DOGE and its approach to U.S.A.I.D. — that there is something about how you treat or don’t treat, how you weigh or don’t weigh, the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machinations and that he just wipes away, as a kind of weakness or liberal piety.

If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.

We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.

You almost miss that because, even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that we were trying to help this country do better, we were trying to help these people do better.

What you are describing, quite accurately, is that Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th century — because sometimes people talk about how he loves McKinley, and he liked tariffs, and he’s like McKinley in that imperialism.

No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th-century European imperialist. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place. There was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal.

As you say, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life and dignity were never at the center of it. It was all a self-interested, short-term, extractive game. And Trump is hearkening back to that.

It’s interesting to ask where he gets it from. Because it really is probably fair to say that nobody else on the American political spectrum, if they were president, would speak like that. I don’t think JD Vance would speak like that. I don’t think Marco Rubio would speak like that.

There’s something that he brings to it — which is a callousness and a contempt for any expression of those values. For him, that’s all a sign of weakness, that’s the kind of [expletive] people say. But the reality is that’s the way he looks at the world.

It goes on from there.

James Soloman, Mayor of Jersey City, speaking at No Kings

Help your local AI pay off its investors

So basically we pay for all of their infrastructure, to the tune of potentially trillions of dollars, and we get a "share" of profits. They know the funding is drying up

— Alex Northrop (@northington764) April 10, 2026

Civil War Among Chimpanzees

Carl Zimmer, These Chimps Began the Bloodiest ‘War’ on Record. No One Knows Why. NYTimes, Apr. 9, 2026.

Near the end:

And the researchers are still trying to figure out what set off the conflict in the first place. “All of a sudden, yesterday’s friend becomes today’s foe,” said Dr. Mitani.

Within any group of chimpanzees, violence will flare from time to time — when apes converge on a tree full of fruit, for example, or when lower-ranked males vie to replace an old alpha male.

But this aggression can be dampened by the friendships that form over years. Some chimpanzees are especially social, jumping between many cliques. “They’re these important social bridges,” Dr. Sandel said.

In 2014, five adult males died, perhaps because of disease. Dr. Sandel speculated that these deaths ripped away some of the bridges that previously held the Ngogo groups together. Low-level conflicts blew up into something akin to civil war.

The Ngogo conflict could offer a glimpse at the kind of violence that might have flared up in our ancient forebears, given that chimpanzees and humans descend from common ancestors that lived about six million years ago.

“These findings tell us indeed that these civil-war-like types of conflicts were possible in the course of human evolution,” said Sylvain Lemoine, a primatologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study.

The Ngogo chimpanzees show how our ancestors could have gotten dragged into years of lethal fighting without ideology or cultural identity — let alone the language to talk about them.

Instead, shifting social bonds might have been enough to light the fire.

There's more at the link.

Friday Fotos: A recent assortment

My Music on New Savanna and 3QD

I’ve got quite a lot about music on New Savanna, including quite a bit about my own music. Here’s posts about my interest in jazz, and here’s posts specifically about how I learned about and learned to play jazz. This post, in particular, is about my earliest jazz, including Louis Armstrong. Groups I've played in.

This is a recent post, about a band I helped form and played in when I was in upstate New York in the mid-1980s. the New African Music Collective (NAMC). We opened for Dizzy Gillespie in 1984.

Here’s three posts about jam sessions with my Hoboken friend, Howard Olah-Reiken.

This is a free jazz workshop I took with the bassist, William Parker.

This post is from roughly the same era as the NAMC post, when I was living in upstate New York in Troy. But it’s about very different music, the Sage City Symphony in Bennington, Vermont (just across the border).

Here’s a post about my favorite venue for listening to live jazz, the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore Maryland. This is a somewhat extended version of that article.

Here’s a post about being in an improvisation workshop led by Frank Foster at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-1970s.

Now we’re back to Baltimore; this is about The Saint Matthew Passion, a rock group I played with from 1969 to ‘71. A formative experience, very.

And here’s the story about The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band, based out of Schenectday, NY.

My association with Charlie Keil. Here we’re marching and jamming in protest against the 2003 war in Irag.

Videos of three tunes performed by a 12/8 path band Charlie Keil assembled: Jamming on “Amazing Grace,” an original we made up in the studio, “Peace Now,”

What I learned playing in marching band in high school. 

NOTE: I also have a YouTube channel. It has a number of solo trumpet (or flugelhorn) videos, three videos of the 12/8 path band, and then a bunch of play lists.

Daffodils and pansies

What place will America have in the world order that’s beginning to emerge?

Steven Erlanger, A Cease-Fire for Now in Iran, but a Blow to American Credibility, NYTimes, Apr. 9, 2026.

Historical analogies are never exact. But with the tenuous cease-fire deal in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, some are asking whether this is a “Suez” moment for the United States, marking the waning of American power and credibility in the world.

The Suez crisis took place in October 1956, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt to force open the Suez Canal. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with an election days away, ordered them to stop. Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain resigned. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt became a hero of anti-colonialism.

Suez became shorthand for the moment that Britain, exhausted from World War II, gave way as a global power to the United States.

There are differences from that time. The Suez Canal is man-made and wholly in Egyptian territory, unlike the international waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. There is no other global power capable of replacing America in the region, let alone ordering President Trump around.

But the two-week cease-fire leaves the Islamic Republic in place and still in command of the future of the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran’s nuclear stockpile and ballistic missile program unresolved. After Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory, however hollow, it is difficult to imagine a resumption of full-scale war. [...]

The impact of a diminished United States is strongest in Europe, which has relied on NATO and the American security guarantee implicit in membership, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But Europeans drew a distinction between faith in America and faith in Mr. Trump. The former remains because it is vital for European security.

Still, Mr. Trump’s policies are inevitably producing a response that will outlast him. The rest of the world is trying to organize itself and derisk from an America that treats its allies as enemies and its traditional enemies, like Russia and China, as friends. [...]

China, which gets so much of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, pushed Iran to agree to the cease-fire, and it is expected to participate in keeping the strait open and guaranteeing safe passage for others.

Much depends on how the war ends, cautioned Mr. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.

If the cease-fire leads to a deal that imposes significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program and its ability to cause trouble, he said, that would be much better in the longer run than a frozen conflict or one that “just burns on month after month,” with all the accompanying impact on the energy market and American allies.

There's more at the link.

Dolphins getting stoned

Scientists Caught Dolphins Doing This for 20 Minut https://t.co/RuQgbsKvK6 via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) April 8, 2026

Which would you prefer, coffee or orange Fanta?

How long can democracy withstand the assault of AI?

Jennifer M. Harris, We Are Witnessing the Rise of a New Aristocracy, NYTimes, Apr. 8, 2026.

Inequality is such a fact of American life that it’s easy to shrug off. But we are in uncharted terrain. The amassed wealth of today’s tech titans makes the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts look quaint. Over the past two years, 19 households have added $1.8 trillion to their coffers, the economist Gabriel Zucman told me — roughly the size of the economy of Australia.

Into this fragile state enters artificial intelligence. It threatens to make a bad situation much worse.

Left on its current course, A.I. could deliver a bleak picture: lower- and middle-income jobs automated away, with top earners remaining unscathed. Income shifting from middle-wage workers doing the bulk of the labor toward those wealthy enough to bankroll the technology. Growth headwinds. Worsening affordability. So, too, a federal government less able to respond, thanks to a shrinking tax base.

For any society in which this much wealth gets concentrated in so few hands, and is then so easily parlayed into political clout, the question becomes one not just of economics but of basic civic standing. At some point soon, we are no longer sharing in self-government. [...]

Those losses on the lower half of the scale are underway. One-quarter of computer programming jobs disappeared in 2023 and 2024. IBM’s chief executive said in 2023 he could “easily see” 30 percent of the company’s back office roles getting replaced by A.I. in the next five years. [...] A Stanford study found that early-career employees in A.I.-exposed fields like customer service have seen a 13 percent drop in employment since 2022 — unlike more experienced workers and those in other sectors.

At the same time, premiums for elite graduates with hefty Rolodexes full of powerful people, and tacit knowledge (like how to generate a laugh at a cocktail party on Park Avenue), aren’t going anywhere. Chatbots are no substitute for people who can call the right people when high-stakes deals go awry.

Meanwhile the investor class, which is very small, is making out like bandits:

What’s worse, much of the trillion-plus-dollar investment in the A.I. boom isn’t happening in the stock market at all — it’s happening in private funds out of reach to all but the wealthiest, most connected among us. In earlier technology-fueled booms, companies like Amazon sold their shares in the public markets. As the value of its shares soared, they enriched Amazon’s early investors, yes, but thousands of employees also benefited, as did millions of other Americans, through pension funds and retirement accounts.

That isn’t the case with A.I. Anthropic and OpenAI, the two best-known A.I. companies, raised over $150 billion, mostly from venture capitalists, private equity firms and foreign sovereign wealth funds — funds mostly inaccessible to the vast majority of investors (let alone ordinary Americans).

With ownership of these firms concentrated in so few hands, any wealth they produce widens the gap between the richest households and everyone else. Also consider the fact that today’s A.I. firms employ far fewer people than established tech companies. OpenAI and Anthropic, which are already operating globally, employ only a few thousand people. Microsoft employs more than 200,000, and Amazon employs 1.5 million. The picture that emerges isn’t of just a deepening of the current divide. The A.I. story is one of more extreme concentration of wealth — at most likely not more than 3 percent of households, the very few who hold ownership in these A.I. companies or in the mostly private firms financing them.

And the inequality just keeps trickling outward:

Well-meaning policymakers often turn to federal spending to prop up our labor markets or address the affordability crisis. But they don’t factor in the tremendous debt load our government is currently servicing nor the negative impact A.I. is poised to have on the government’s coffers.

Because investment income is taxed at lower rates than wages — and because the wealthiest often find ways to defer or avoid those taxes altogether — A.I. will significantly shrink the tax base. Economists estimate that as $1 of value creation shifts from workers to owners, total tax revenue falls on the order of 10 to 15 cents. You don’t need to squint to see the resulting cuts to safety net programs like work-force training and Head Start that low- and middle-income families rely on — cuts that will, in turn, also worsen inequality.

What to do? How about public equity in AI?

Another idea, so far still confined to think tank circles, proposes innovative tax structures to create public equity stakes in large A.I. firms; these stakes could then fund a better safety net or simply put money in workers’ pockets. After all, the “intelligence” in A.I. was ours to begin with. One especially promising fix is to incentivize more firms to convert into worker-owned cooperatives, building on modest federal support passed in 2022. If we put more workers in charge of the firms deciding how to use A.I., the odds climb that they will figure out how to use A.I. so as to increase their own value.

All of these fixes are made harder as the wealthiest parlay their economic clout into political sway.

There's more at the link.

The legacy of string theory, a generation of physicists content to play with math

On the water

Ramble: What I’ve been up to in February and March with the chatbots, the literary mind revealed (maybe)

This is a somewhat different ramble. Normally I ramble on about things I want to work on but can’t quite prioritize them. So I gather them together in one place so I can look at them all, all at once. And then sort things out.

This time I’m looking at what’s been going on in the last two months or so and reminding myself what I’ve been doing with my two interlocutors, ChatGPT and Claude. It’s really quite amazing, and exhausting. I’ve been having them review work I’ve done, starting with having Claude review reports of the experiments I’d done with ChatGPT in 2023 and 2024. I’ve also had both of them look at papers by David Hays, some things we did together and other work I’ve done.

So, for a long time I’ve thought of myself as in the business of investigating arenas of qualitative research and figuring out how to get quantitative research out of them. Literature has been my main arena. Working with both Claude and ChatGPT has advanced me on various fronts. It’s been amazing. The chatbots have been able to work out (some of) the implications of these ideas more rapidly than I could have done, and even pushed into unexpected territory.

Thus I can now begin to think about Rank 5 cognition in a coherent way. It turns out that Miriam Yevick’s 1975 paper on holographic vs. sequential logic is Rank 5. Why? because it takes two different computational regimes as objects of thought, placing them in relation to different informatic environments. Since Hays and I put Yevick’s work at the center of one of our five principles of natural intelligence, does that make that paper Rank 5?

A discussion of my paper about ChatGPT’s inability to generate a semantic network diagram led me to a long discussion about how to train AIs to perform a task like that. That came in the wake of our discussion of virtual reading [File: Notes from Virtual Reading.docx]. This requires explicit instruction comparable to what, for example, Hays gave me when I first learned how to do it. The problem is that there is a normative element involved in learning that the AI cannot pick up simply by reading articles using semantic networks. It actually has to attempt to create such networks and have those attempts critiqued by a human, or, conceivably, someday, another AI. That same discussion led to discussions of learning about sentence diagramming, constituent structures, symbolic logic, semantic networks, and close reading.

Then I had Chatgpt look at my Coleridge work, particularly my paper about “This Lime Tree Power My Prison,” the 2003 rework of my analysis of “Kubla Khan,” and my unpublished working paper indicating how they are two different trajectories through the same mental terrain. The “Lime-Tree Bower” paper has a table indicating how the mapping between agents in the poem and a hypothetical underlying attachment mechanism changes from one section of the poem to the next. ChatGPT suggested how to construct a similar table for “Kubla Khan.” Whether or not that will work out, that’s another matter which I’ll take up in a year or three. If that works out then I’m clear to work out how these two different poems related to the same underlying neural state space (HA!).

We did similar work with Shakespeare’s plays, starting with my analysis of Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. & the Chatster had helpful remarks on the relationship between The Winter’s Tale and Pandosto, from which it is derived. That is, once an explicitly mechanistic framework is established, like I have for “Lime-Tree Bower,” other things fall into place. So the theory goes. Details need to be worked out, but I’m not going to get around to that anytime soon.

And then we have cultural evolution again, which I ChatGPT and I discussed in the Virtual Reading paper. Just as you can conceive of an individual text as a trajectory through the high-dimensional state space of a human mind, so you can conceive of the long-term change in a corpus of texts, such as the 19th century Anglophone novels Matt Jockers has analyzed, that evolution is, in effect, a trajectory through an approximation to a collective mind, the Geist, or spirit, of an age. It all makes sense. Sure, there are lots of details to be worked out. But it is all now possible. We have the technical means.

And almost none of this was on my intellectual agenda for th3e first quarter of this year. It just happened. Not passively. It didn’t happen to me. Rather, it emerged through interaction with ChatGPT and Claude.

More later.

Intensity of Light

Table of Cultural Ranks from August1981, A Five-Fold View

This post consists of a table that David Hays and I drew up in August 1981, nine years before we pubished our basic article on ranks theory: The Evolution of Cognition. That is to say, when we made this, we hadn’t really thought things through. Notice, first of all, that each table has five columns, one for each rank. We were thinking in terms of five ranks. When it came time to publish we couldn’t conceptualize a fifth rank in a way that satisfied us, so we dropped it from our accounts. Through interacting with chatbots I’ve come up with a way of thinking about Rank 5, but I want to set that aside for now.

While I have thought about updating this table with my current thoughts, that would take a lot of work now that I’m working with a much more sophisticated theory. The point of posting this table is siimply to show what a quick sketch looks like. It’s the form of the individual tables that is important, not the specific labels we placed in the cells back in 1981.

Summary by Rank

This table summarizes some, but not all, of the individual tables below. The ranks are columns, from left to right. The entries in the cells indicate what is new at that rank. Those entries are taken from the diagonals in the following tables. Some of the cells contain abbreviations, some of which are obscure. I could expand some, but not all of those abbreviations. 1981 was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.

I’ve colored the rows for material that either or both of us, Hays and me, have more or less covered in one of our publications. The first row became the central argument in our cognitive evolution paper. “PlaceNo” is place notion, for the arithmetic we argued was central to Rank 3. “Code” is computer code, for the computation that is central to Rank 4. By “Network” we probably meant cognitive or semantic networks, which was the notation we used for knowledge representation, as it was known back then. These days it could almost, but not quite, be artificial neural network (ANN).