YouTube:
Adam welcomes pop-up book designer Kelli Anderson to the workshop to learn about her latest book: Alphabet in Motion. Six years in the making, this book is an interactive exploration of the history of typography, and the engineering of its pop-up mechanisms is as elegant and beautiful as the letterforms they illustrate!
A M A Z I N G !!
The technology is coming, but we can't foresee the social and political consequences. Hossenfelder, however, is skeptical about the survival of current democratic systems, which she discusses about 7 minutes into the video. She doesn't think the European welfare system will survive.
Here's the content of a tweet by Séb Krier (you should check out comments to the original):
Yes, I've been saying this for a while now. See for example https://x.com/sebkrier/status/1968753358216302894 and Danzig's work here: https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Machines-Bureaucracies-and-Markets-as-Artificial-Intelligences.pdf
I don't think the predominant narrative of AI as a singular entity, a Sand God, a discrete moment in time, or a 'separate species' (as Tegmark puts it) is correct or helpful. As Danzig argues, AI is indeed "alien," but only in the same way a stock market or the DMV is alien: they are all reductionist, correlative intelligences.
They strip the world of context, reducing reality to standardized inputs like prices or tokens to process information at scales humans cannot. To me at least, this shared "alien" nature normalizes AI as the latest evolution in a lineage of artificial processors we’ve lived with for centuries.
So instead of a unitary being or species, AGI should be understood as a collection of complex systems, models, and products that functions similarly to (and integrates with) existing human macro-systems. An amplifier for the bureaucracies and markets that already govern us, not a discrete 'biological-style' agent. Its governance is a continuous sociopolitical struggle (insert always has been meme) that is shaped by many different forces, not a one-time mathematical proof of safety before a launch.
Relatedly, I feel like the current discourse also has a blind spot for the 'demand' side. We obsess over the supply (R&D, model scaling, 'the AGI') as if these systems are created in a vacuum. I think this is how people end up with scenarios where AGIs are just doing things for their own sake, completely detached from human preferences (who are usually described as 'disempowered').
But they aren't; they are pulled and shaped by downstream demand, cost constraints, and efficiency needs. This economic reality has implications for how the technology develops. See also Drexler's CAIS model (https://owainevans.github.io/pdfs/Reframing_Superintelligence_FHI-TR-2019.pdf) - Drexler anticipated much of this and the core intuitions remain true, even if slightly out of date. You won’t see one omniscient agent, but a proliferation of specialized systems, models of varying sizes, and distinct products rising in parallel because that is what is economically viable.
This is why the AGI governance conversation often feels so confused. If you view AGI as a singular biological entity, you make two mistakes: safetyists project human-like 'intent' where they should be looking at incentives, and policymakers reach for a singular 'FDA' when instead they need to look into different different markets, sectors, products etc.
You can’t have a single regulator or discrete safety rules for 'The Economy' or 'The Bureaucracy,' and you won't be able to have one for 'Intelligence' either. Models still matter of course - none of this means you shouldn't test, evaluate, and understand them better - but I think we overindex on this frame a bit. And as Dean says, none of this is to downplay concerns and risks: but I do think it has implications for how to understand and address them.
"Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify.
Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify."
Sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) November 16, 2025
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are…
At the very least, that’s the right way to think about the problem. Assuming stationarity is problematic for most real-world tasks.
— Masudur Rahman (@masud99r) November 17, 2025
An interesting conversation that refuses to indulge in speculation about the Epstein papers, while noting that Trump seems terrified off them and so is increasingly distracted, and moves from populism through peformativity and on the Marjorie Taylor Green as an odd sort of bell weather.
YouTube:
Robert Wright and Nikita Petrov discuss Trump 2.0, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist theory, Covid, the rise of “inner emigration” as survival strategy, normalized warfare in Russia, the reality-distorting effects of deepfakes, and more—all in light of invoking W. B. Yeats to ask: Are things falling apart?
0:00 Teaser
0:59 What is Bob doing in Qatar?
4:04 "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Why Yeats felt this way
7:37 Peter Thiel's Antichrist theory
9:46 Nikita: COVID was a weird time, and nothing has been the same since
14:57 Why Bob feels things are falling apart
18:28 Were things ever in order?
19:53 "Inner emigration": tuning out the world as self-care
22:38 A reaction to a drone strike: "Loud noises don't wake me up"
25:57 Young people are turning away from social media
27:05 When Spain lost all power and cellular coverage
30:36 War as a "major inconvenience"
34:22 Bob's prediction about Ukraine's future retaliation for Pokrovsk
38:56 Nikita's impressions from Europe
42:07 Nonzero Reading Club THIS SATURDAY: Norbert Wiener's God & Golem, Inc.
47:08 Deepfakes and the future of news
52:04 Russia's first humanoid robot falls down
Note that Wright was born in 1957. At roughly 16:23 he notes that:
I grew I kind of came of age entered adolescence amid the the turmoil of the late 60s and was in fact in San Francisco uh the epicenter of it in the US kind of when I was 12 13 years old. Um and so I don't know I you would think that would kind of have anured me to it. Um, for whatever reason, this seems a lot worse than that did to me, at least at the time. I mean, where the US is, the degree of polarization, nature of the polarization, and so on. Um, but it isn't just that and different people talk about different things when you ask them if things are falling apart. I mean, there is the whole international thing with uh Trump really almost making a point of establishing that the rules just don't apply.
I'm a decade older that Wright and so arguably have lived through more of the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s (though I was not in San Francisco). By the time he was in his teens the war in Vietnam was over, as was the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, but I experienced those, not to mention a steelworkers' strike the shut down the steel industry for four months. I agree with his observation that the current period seems more chaotic than things appeared back then. Is this an illusion of some sort, or are things currently more disordered? I'm not quite sure.
Wright's written a Substack post on this theme: Are Things Falling Apart?
Gavriil tries Tchaikovsky's "At the Church" - "В церкви" Чайковского - Гаврилушка пробует разучивать
YouTube:
The brand new oil rig, West Bollsta, worth $500 million, travels from manufacture in South Korea to Europe. Although self powered, the rig still needs a specialised high powered ocean tug, the ALP Striker, to assist with the long trip.Mega Transports look at the vehicles that transport exceptionally large and demanding cargoes across the planet; these journeys require precise planning, which can only take place with special safety precautions and for which large teams plan months in advance.
New Harvard study shows AI companion apps use emotional farewells to stop user exit.
— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) November 3, 2025
These messages produced up to 14x more engagement after goodbye.
An audit of 6 top apps captured 1,200 goodbyes and coded the immediate replies.
6 tactics emerged, premature exit guilt, fear… pic.twitter.com/omEdFIh11T
Nick Corasaniti and Tracey Tully, 6 Takeaways From Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s Victory in New Jersey, NYTimes, Nov. 5, 2025.
The race was expected to be close. In fact, it was a blowout.
Representative Mikie Sherrill beat Jack Ciattarelli by a wide margin, becoming the second woman to be elected governor of New Jersey.
Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, made her opposition to President Trump the cornerstone of her campaign against Mr. Ciattarelli, a Republican who crisscrossed the state with fervor, trying to replicate the inroads Mr. Trump made with Latino and Black voters in New Jersey last November.
Mr. Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump in May, had gambled that his new alliance with a president he once called a charlatan would help him run up the score, even in a left-leaning state.
Here's why:
As you may know, Trump has decided to stop work on the Gateway Tunnel project, which involves creating a new rail line between New York City and New Jersey. As this video should make clear, that affects not just New York City and New Jersey, but the whole Northeast corridor of the US (see video starting at roughly 31:01).
“If this system of transportation collapses, the Northeastern economy and the economy of the country collapses, so why be so shortsighted?” Governor Hochul said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday night.
* * * * *
00:00 Intro
03:19 The Northeast Corridor (NEC)
06:55 B+P Tunnel
12:36 The Frederick Douglass Tunnel Programme
16:01 Susquehanna River Rail Bridge
23:08 Philadelphia's 30th Street Station
25:20 The Portal North Bridge
29:28 New York's Hudson Tunnel
33:49 What it All Means
35:15 Staying On Track
Janet Horvath, Musicians in Sync – What Yuja Wang’s Heartbeats Tell Us, Interlude, December 7, 2023.
During the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth, pianist Yuja Wang undertook an extraordinary feat. She performed all the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one marathon concert at Carnegie Hall on January 28, 2023. Wang appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Maestro Yannick Nézet- Séguin. The audience was treated to a four-hour program, with two intermissions, consisting of 97,076 notes and 621 pages of music. But who’s counting? It turns out that noting the numbers was part of the evening. Wang was asked to wear a device to track her heartbeat during the concert, and so did the conductor, nine members of the orchestra, and six members of the audience. The results of this experiment are quite extraordinary.
Read the whole article at the link, which includes excerpts and graphs of heart-rate. This is a link to a number of articles and videos about the concert.
* * * * *
From tonebase Piano:
What Yuja’s Rachmaninof marathon reveals about the miracle of live performance.
Hosted, written and edited by Robert Fleitz @RobertFleitz
In January 2023, Yuja Wang performed all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening at Carnegie Hall — a feat once thought impossible. But this concert was also an experiment. Yuja, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and audience all wore heart-rate monitors, revealing the invisible instrument at the center of it all: the human heart.
In this video, Robert Fleitz explores what Carnegie Hall’s data revealed — not only about Yuja’s extraordinary focus and endurance, but about the shared physical and emotional pulse that connects performer and listener. Drawing on insights from Juilliard performance psychologist Noa Kageyama, choreographer Martha Graham, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and pianist-teacher Seymour Bernstein, the film asks how art lives through the body, and what it means to face our own limits in sound.
The story widens beyond Carnegie Hall: Clara Schumann’s journals describing the physical toll of constant touring, Rachmaninoff’s lifelong stage fright, and the tragedy of pianist Simon Barere, who collapsed mid-performance in 1951. From those histories to this year’s Chopin Competition — where a young pianist broke down in tears mid-performance — the through-line is clear: the greatest performances touch the limits of the human body.
Featuring performances by Nikolai Lugansky and materials from Carnegie Hall’s report on the data, this film explores how the heartbeat, the body, and the audience’s breath all become part of the same living organism — and why that fragile aliveness may be the real miracle of performance.
⌛ CHAPTERS ⌛
0:00 A cold night at Carnegie Hall — January 2023
0:23 Yuja Wang takes on the impossible
1:09 Rachmaninoff’s concertos: a marathon for one pianist
1:30 The hidden instrument: the human heart
2:09 Taming the body — the pianist as cowboy
2:46 “The mood is gone.” When control meets chaos
3:05 Coughing fits and breakdowns at the Chopin Competition
3:24 The delicate, dangerous art of live performance
3:56 What Carnegie Hall’s heart-rate data revealed
4:31 The shocking calm of Yuja’s Rach 3
5:08 Heart racing in the Fourth Concerto
5:40 The science of learning, memory, and adrenaline
6:25 Lessons from Lugansky, Avdeeva, and others
7:20 “It’s not just intellectual — it’s biological.”
7:55 Schumann and Rachmaninoff at the edge of their limits
9:05 Simon Barere’s final performance
9:45 The Romantic obsession with suffering
10:12 “There is only one of you in all of time.”
11:14 Profound data and deeper questions from Carnegie Hall
11:40 When performers and audiences breathe together (feat. Lady Gaga)
12:07 Yumeka Nakagawa’s tears at the Chopin Competition
12:25 The miracle of performance
13:24 “Unable to stop smiling.”
14:08 tonebase biggest offer of the year
15:20 (Yes, we can do jokes here.)
Tsao, Jeffrey, Beyond the Endless Frontier: Rebuilding Corporate Research for a Stronger American Future (October 13, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5600892 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5600892
The American R&D enterprise, long considered the global gold standard and a cornerstone of national security and economic competitiveness, faces mounting concerns regarding its productivity and societal relevance alongside intensifying international competition. In the meantime, a powerful component of that enterprise that, in the 20th century, helped create the science and technology foundation for our 21st century world lies dormant. That component is corporate research labs: labs that uniquely excelled at research embedded in real-world problemand-technology-rich use environments but curiosity-motivated to learn and discover with ultimate benefit to broader society. Here, we sketch a complete, though still evolving, vision for corporate research, its importance to a healthy R&D enterprise, and how we might rebuild it in a 21st century public-privatepartnership form. We refer to the vision as the "Bell Labs Xs" vision, to signify that there would be many Bell Labs Xs, all emulating the essential magic of corporate research labs such as the iconic Bell Labs of the 20th century while competing with each other and evolving in an "X-like" manner. This vision represents a radical rethinking of the Endless Frontier's sole focus on academia-harnessing American industrial prowess to create public, not just private, goods, and in doing so revitalizing American leadership in societally relevant science and technology.
Peyman Shahidi, Gili Rusak, Benjamin S. Manning, Andrey Fradkin & John J. Horton, The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents, NBER, Working Paper
AI agents—autonomous systems that perceive, reason, and act on behalf of human principals—are poised to transform digital markets by dramatically reducing transaction costs. This chapter evaluates the economic implications of this transition, adopting a consumer-oriented view of agents as market participants that can search, negotiate, and transact directly. From the demand side, agent adoption reflects derived demand: users trade off decision quality against effort reduction, with outcomes mediated by agent capability and task context. On the supply side, firms will design, integrate, and monetize agents, with outcomes hinging on whether agents operate within or across platforms. At the market level, agents create efficiency gains from lower search, communication, and contracting costs, but also introduce frictions such as congestion and price obfuscation. By lowering the costs of preference elicitation, contract enforcement, and identity verification, agents expand the feasible set of market designs but also raise novel regulatory challenges. While the net welfare effects remain an empirical question, the rapid onset of AI-mediated transactions presents a unique opportunity for economic research to inform real-world policy and market design.
One critical point made by Karpathy on the Dwarkesh podcast was about the difference between AI coding agents and the rest of knowledge work.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) October 20, 2025
It’s clear that AI agents in coding have taken off extremely quickly. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that a…
So is it a bubble?
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 16, 2025
If I had a way to reliably forecast financial bubbles I’d be a trading billionaire not writing political columns. https://t.co/jtPIEInPON
It's the time of year that the chrysanthemum (kiku) comes into bloom: a flower in Japan that's perhaps only 2nd to the cherry blossom, and one with a wide range of associations. Its luxurious petals won it the title of imperial family crest, as well as floral motif on the cover… pic.twitter.com/p5ZQVu9GjA
— Spoon & Tamago (@Johnny_suputama) October 13, 2025
YouTube:
The NATO phonetic alphabet is not a phonetic alphabet and wasn't invented by NATO. However, it has a fascinating story to tell. It is the result of years of linguistic experimentation in the wake of the violence of World War II. So let's explore its development, from ALFA to ZULU.
In this episode, we'll uncover the surprising story of how this alphabet – used by everyone from pilots to police officers – came to be. And look at the strange words that almost made the cut.
Cody Delistraty, A.I. Isn’t Magic. Lots of People Are Acting Like It Is. NYTimes, Sept. 25, 2025.
There’s a word that Sam Altman likes to use when talking about artificial intelligence: magic. Last year, he called a version of ChatGPT “magic intelligence in the sky.” In February, he referred to “magic unified intelligence.” He later posted that a recent update has “a magic to it i haven’t felt before.”
At times, A.I. can indeed feel magical. But treating it as anything other than a mere machine can have serious consequences. How many pose their deepest questions to chatbots, as if to an omniscient oracle? They ask Claude or ChatGPT: What should I do about this relationship? This job? This problem? Technology’s supposed promise of salvation — whether it’s Mars colonization, eternal life or achieving the A.I. “singularity” — has become a kind of secular religion, a mix of utopian beliefs that borders on the mystical.
Part of A.I.’s mystique comes from the fact that its inner workings aren’t entirely understood, even by its creators.
And so forth and so on. The article is about AI and magical thinking about it. But halfway through it has a telling section about magical beliefs occasioned by the invention and deployment of the telegraph and then of radio:
There’s a word that Sam Altman likes to use when talking about artificial intelligence: magic. Last year, he called a version of ChatGPT “magic intelligence in the sky.” In February, he referred to “magic unified intelligence.” He later posted that a recent update has “a magic to it i haven’t felt before.”
At times, A.I. can indeed feel magical. But treating it as anything other than a mere machine can have serious consequences. How many pose their deepest questions to chatbots, as if to an omniscient oracle? They ask Claude or ChatGPT: What should I do about this relationship? This job? This problem? Technology’s supposed promise of salvation — whether it’s Mars colonization, eternal life or achieving the A.I. “singularity” — has become a kind of secular religion, a mix of utopian beliefs that borders on the mystical.
Part of A.I.’s mystique comes from the fact that its inner workings aren’t entirely understood, even by its creators.
A bit later Delistraty observes: "People who describe A.I. engines as 'magical. seem to be saying A.I. has become so sophisticated that it is indistinguishable from what was once considered magic." And yet he missed the third Arthur C. Clark's well-known “three laws”: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
There’s more at the link.
YouTube:
On a special edition of Shield of the Republic, Eric and Eliot break down Secretary of Defense Hegseth and President Donald Trump's speeches to the General Officer Corps at Quantico this week. They discuss the administration's ongoing damage to civil-military relations and the implications for the future of our armed forces.
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
YouTube:
In this interview, I sit down with Japanese piano virtuoso Hiromi to talk about her playing, her influences, and her approach to improvisation. We cover her career, her unique style, and what drives her as a musician.
Hiromi is AWESOME!
This is a peculiar and interesting discussion. The first hour and a quarter are about Pinker's latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., and then we have half an hour when Bialik and Cohen push Pinker on spiritualism, transcendent experiences, and the like. It's a peculiar juxtaposition. Though I have a bit of sympathy with Bialik and Cohen, my own position is closer to Pinker's.
The Rising Risks of Cancel Culture & The Psychology & Language That Built It!
In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Steven Pinker (renowned Harvard psychologist and author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows) joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen for a no-holds-barred conversation that quickly turns into a fiery debate on the limits of science, belief, and human consciousness.
From the hidden mechanics of social dynamics and language to the perils of thought policing and cancel culture, Dr. Pinker dives deep into how shared knowledge shapes society, why what people think others believe can shift power, and how social media became a modern-day coliseum for public shaming.
But the sparks really fly when Mayim and Jonathan challenge Pinker’s staunchly materialist worldview — questioning whether extrasensory perception (ESP), near death experiences (NDEs), and higher consciousness might point to something beyond the reach of scientific instruments. Pinker doesn’t hold back, offering his sharply skeptical takes on mystical claims and pushing back against spiritual notions with cool-headed logic.
Dr. Pinker also breaks down:
- Why what others think of us actually matters
- Dangers of being too direct or too indirect — especially for neurodivergent folks
- How to create or hide common knowledge in relationships
- The first case of cancel culture on social media (and its ancient roots!)
- The thin line between freedom of speech and incitement to violence
- How distrust in science fuels conspiracy theories
- Can we depoliticize science? Or is it already too late?
- The danger of defunding academic research
- Why authoritarian regimes fear open communication
- The healthcare system: overprescription, profit motives, and how to fix it
- Is free will real? Or are we just dancing to the tune of biology and environment?
Don’t miss MBB's first-ever toe-to-toe spiritual showdown between Mayim, Jonathan, and a die-hard materialist. Whether you lean scientific, spiritual, or somewhere in between, this conversation will challenge what you think you know about reality.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
04:04 - How Shared Knowledge Shapes Society
17:09 - Why What Others Think of Us Actually Matters
29:46 - What Happens When We Disagree on Moral Order?
38:51 - Dangers of Erosion of Trust in Institutions
52:40 - Freedom of Speech vs Incitement to Violence
1:00:45 - Dangers of Politicizing Science
1:05:10 - Dangers of Defunding Academia
1:11:52 - Mental Health System Challenges
1:17:15 - Mysticism vs Materialism Debate
Read “The sleeping giant is awakening“ by Robert Reich here: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-sleeping-giant-is-awakening
I think our entire ontology for how we talk about and conceptualise A[G]I is confused. And I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years we will look back at the discourse today and laugh at how primitive some ideas are. A few hot and uncertain takes:
— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) September 18, 2025
The way people talk about future… pic.twitter.com/1o5oilqzQh
From deeper into this long tweet:
The way people talk about future AIs/AGIs feels like a category error. Sometimes they reify future systems as self-sovereign entities with their own goals and incentives, a different species that we need to learn to co-exist with. I think that's not impossible, and I used to be a lot more sympathetic to this view, but I'm a lot less certain now and it's certainly not self-evident. Agents can still be tools, and tool agents that operate along timelines don't need to necessarily be 'separate species'-like. [...]
To me at least, AGI will likely be a distributed ecosystem of different models, built by different companies and state actors, with different capabilities, architectures, and incentive structures.
YouTube:
NOTE: This livestream was recorded on Wednesday, September 17th at 3pm ET.
Is Trump and MAGA the inevitable endpoint to conservatism in America? JVL was joined by Heather Cox Richardson to discuss the state of conservatism in American politics.
The discussion gets really interesting around 21 minutes or so when Heather Cox Richardson advances the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union is what began the slide toward the highly polarized society we now have.
YouTube:
In this Pivot Quick Take, Sen. Mark Kelly makes the case for his "AI for America" plan, calling on tech companies to fund job retraining and infrastructure as AI reshapes the economy — plus how he personally uses AI in day-to-day life.
From YouTube page:
Sep 10, 2025
In an interview with Forbes Women, editor Maggie McGrath at the 2025 Forbes Power Women's Summit, legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher gives her unfiltered take on the people and trends shaping the future.
General comments about Silicon Valley start at about 12 minutes or so.
Correct! Just as a reminder: this is what a Transformer found after looking at 10M solar systems https://t.co/cz6MpG2Qtq pic.twitter.com/OozXPKYatb
— Martin Bauer (@martinmbauer) September 10, 2025
Ian Leslie writes about The Greatest Night in Pop, a documentary about the making of "We Are The World." The opening paragraphs:
The Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, tells the story of the making of We Are The World, the 1985 charity single featuring (almost) everyone in American pop at the time: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick…the list goes on and on.
The documentary is based on hours of footage from the night they recorded the single, only a few minutes of which was used for the original music video. The Greatest Night In Pop (TGNIP) came out eighteen months ago, and while millions of people have viewed it, I’m constantly surprised to learn that many have not. Everyone should.
If I had to recommend a documentary or just ‘something to watch on TV’ for absolutely anyone - man or woman, old or young, liberal or conservative, highbrow or lowbrow - I’d recommend The Greatest Night In Pop. It may not be the deepest, most profound ninety minutes of TV, but it is irresistibly enjoyable. And actually, like the best pop, it is deep; it just doesn’t pretend to be.
Diversity and roles:
I’ve written before about how diversity needs to be interpreted beyond demographic attributes like race and gender to temperament and personality. The British management researcher Meredith Belbin constructed a famous inventory of behavioural types which together make up a successful team: the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Catalyst, and so on.
TGNIP prompted me to come up with an inventory of my own: the Decider, the Connector, the Conscience, the Old Buck, the Disrupter, the Weirdo, and the Lover.
The players:
Task length is the key AI metric to watch - and it’s accelerating faster than almost anyone outside the industry realises https://t.co/LHzNjsQIco
— Matt Clifford (@matthewclifford) September 11, 2025
Mom (2013-2021) showed up on my Netflix feed sometime within the last month. I saw Allison Janney on the clip, a plus, as I liked her as C.J. Craig in The West Wing. I saw it was a sitcom. I’m certainly in the mood for a sitcom. And that title proclaimed, “family wholesomeness,” and yes, that’s there. But it’s not the wholesomeness of the sitcoms I grew up with.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Set in Napa, California, it follows dysfunctional mother/daughter duo Bonnie and Christy Plunkett, who, after having been estranged for years while both struggled with addiction, attempt to pull their lives together by trying to stay sober. [...] Mom received acclaim from critics and audiences for the writing and performances (particularly Janney's), as well as for addressing real-life issues such as: alcoholism, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, addictive gambling, homelessness, relapse, cancer, death, erectile dysfunction, domestic violence, overdose, palsy, rape, obesity, stroke, ADHD and miscarriage; and for maintaining a deft balance between the humorous and darker aspects of these issues.
Whoa!
I grew up with, for example, Father Knows Best:
The series, which began on radio in 1949, aired as a television show for six seasons and 203 episodes. Created by Ed James, Father Knows Best follows the lives of the Andersons, a middle-class family living in the town of Springfield. The state in which Springfield is located is never specified, but it is generally accepted to be located in the Midwestern United States. [...] As before, the character of Margaret was portrayed as a voice of reason, and Jim's character was that of a thoughtful father who offered sage advice in response to his children's problems. A responsible man, he loved his wife and children and would do whatever he could to give them a better life. Jim was a salesman and manager of the General Insurance Company in Springfield, while Margaret was a housewife. Their home was located at 607 Maple Avenue. One history of the series characterized the Andersons as "truly an idealized family, the sort that viewers could relate to and emulate." As the two eldest children aged from teenager to young adult, Betty (1956) and Bud (1959) graduated from high school and attended Springfield Junior College.
That’s a different world, very different.
I wonder how much daytime soaps changed over the same period?
BTW, I’ve now finished the first two seasons (of eight) of Mom, and will continue watching, though I don’t know whether or not I’ll go the distance. All that stuff that Wikipedia passage mentions, I’ve seen much/most of it in these two seasons. It’s light and enjoyable, which is what I was looking for. That is to say, it really is about family solidarity, even if the families involved are dysfunctional and centered on single moms. Every episode has one, two, or three scenes in an AA meeting. So we’ve got scenes of dysfunction in action, AA meetings (for a little distance), and reconciliation. For the most part, it works.
YouTube:
Behind the Scenes: How We Learn a New Song in One Day
Hey guys! Tonight we have our most requested video! We explain how we learn a new song in one day. During the 2020 quarantine when we started, we were learning 4 or 5 songs a week but we modified the arrangements to their skill level at the time. The kids were done with homeschool and it was something fun that kept us sane during a very chaotic time. As the world started opening back up and the years went by we gradually decreased the new songs/videos to twice a week but with more difficult arrangements. The days that we film the songs start with a morning drive (and coffee) around a pretty neighborhood we all love. We listen to a playlist that we’ve all added songs to and come up with one that we all like for the day. Once we choose the song, we head back home. Cash and Beckett spend about 15 minutes on their own learning their parts. Colt and Cash will work together on guitar tones and getting the guitar sound perfect. Then Colt will work with Bellamy on her bass part. She can usually learn that in about 30 minutes. Next Colt will play with Beckett, working on the breaks and fills. The order that he works with them can be subject to change based on whether we have homeschool that day. Lastly we run the song all together around 3 or 4 times and film it right after. We hope you enjoy this little behind the scenes video of our process. Also, if you’re local to the Tampa Bay area, we’d love to see you at our show at Hutchinson Auditorium on Florida College’s campus on 9/20 at 7pm. I’ll leave the link below. Hope to see you there!
Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby, You’re Probably Doing Small Talk Wrong, NYTimes, Sept. 4, 2025.
There’s a moment in human connection that defies easy explanation — that sudden, electric feeling when you meet someone and feel your minds merge. It happened to the two of us when we met at a psychology symposium: Our small talk during a break quickly gave way to playful theories about coffee drinkers versus tea drinkers. We went to find seats together, unaware that this conversation was the start of a decade-long collaboration and friendship.
Where does that spark come from, exactly? What makes someone feel like a lifelong friend after just a couple of minutes? People tend to assume it’s similarity: that they are especially likely to hit it off with someone who shares their background or personality traits.
But in our research, we’ve found that many of the strongest bonds come less from pre-existing similarity and more from riffing playfully. In these moments, people create a little world that belongs just to them, a process we call “building a shared reality.” Collaborative riffs are surprisingly central to our mental well-being: They’re the glue that binds us together, adds color to our lives and gives us a sense of purpose.
And yet, our culture’s conversational rituals revolve not around playful co-creation, but around exchanging formalities.
Riffing doesn’t require being naturally funny or witty, just being attentive and embracing spontaneity. Like any conversational skill, it takes practice. When riffing, speakers resist the urge to counter every observation with their own separate example, instead building bridges to new ideas (“That reminds me of. …”) or tossing in a “Can you imagine if …?” They reference earlier parts of the conversation to create inside jokes (“Looking forward to our miniature potluck committee!”).
Riffing isn’t just for new acquaintances. Over time, it creates a feeling of having merged minds and inhabiting a private universe. Patti Smith described her relationship with her late husband as the “silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”
There's more at the link.
Joshua Hunt, How Anime Took Over America, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 3, 2025. Selected passages.
From the opening:
Like the name Walt Disney, the word “anime” brings to mind not just an aesthetic but a distinctive storytelling ethos. My own first encounter with anime was at a middle-school sleepover in the mid-1990s, where I watched a bootleg VHS copy of the Japanese anime film “Akira.” It was mesmerizing.
Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian masterpiece was unlike anything my friends and I had experienced. The film held us in its thrall from the opening scene, in which Tokyo is silently swallowed up by a nuclear-scale blast that eventually gives birth to Neo-Tokyo, populated by biker gangs, mystics and powerful psychic beings who are the worst-kept secret of a crumbling military bureaucracy. “Akira” (1988).
Everything about “Akira,” from its gamelan-inspired soundtrack to its unusually complex characters, seemed fresh and exciting — it was so new, in fact, that Americans had not yet agreed on what to call it: anime, Japanime or Japanimation. This inability to define the form did no harm to its countercultural appeal. By 1996, Roger Ebert had called anime “the fastest-growing underground cult in the movie world.”
Ebert was especially impressed by “Akira” and Mamoru Oshii’s “Ghost in the Shell,” whose imagery and themes — cyborg police officers, hacker terrorists and the nature of identity in a technologically advanced society — would inspire the filmmakers behind “The Matrix.” It’s now clear that the thrill of these early anime imports was tied to the way they anticipated the contemporary world, offering a glimpse of a more connected, paranoid and altogether less stable planet years before we got here.
Conforming to American standards:
As an added challenge, writers had to come up with inventive ways of placating the standards departments that policed American television broadcasts. “The Bible Belt is what you had to think of as your audience,” said the voice actor Terry Klassen, who also worked as a writer on some “Dragon Ball Z” scripts. “So anything that had to do with Eastern prayer or looking to the heavens or having different levels of spiritualism, you had to change that, take that all out and sort of make it a more nonreligious quest.” Sometimes this meant altering a character’s name — from Mr. Satan to Hercule, for example. But other times it meant rotoscoping — a technique for tracing over footage — to make changes as innocuous as transforming beer into orange juice.
Funimation and Cartoon Network:
Before partnering with Cartoon Network, Funimation had shopped “Dragon Ball Z” to networks like ABC, which passed. “They said that the cartoons in the U.S. need to be like ‘Scooby-Doo,’ where every show has a beginning and end and you don’t need to worry about the next one,” said Daniel Cocanougher, a founder of Funimation. “This episodic-type stuff, it doesn’t work in the U.S.,” he recalled the network saying. “Dragon Ball Z” would end up being the first blockbuster anime series on American television.
Toonami picked up the first 56 episodes for a daily after-school broadcast that started in 1998. It was an immediate hit. “Within a year, we were the No. 1 show on Cartoon Network and helped take them from 40 million households to 80 million households,” Cocanougher told me. Just a few years after its debut on Toonami, he said, the series had helped make Funimation the fifth-largest distributor of VHS tapes and DVDs in the United States, just behind Columbia and Universal. “There was a generation of kids that got to see a cartoon that took its characters seriously, where people lived and died,” DeMarco told me. “There were real stakes, and people loved and had families, and it wasn’t just reset after every episode.”
The one-two punch of “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon,” which also found success in America, served as a foundation for everything that followed.
Miyazaki:
Shows like “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon” were largely aimed at children; different as they were from American cartoons, they were still cartoons. What got American adults interested in anime was the singular artistic vision of Hayao Miyazaki, who cultivated a large audience among cinaesthetes.
Just a few years before his movie “Spirited Away” won an Academy Award for best animated feature, in 2003, I saw his 1988 film “My Neighbor Totoro” at a small film festival in Minneapolis. Miyazaki’s work changed the way I looked at anime, and animation more broadly, in the same way David Lynch changed the way I looked at cinema; both filmmakers gave free rein to their subconscious and steadfastly refused to choose between style and substance. Winning the Oscar put Miyazaki in the same league as Walt Disney, earning anime the same kind of artistic credibility that Disney had garnered through films like “Bambi” and “Fantasia.”
Black Americans:
From this early stage on, Black Americans were overrepresented in anime fandom. Arthell Isom, whose D’ART Shtajio is Japan’s first Black-owned animation studio, shared his theory with me that Black Americans identified with anime protagonists who often come from the margins of society. Perhaps, he suggested, they were also so used to being absent from the media they consumed that they had an easier time watching and identifying with Asian protagonists than white audiences did.
A decade or so later, the generation of rappers who grew up watching Toonami after school seemed to take every opportunity to announce their anime fandom, from Lil Uzi Vert (“Throw up gang signs, Naruto”) to Megan Thee Stallion [...]
American style:
Like Champagne in France, something can be anime only if it is produced in Japan. But the boundaries of the genre have become blurrier as anime’s stylistic markers show up in the work of American and European animators, beginning as early as 2005 with Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which replicated the look and feel of anime but was made in the United States. More recently, American shows have been retrofitted into anime. The popular American cartoon series “Rick and Morty,” for example, shows few obvious anime influences, but its creators are such big fans that in 2024 they debuted a stand-alone series called “Rick and Morty: The Anime,” which was produced in Japan by a seasoned animator.
The trend toward reworking Western intellectual property as anime is accelerating. When I visited Isom’s animation studio in Tokyo, he had recently finished work on a “Star Wars” anime for Lucasfilm. And in November, when I met Gianni Sirgy, a content creator who helps run a TikTok channel called TheAnimeMen, he told me that he had been hired to help promote a “Lord of the Rings” anime film produced by Warner Bros. Entertainment. This made me wonder: Now that anime is truly mainstream, will the form’s outsider appeal be sacrificed as part of a scheme to create yet another delivery system for the same intellectual property that Hollywood has been regurgitating for decades?
There's much more at the link, especially the images, lots of them.
Check the credits:
‘‘Demon Slayer,’’ ‘‘Pokémon,’’ ‘‘Sailor Moon,’’ ‘‘Bambi,’’ ‘‘Revolutionary Girl Utena,’’ ‘‘Ranma ½,’’ ‘‘Dragon Ball Z’’ and ‘‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’’: Screenshots from YouTube. ‘‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’’ and ‘‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’’: Screenshots from Netflix. ‘‘One Piece,’’ ‘‘Haikyu!!,’’ ‘‘Akira’’ and ‘‘Dragon Ball Z’’: Screenshots from Crunchyroll. ‘‘Ghost in the Shell’’: Screenshots from Criterion Channel. Weekly Shōnen Jump covers: Screenshots from Comicvine. ‘‘Doraemon’’: Screenshots from Oricon News. Pokémon items: Screenshot from PokémonCenter.
Since some people asked about independent assessment, here is ML Energy Leaderboard, which uses a collection of 500 human prompts for testing, and is not particularly optimized for energy consumption, again finding right around .0003 kWh
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) September 3, 2025
(Just as many other do) pic.twitter.com/0mWMHuBhoh
The film is getting a lot of buzz. I like animation & I have some interest in Korean culture, so why not? From the Wikipedia entry:
KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 American animated musical urban fantasy film directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans from a screenplay they co-wrote with the writing team of Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan, based on a story conceived by Kang. Produced by Sony Pictures Animation for Netflix, the film stars the voices of Arden Cho, Ahn Hyo-seop, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, Ken Jeong, and Lee Byung-hun. It follows a K-pop girl group, Huntr/x,[a] who lead double lives as demon hunters; they face off against a rival boy band, the Saja Boys, whose members are secretly demons.
KPop Demon Hunters originated from Kang's desire to create a story inspired by her Korean heritage, drawing on elements of mythology, demonology, and K-pop to craft a visually distinct and culturally rooted film. The film was reported to be in production at Sony Pictures Animation by March 2021, with the full creative team attached. The film was animated by Sony Pictures Imageworks and was stylistically influenced by concert lighting, editorial photography, and music videos as well as anime and Korean dramas. The soundtrack features original songs by several talents, and a score composed by Marcelo Zarvos.
KPop Demon Hunters began streaming on Netflix on June 20, 2025, while a sing-along version of the film received a two-day limited theatrical release from August 23 to 24, 2025. The film drew acclaim for its animation, visual style, voice acting, writing, and music, and was named a cultural phenomenon by several publications. It surpassed Red Notice (2021) to become the most-watched film in Netflix history with 236 million views, and its sing-along theatrical release was both the widest for a Netflix film and the first to top the box office in the United States, surpassing Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022).
I suppose that accounts for the buzz. As for me, in two sittings I didn’t get more than a third into it. It struck me as slick, bland, and bloodless.
