LLMs are secretly obsessed with Japan.

Researchers proved every major LLM is secretly obsessed with Japan.

And they finally figured out why.

For years, we’ve been told that AI is entirely Western-centric, that it just reflects Silicon Valley and American values.

A landmark paper by Cardiff and Basque researchers… pic.twitter.com/ZfyypmmbjL

— Superman (@thesupermanmx) July 20, 2026

Red flowers in a planter on a street corner in Hobken

Beyond Marginalism: What’s Next? [MR #12]

It is time to conclude my series of posts on Tyler Cowen’s monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026). Let’s look at the fourth and final chapter, “Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?” Here’s how Cowen opens it (p. 85):

The underappreciated news is that marginalism is on the way out. Furthermore, this is old news, though the trend is accelerating.

Most of all it is underdiscussed news. As economics continues to evolve, marginalist insights – probably of all different kinds – will lie ever further from the frontiers of research and knowledge.

I find it easy to imagine that – less than 20 years from now – marginalism will be viewed as a historical curiosity rather than a central analytical engine of economics. No one will quite come out and say that, nor will they present marginalism as false or destructive. Rather it will be seen as of limited relevance, much as we might view parts of the earlier classical economists, such as their expositions of the quantity theory of money. New and different analytical frameworks will replace the ones that have dominated neoclassical economics to date.

Think about that, think about it very carefully. When thinking about it remind yourself that Cowen named his blog, his virtual home base for the last two decades, after marginalism.

For a professional academic to say that the world in which they were trained, the structure of ideas within which they have worked, which they have nurtured in students, which they have communicated to the public at large, which they have come to love, to say that that world is slipping away into the past, man, that’s rough. And rare. Not many have been able to do it.

Back in 1946 the great physicist, Max Planck, remarked, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Thomas Kuhn referenced that remark in The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and the economist Paul Samuelson gave a compressed version in a 1975 article in Newsweek. It would appear that Cowen has gotten the message and decided that, rather than dropping dead, he’d give the new ideas a boost.

After that sobering opening, Cowen reviews what happened between the late 19th century and now. He lands on price theory. Price theory? – “the view that the basic intuitive economic concepts, as would be taught in intermediate microeconomics, are highly useful and for advanced problems too” (p. 91). There’s that word, “intuitive.” Cowen explains:

Your hypothesis should be intelligible in terms of microeconomic concepts that you can hold in your mind and understand. In most (maybe not all?) cases, you should be able to explain some version of those principles to a well-educated, non-economist onlooker.

A couple pages later we arrive at something called “Topkis’s Theorem” which is very mathy (p. 94). Two pages after that: “Economic intuition, RIP. And marginalism with it.” Whoops! “I am seeing the traditional, intuitive approach to economic reasoning retreating from one field after another. To give one vivid and also important example, machine learning and neural nets are overturning the world of finance.”

Modeling collective action with 360,000 factors

A couple of pages later Cowen gives us a striking example. It’s from something called Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) (pp. 99-100). It’s a model that uses machine learning to develop 360,000 factors and does a better job of predicting than traditional models have only five or six factors. However, the factors in the traditional models are derived from marginalist assumptions and make intuitive sense while none of those 360,000 factors are legible. It’s clear to Cowen that, in the current intellectual marketplace for economics, the unintelligible models with superior performance are out-competing the traditional marginalist models. Bye, bye, marginalism!

I see no need to comment extensively on this particular model as I’ve already given it a great deal of attention, generating two different working papers from it. The first, On Method: Computational Compressibility in Complex Natural and Cultural Phenomena, places it in the context of a half-dozen other investigations in a half-dozen fields in the social and natural sciences. The second, Notes on the Collective Valuation of "Thick" Objects: Financial Assets, Movies, and Novels, compares it with work that Arthur De Vany published in 2004, Hollywood Economics, and a more recent study by Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis (2013), in which he investigated a corpus of 6000 19th century Anglophone novels. I’ve also written a blog post that complements that second paper: Thick Objects, High-Dimensional Models, and the New Intuitions [MR #11].

In that second paper and in the blog post I argue that those three cases are about a collective process where a population of human actors – traders and analysts in one case, movie goers in another, and novel readers in the third case – make judgements about “thick” objects. Even before I made an explicit argument, I had an intuition, an intuition that, despite the obvious differences, what De Vany was up to with movies was somehow like what Didisheim et al. were up to with stocks. Just where those intuitions came from, I can’t say, but I’ve been thinking about complex systems for a long time. [As an aside, for what it’s worth, Robert De Vany’s work on movies is perhaps where my interests in culture and cultural evolution come into closest contact with Cowen’s interests in economics and, in particular, in the economics of culture.]

As for the idea of thick objects, the term was suggested to me by either ChatGPT or Claude to characterizes complex objects whose characteristics cannot be fully enumerated because of that complexity. Moreover they are under constant scrutiny by a population of people who are interested in them and constantly evaluating them back and forth among themselves and, in that process, revealing further characteristics. It is not difficult to see that movies and novels are the same kind of thing, each is a mode of storytelling, and that they are complex objects. But what do they have to do with stocks? A remark by the pundit, Scott Galloway, made the connection for me in a podcast with Kara Swisher, “Stocks are like brands and that is they’re part promise and part performance.” Performance is assessed by a wide variety of metrics, metrics which go into the models such as the one by Didisheim et al., while promise is subject to endless speculation, some of which inevitably precipitates into those metrics.

Animal spirits, narrative economics, memes, and a Squid Game market

And that leads me to a conjecture that follows from the analysis that ChatGPT and I undertook in the collective valuation paper. Perhaps those 360,000 parameters are picking up traces left by those “animal spirits” that Keynes talked about. Their effect on asset values is too diffuse and indirect to be detected by those classical models with a half-dozen or so factors, each of which is intuitively legible on its own. But those traces show up distributed across those 360,000 parameters and allow the model to produce more accurate predictions. If that is what is going on, then I wouldn’t expect any of those factors to be intuitively legible, any more than one would expect such legibility of individual weights in a large language model. That’s not the nature of this conceptual world.

While we’re speculating, why not continue on? Those animal spirits can’t work their ways on the market by wafting around like odors in a breeze. They need to be embodied in some form, like gossip and stories. That leads us to 2017 Robert Shiller’s 2017 paper on “Narrative Economics” in the American Economic Review. Here’s his abstract:

This address considers the epidemiology of narratives relevant to economic fluctuations. The human brain has always been highly tuned toward narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing. Stories motivate and connect activities to deeply felt values and needs. Narratives “go viral” and spread far, even worldwide, with economic impact. The 1920–1921 Depression, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the so-called Great Recession of 2007–2009, and the contentious political-economic situation of today are considered as the results of the popular narratives of their respective times. Though these narratives are deeply human phenomena that are difficult to study in a scientific manner, quantitative analysis may help us gain a better understanding of these epidemics in the future.

Perhaps those high factor models are picking up the narrative dimension of asset value, which is a product how performance and promise become intertwined in the stories that analysts and traders tell themselves and one another about the assets they’re watching.

That, in turn, leads to the concept of meme stocks, a term that dates back to 2020. Here’s how Wikipedia characterizes them:

...a stock that gains popularity among retail investors through social media. The popularity of meme stocks is generally based on internet memes shared among traders, on platforms such as Reddit's r/wallstreetbets. Investors in such stocks are often young and inexperienced investors. As a result of their popularity, meme stocks often trade at prices that are above their estimated value – as based on fundamental analysis – and are known for being extremely speculative and volatile.

More recently, Owen A. Lamont, a senior analyst at Arcadian, has speculated that we’re in what he calls a “Squid Game market”:

Something’s happening in the U.S. stock market. We see cult stocks and crypto stocks. We see money pouring into leveraged single-stock ETFs and crypto ETFs. And we see dramatic price moves, for example in quantum computing stocks in December 2024. What’s going on?

Here’s one theory: these phenomena partly reflect an influx of Korean retail investors into the U.S. stock market. Last year, I wrote that “the U.S. stock market is Koreafying,” meaning that the U.S. market was starting to behave like the retail-dominated Korean market. What I didn’t realize was that this Koreafying process involves actual Korean retail investors.

He then goes on to develop the parallel between the Korean streaming series, Squid Game, and the U.S. retail market over the last few years.

If those high parameter models are picking up the effects of animal spirits embodied in gossip and narratives, then we’d expect their advantage over classical models (based on a handful of fundamentals) to be larger in the case of these meme stocks. So, if we compare the results of a classical model with those of a high-parameter machine learning model, are the assets with the greatest divergence also those otherwise identified as meme stocks? Perhaps some intellectual fishing expeditions are in order. Perhaps we can develop some new intuitions by comparing the results of classical models with machine learning models.

Whoops! Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn't appear on their balance sheets

🦔A Nikkei investigation found that Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn't appear on their balance sheets, more than the $1.35 trillion they officially report. These are GPU contracts, data center leases, and joint ventures that… pic.twitter.com/QbkzlenQAv

— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) July 20, 2026

Some birches in Liberty State Park [2016]

Agentic AI for science – Yippie!

Using agentic AI for scientific research has been an utterly fascinating experience. I can't remember the last time in my scientific career when I tackled such a stunning variety of problems with so much complexity and - most importantly - derived meaningful, reasonable answers…

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) July 21, 2026

America and China in the World, a quick note

Is that where we’re headed, to a bipolar world dominated by America and China? I just asked Google Search: “Is China the largest economy in the world?” Its reply:

China is the world's largest economy when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), but the United States is the largest in terms of nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

• By Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): China is the world's largest economy, with an estimated output exceeding $44 trillion. This metric adjusts for the cost of living and the price of local goods, reflecting a higher real volume of economic activity.
  
• By Nominal GDP: The United States holds the top spot. In current market exchange rates, the U.S. economy is valued at approximately $32 trillion, while China's nominal GDP is roughly $20 trillion.

So that’s one thing. The other is AI. America and China are in a race for dominance in AI. America has a technical lead, but with respect to Frontier LLMs, that lead is measured in months, not years. And China is making its models open weight while the most advanced American models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and not open. It’s not at all clear how that will shake out.

With the Trump administration authoritarianism is on the rise in America. While the Democrats may well win the next presidential election, it’s not at all clear what that means for America’s already precarious democracy. The problem is that a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of political and business elites, so much that America’s democracy looks like a chess game played by oligarchs where ordinary Americans are the pawns.

Is that what the world will become in 2040, a competition between American and Chinese oligarchs in which everyone else is a pawn, with Homo economicus triumphant over all?

A case of visual aesthetics: Why is the monochrome image superior to the color image?

Last Saturday (July 18, 2026) I posted, Some notes on AI and “fine art” imagery, which included these two images, remarking that the first seemed superior to the second:

But I didn’t ask why it is superior. Now I’m asking: Why?

FWIW, ChatGPT produced the first image based on my prompt. I forget the exact working of the prompt, but it was simple. After uploaded a long document about virtual reading I directed it to create an image for the cover of that document. That color image is what it gave me. I liked the form, but found the color distracting, so I asked it to render the image as a Renaissance engraving, resulting in the first image.

To investigate the question I used Photoshop to alter the color version. For this one I reduced the level of saturation:

Here I rendered the image in monochrome blue:

Finally, monochrome grayscale:

All three strike me as being superior to the original color image. The de-saturated version still has color in it, but the color is not so prominent. The monochrome blue has color information, obviously, but only one hue, so there is no contrast between hues. Finally, the grayscale image has no color information at all. Of the two monochrome images, is one better than the other? At the moment I like the blue better than the grayscale, but I’m not sure it matters much.

But I like the engraving rendition better than either of those. Why? It has a much richer texture. Without bothering to has things out, let’s posit that as part of the reason for the superiority of that version over the original color version.

But that doesn’t explain why the other three are superior to the original. What they have in common is less color information. There’s no color information in the grayscale image and the range of color information in the other two is reduced, drastically so in the blue image.

Why should that matter? Let me speculate. The vision system handles brightness differently than it does hue. Luminance is picked up by so-called rods in the retina while color is picked up by cones. To my eye the color information is just there in the color image. It forms no interesting pattern one its own and it doesn’t seem to be interacting with brightness in any way. It adds nothing but color itself.

Let’s speculate a bit farther. Some years ago Mark Changizi published The Vision Revolution (2009). He argued that the biological purpose of color vision is to allow us to read one another’s emotions more accurately based on gradations in skin color. I find his arguments persuasive. Now, while that may be the primary function of color vision, color vision obviously is not confined to how we see other humans. We use it generally in the world.

Now, let’s look at that image. The only recognizable object in it is that book, and it has very little color in it. The rest of it is just spots, lines and swirls that doesn’t look like anything. But maybe it looks a little like veins beneath the skin, not much, but perhaps enough to “invite” the color system to look for emotional resonance, and fail. It’s that invitation-and-failure that makes the color information, not simply irrelevant, but actively distracting.

Do I believe this? Yes and no. It’s speculation. I just made it up. To move from there to belief I’ve have to come up with a way of actually investigating the question, which is more than I’m in a position to do at the moment.

Mulling. Sometimes monochrome even looks … better in some sense… on human faces. 🤷

— Mark Changizi (@MarkChangizi) July 20, 2026

Johns Hopkins imagines 2076

Johns Hopkins University (“America’s First Research University”), my alma mater, was founded in 1876. In the current issue of Johns Hopkins Magzine and number of professors imagine the world in 2076: Ben Whitford, What Happens Next?

Getting old:

When Disneyland unveiled its House of the Future attraction in the 1950s, visitors lined up to wander through the MIT-designed plastic shell and gawp at wonders—including a microwave and a wall-mounted TV—designed with young families in mind. Back then, just 8% of Americans were 65 or older, but today this group makes up nearly 20% of the population; by 2076, the proportion is expected to climb to over 27%. To manage that transition, we’ll need a new approach to domestic environments, says Najim Dehak, director of engineering in JHU’s Geriatrics Engineering hub. “Older adults have different needs and different wants,” he explains. “We need to design future houses that can let older adults live safer, longer, and healthier lives.”

On the Bayview campus, Dehak’s team is building a new generation of “houses of the future”: model apartments packed with sensors and AI tools to help older residents. Fifty years from now, Dehak predicts, people will stay independent far longer, using self-driving cars to run errands or meet friends. Arriving home, they won’t fiddle with keys; their homes will recognize them, log their safe return, and automatically open the door. Inside, sensors—from motion detectors to cameras scanning the contents of the fridge—will monitor each resident’s wellbeing, ensuring they eat well, stay hydrated, and keep active. If we aren’t taking care of ourselves, voice-operated artificial intelligence assistants—Dehak’s specialty— will encourage us to grab a snack, call a loved one, or pop on virtual reality goggles for immersive group activities.

Space exploration:

Each new probe builds on insights from previous missions, but the intervening period is determined by planetary alignment. Missions to Saturn, for instance, can be sent only about every 30 years, so by 2076 researchers will likely be digesting data from a hypothetical “Son of Dragonfly” mission in the mid-2060s and deciding what to focus on next. One thing’s for sure: Titan won’t have given up all its secrets by then. Researchers will still be exploring what its complex chemistry and weather reveal about the origins of life on Earth or the likelihood of finding life elsewhere.

“Those are the kinds of questions we’re aiming toward making progress on,” Hörst says.

In coming decades, other flagship probes could include the Europa Clipper, arriving at the Jovian moon in 2030; a mission to Uranus, arriving around mid-century; and the Enceladus Orbilander, which could reach the Saturnian moon in the 2050s. Many of Hörst’s biggest questions— such as whether there’s life in Europa’s buried oceans or what Venus’ surface is really like—will almost certainly take longer to answer, requiring major breakthroughs in robotics and materials science. “I personally would be surprised if we accessed Europa’s ocean or sent a rover to the surface of Venus by 2076,” she says.

Further afield, the study of exoplanets will yield new insights: While thousands of planets have been discovered, there’s an enormous amount still to learn.

Solar panels:

Today, virtually all solar panels are made from silicon, which is cheap, durable, abundant—and only capable, even in theory, of absorbing one third of the energy in any given sunbeam. In practice, most current photovoltaic panels convert barely one-quarter of incoming solar energy into electricity, limiting their usefulness and driving up the cost of clean energy.

By 2076, that could change dramatically, says Susanna Thon, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Using nanomanufacturing, layered semiconductors, and other innovative techniques—some of which Thon is testing in her lab—it will soon be possible to harvest energy from a wider range of high- and lowenergy photons, potentially tripling the efficiency of panels. “We have a bunch of strategies, so it’s a technical challenge now,” Thon says.

Beyond AI

If Joshua T. Vogelstein—a polymath whose research spans biomedical engineering, computer science, mathematics, and neuroscience— had a time machine, he’d head to 2076 and ask family and friends their take on artificial intelligence.

“I’ll know we’ve made real progress when the general population—people who aren’t involved in creating AI—are no longer afraid of it,” he says.

Right now, Vogelstein says, we’re in an unsettling place: AI is evolving fast, but we don’t know where it’s heading. Some expect progress to snowball, leading to the “singularity”—a turning point in which machine intelligence leaves humans in the dust. Others believe computers will never achieve humanlike intelligence. “And there’s good support for both claims,” Vogelstein says.

Demystifying AI will require a fuller understanding of intelligence itself, Vogelstein argues. [...] we’ll need to fuse interdisciplinary research spanning neuroscience, human and animal cognition, and neural networks into something akin to the Standard Model used by physicists. “I’d like to think that by 2076 there will be a unified set of theories to explain intelligence writ large,” Vogelstein says.

Notice, however, there's no mention of superintelligence, much less world-wide dominance by our robot overlords.

Quantum weirdness:

Quantum mechanics has been around for a century but continues to challenge researchers, says physics professor Peter Armitage. The field’s core insight—that at the tiniest microscopic levels, the universe is choppy and pixelated, rather than smooth and continuous—quickly leads to mindbending conclusions, with quantum objects teleporting around, influencing one another instantaneously across vast distances, or existing simultaneously as both waves and particles.

The core equations governing quantum mechanics are now well-understood, but new technologies and theoretical advances mean the field’s practical implications are still being explored. “I don’t see any indication we’re at the bottom of this well,” Armitage says. “We’re so busy that it’s like drinking from the fire hose.”

Microrobots investigating your body:

In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, scientists shrink to microscopic size to explore the body and treat a patient’s blood clot. We won’t achieve that in the next half-century—but the next best thing, says biomolecular engineer David Gracias, would be intelligent micro-robots that could be swallowed like a pill, allowing them to examine and treat patients from within. “We can send probes into space but don’t have a system to navigate our own body. That’s the big challenge that motivates me,” he says.

Gracias has already developed starfish-like contraptions, each the size of a grain of sand, that pinch onto the intestinal lining to deliver medications more slowly and precisely. Next, Gracias hopes to develop swallowable robots that can take photos or video before selectively performing a biopsy on tissue, enabling noninvasive colonoscopies and ureteroscopies.

Sensation revealed:

When you reach out and feel something—rough or smooth, wet or dry, hard or soft—you’re touching on a mystery that still baffles researchers, says Jeremy D. Brown, associate professor in mechanical engineering. “We still don’t fully understand how haptic sensing really works,” Brown says. “Over the next 50 years, I suspect, scientists will get better at understanding how the touch system orchestrates disparate stimuli to form a percept of the physical world.” That would unlock new ways for humans to interact with machinery and digital tools. [...]

Better haptic technologies could also upgrade medical tools, allowing surgeons using laparoscopic robots to feel what’s happening deep inside the body and maneuver robots as dexterously as their own hands. “Having access to that sensory information naturally changes how you physically interact with tissue in a surgical environment,” Brown says.

There’s more at the link.

Quilts

The first one blew me away pic.twitter.com/1PLastuCR2

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 18, 2026

quite a few patriotic quilts this year in celebration of the semiquincentennial pic.twitter.com/jBrAB2gKTr

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 18, 2026

That is gorgeous. Here's one my mom did pic.twitter.com/OpzhijCSOX

— Karien (@jazzivalyn) July 19, 2026

This quilt was indeed inspired by the Chihuly, based on the artist's caption next to the quilt. Very impressive to notice this connection. https://t.co/qZgWXIET5S pic.twitter.com/NK9FRUlRqm

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 19, 2026

CitySim: Using LLMs to model 1M virtual residents in a virtual city

Japanese researchers created a system that simulates an entire city by generating up to 1 million virtual residents who behave like humans using LLMs.

And it predicted real-world with terrifying accuracy.

They created an urban simulator called "CitySim" that populates a digital… pic.twitter.com/yCBZFmWh3C

— Superman (@thesupermanmx) July 19, 2026

Paper: https://t.co/bznmcMfedg

— Superman (@thesupermanmx) July 19, 2026

Two irises and a bush

Soccer considered as a legacy of European colonialism

Akim Reinhardt, The Good, the Bad, and the Soccer, 3 Quarks Daily, July 19, 2026.

The fourth and fifth paragraphs:

Want proof that European colonialism is the real reason for, or at least the original factor in, soccer’s global popularity? Look at the nations that were not under European control during the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and you’ll mostly find countries where soccer is not the top spectator sport. The United States broke away from Great Britain long before the rise of soccer, and it has a bevy of its own sports that are far more popular (baseball, basketball, American football, and on a good day hockey). Canada, New Zealand, and Australia never rebelled, but rather faded away in time for their most popular sports to be, respectively: hockey, rugby, and cricket (summer) and Australian rules football (winter). Finland, up at the edge of the world, prefers hockey. Mongolia, at the center of the world, prefers wrestling. Ireland, forever looking to do whatever the English do not, very much prefers hurling and Gaelic football. China was never culturally colonized, and basketball is its most popular spectator team sport, with various individual sports also attracting huge fan bases. The United States is itself a massive colonial power, and wherever it held sway, soccer likewise takes a backseat: basketball in the Philippines; baseball and sumo in Japan; baseball in South Korea, Taiwan, and chunks of Latin America (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, and even Venezuela to some degree). India and Pakistan are odd, and extremely populace [sic], outliers. Ruled by Great Britain until after World War II, the English upperclass seems to have had an undue influence there, and cricket, not soccer, is by far the most popular spectator sport in both nations, which collectively account for over a fifth of Earth’s humans.

Add it all up, and we find that soccer is not actually the world’s game, but more accurately about half the world’s game. It’s tops across Europe, Africa, and most of Latin America, but secondary (at best) in the most populated parts of Asia, Oceania, and North America.

There’s much more to the article.

The Boys [Media Notes 187]

David Colman, The Emmy Awards Are Afraid of This Vulgar, Gory, Brilliant Show, NYTimes, July 19, 2026.

Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.

But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.

And then there’s The Boys, which captured our current moment, where it’s “as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.”

There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together. [...]

For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.

The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.

For what it’s worth, I was hooked from the first season in 2019, while the Trumposaurus was finishing off his first term.

This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”

It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day. [...]

You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.

There’s more at the link.

Blood, Sweat & Tears was bigger than I've remembered (what the hell happened to them?)

What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

From the YouTube page:

A political thriller about the first American rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, whose members find themselves in the crosshairs between the Right and the Left of a polarized America with severe career repercussions.

I was certainly aware of Blood, Sweat & Tears back in the 1960s and 70s. After all, I played in a band that played a number of BS&T tunes. But I don’t remember them as being THAT big, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “by the mid-1970s the group’s popularity began a decline.” And if I was aware of their State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which is the focus of this fascinating documentary, I’ve forgotten or repressed it.

Just around the corner

What do you do when you retire?

Brian J. O’Connor, You’re About to Retire. What Are You Doing for the Next 20 or 30 Years? NYTimes, July 18, 2026.

“Most people have never been retired, so they can’t connect their present reality with their future unknown reality,” said Michael Crews, author of the retirement book “Saturday Everyday” and chief executive of North Texas Wealth Management in Allen, Texas.

“The biggest question that people miss is the goal-setting and lifestyle for retirement,” he said. “In retirement, you still have to figure out what’s really important to you. And people just aren’t having those conversations.”

Like Mr. Crews, an increasing number of financial planners now say the most important retirement question to answer isn’t your net worth, your marginal tax rate, your gift-tax exclusions or expected longevity. Instead, it’s this: How do you plan to spend your time?

Unretiring:

Other retirees stop working entirely for a while and then return part-time or as consultants, aiming to balance the social and mental stimulation with shorter hours and less stress than in a full-time job. An AARP study published early this year found that of the 7 percent of retirees returning to work, 15 percent cited boredom as the reason, with 14 percent saying they were motivated to help others. Still, nearly half said they needed the money.

“People unretire, I think, largely because it was part of their plan to do that all along,” said Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a research fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who said that academic literature finds that nearly a quarter of retirees unretire at some point. “They’re stressed, they’re done, they retire, and at some point they’re recharged and they come back to work, especially the more educated group, where there’s not a physical component to the job.”

Three phases of a long retirement:

A retirement of 20 years or longer can cover three phases: An active, healthy phase right after leaving work, followed by a period of less activity, and a final period when retirees settle in to a lifestyle with little activity near the end of life.

Phase One: If they have the resources, this is when retirees should travel, before illnesses or ailments show up. Conventional wisdom once held that spending dropped after you left work, but later, research found that spending actually increased as retirees took up new hobbies, traveled, relocated and pursued other long-delayed plans.

Phase Two: After 10 to 15 active years, physical reality catches up with 75- or 80-year-old retirees. Those who were working part time have typically finished but still have time for family, friends and social activities. Spending tapers off.

Phase Three: After an additional five to 10 years, retirees typically stay closer to home with less activity and may develop more serious health issues that can lead to large medical bills. As of 2025, the median cost for nonmedical caregiver services at home was $80,000 a year (assuming 44 hours a week), assisted living was just over $74,000 and a private nursing home room cost about $130,000.

There's more at the link.

Craziness in the Korean Stock Market [up and down at the same time!]

From the YouTube page:

South Korea has the best performing stock market in the world for the second year running — and it's also in the middle of one of the worst bear markets on earth. The KOSPI is down around 27% from its June peak, more than 1.2 million retail accounts have been hit with margin calls, and hundreds of thousands of Korean investors have been wiped out entirely. But this isn't a story about meme stocks or worthless companies. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are enormously profitable businesses at the center of the global AI boom, and the traders buying them were right about the trend. In this video I look at how a national stock index became a two-stock bet on artificial intelligence, how single-stock leveraged ETFs turned ordinary volatility into a mechanical feedback loop, why Korea's retail "ants" took on so much leverage in the first place, and what Victor Haghani's famous biased-coin experiment tells us about how you can be completely right about a market and still lose everything.

Some notes on AI and “fine art” imagery

A couple of weeks ago I had a post entitled “Friday Fotos: The Last Frontier of AI.” I was interested in whether or not a certain approach I’d been using to create images with ChatGPT could produce “fine art” images, as opposed to illustrations or popular art of various kinds. The particular images I developed for that post (there were five), while interesting, were not particularly compelling. So I went on to display eleven other images I’d created with ChatGPT, including some of the images which that had motivated the post in the first place. I then ranked the images among themselves and decided that the images I’d created specifically for the post ranked near the bottom.

So, while the approach that motivated that post cannot be called a success, the post as a whole has raised the question: Can ChatGPT (be used to) create “fine art” images? I put “fine art” in quotes because the term itself is problematic. It’s not as though there are identifiable characteristics such that any image exhibiting them is a fine art image. The notion of fine art as opposed to folk art or popular art or (mere) illustrations is a cultural convention, one that Marcel Duhamps exploded in 1917 when he entered a urinal into the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. He called it Fountain and attributed it to “R. Mutt.” Fine art is simply the art that society has decided deserves to be treated in a certain way, no more, no less. If you decided that a common urinal should be treated in that way, then it becomes fine art.

Duchamp’s move was controversial, and that controversy has been reverberating ever since. I have no intention of reviewing and rehashing it here. Rather, I simply want to present a collection of images I’ve made with ChatGPT and view them with that issue reverberating in the background.

This image is one of my favorites among those I’ve created with ChatGPT:

I created it for illustrative purposes, to go on the cover of a working paper about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but I think the image stands on its own. If you’re familiar with the book, then resonance is obvious. It tells about a voyage up the Congo River. As for the superimposed image of the Buddha, here’s first sentence of the last paragraph: “Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha.”

I should note, and this is important, I had ChatGPT create that image from within a chat devoted to that working paper, making the entire chat (up to that point) the context in which ChatGPT created the image. I have reason to believe that it wasn’t working simply from prompt that generated that image. For a discussion of that, see this post: High-level “vibe” – Creating Imaginary Bank Notes with ChatGPT: AI as cultural technology and collective creativity.

Here’s a somewhat different image that I also like very much. It’s almost, but not completely, abstract:

The book is obvious. The rest of it? But that’s not the first image ChatGPT offered to me. This came before (and there were others before this):

If it’s fine art we’re interested in, the black and white image seems (vastly) superior to me.

Here’s an utterly different image:

I don’t remember what prompt I used to create that. But I like the image, absurd as it is, a lot. THAT’s why I like it. It’s ridiculous, but fun. Fine art? Ask me if I care. 

What about this? 

The sun rises in the East [China & AI]

Steve Lohr, China’s Leader Pitches ‘Openness’ in Push to Shape A.I.’s Future, NYTimes, July 17, 2026.

China’s leader on Friday laid out his nation’s bid to shape the path of artificial intelligence, casting China as a champion of an open approach to the technology and a trusted ally of developing nations in advancing A.I.

The remarks by Xi Jinping highlighted the importance that China’s top political and governmental leadership place on artificial intelligence. Mr. Xi’s speech did not mention the United States by name, but the message was clear: China plans to compete as the world’s other A.I. superpower.

Speaking at an A.I. conference in Shanghai, Mr. Xi said that “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of global collaboration.”

He described open-source A.I. technology, in which much of the software can be freely shared and modified, as a “rare and historical opportunity” to spread the benefits of A.I. globally. The technology, he said, must be shared by developing nations or raise the threat of “new historical injustices.”

Moonshot open-source:

On Friday, a Chinese company, Moonshot, introduced a new model that it claimed performed as well as American models from Anthropic and OpenAI. The announcement of the model, Kimi K3, helped roil financial markets.

The U.S. companies, which have spent many billions of dollars creating their frontier models, do not share their technology freely. They have also accused the Chinese of pilfering their technology. And China remains well behind in the most advanced A.I. chips, a market dominated by Nvidia. [...]

In his address, Mr. Xi also said China planned to offer its A.I. technology and training to developing countries that were friendly to China. “We must uphold openness and win-win cooperation,” he said.

But how open?

But A.I., depending on how far and fast it progresses, poses a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party. How should it manage the rise of a technology that could one day be so disruptive that it could threaten its interests — and its grip on power?

There's more at the link.

The language of thought is not natural language

Hope Kean, Alexander Fung, Paris Jaggers, +6 , and Evelina Fedorenko, Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language, PNAS, 123 (28) e2520095123 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2520095123, July 6, 2026.

Significance: Which cognitive mechanisms allow humans to reason logically, to understand whether a conclusion follows from the premises? Are they the same ones that allow the assembly of words into structured representations? Scholars have debated for millennia whether logical reasoning is inextricably tied to natural language, or instead relies on a distinct “language of thought” (LOT). Using fMRI in healthy adults and evaluating logical ability in individuals with severe aphasia, we find that distinct neural systems support language processing vs. logical (inductive and deductive) reasoning. These results suggest that, at least in mature brains, language processing does not underpin logical inference, perhaps due to the distinct representational format of the logical LOT.

Abstract: Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to express complex and structured meanings. Some have therefore argued for a tight relationship between complex thought and language, postulating that reasoning, including logical reasoning, relies on linguistic representations. We systematically investigated the relationship between logical reasoning and language using two complementary approaches. First, we used noninvasive brain imaging (fMRI) to examine neural activity as healthy adults engaged in logical reasoning tasks. And second, we behaviorally evaluated logical abilities in individuals with extensive lesions to the language brain areas and consequent severe linguistic impairment. Our findings reveal that the language brain network is not engaged during logical reasoning, and patients with severe aphasia exhibit intact performance on logic tasks. Instead, inductive reasoning recruits the domain-general multiple demand network implicated broadly in goal-directed behaviors, whereas deductive reasoning draws on brain regions that are distinct from both the language and the multiple demand networks. Together, these results indicate that linguistic representations are neither utilized nor required for inductive or deductive logical reasoning.

H/t Daniel Everett.

Friday Fotos: Yesterday's breakfast [pancakes]

Perceptions of probability

Very cool graph show what people really mean when they use vague terminology describing the probability of an event. Source: https://t.co/uQQCRohYtS pic.twitter.com/FRx4xAPAW5

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) July 17, 2026

The Mystic Jewels and Matrix Miriam @3QD

I’ve got a new piece out in 3 Quarks Daily:

The Mystic Jewels, the Vatican, and Matrix Miriam

From the introduction:

A bit over a year and a half ago I published “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising,” a science fiction yarn set a decade later and half way around the world from Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Robinson gave us a post-climate change world with pretty much the same institutional structure of the current world. Things were a bit looser in some ways, the very rich were, if anything, even richer, and finance made that world go round. Robinson developed a rich plot in which the financial crisis of 2008 was replayed, but to a different denouement. The banks weren’t bailed out; they were nationalized. Our heroes celebrated by going to Mezzrow’s where they danced “to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard.”

My world. As a musician who’s played RnB, rock, and jazz in many clubs and private parties, that world is more familiar to me than the world of financial derivatives and AI-driven trading, where Robinson centered his story. I decided to take Robinson’s world, move ahead a decade, and center it on the activities of Homo ludens rather than Homo economicus. That gives us Kisangani in the center of the Congo Basin and in 2150.

But this story is much earlier than that. It takes place just a few years from now and is about how the Mystic Jewels started Matrix Miriam, their first in a series of projects to create a new architecture for artificial intelligence. A somewhat revised version will be incorporated into Chapter 6 of my book in progress, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution, where it will be mated with a revised version of “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising” and some more fictional material.

This is thus is a work of fiction, and science fiction at that. Though the science aspect is a bit light in this piece, I expect it to get more intense as the story unfolds. You can get a glimpse of that in the working paper I developed from that 3QD piece, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper, in the section, “Discussion with Claude about digital doppelgangers,” pp. 10-14. The notion of a digital doppelganger is derived from Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, where the protagonist, Nell, is gifted with an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, when she is four years old. This primer then guides her education into early adulthood.

I am imagining that in the late 22nd century everyone is gifted with a similar resource which is available to and even accompanies them throughout their life. The relationship is so intimate that the doppelganger is in effect a person’s Mirror. But, what happens to the Mirror when the person dies? I haven’t worked that out, but I imagine that it persists for it is (effectively) immortal. I’ll be doing that in that book, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution.

Governing Agentic AI

Rajagopalan, Shruti, GOVERNING AGENTIC AI: WHY LEGAL PERSONHOOD IS NEITHER NECESSARY NOR SUFFICIENT (March 05, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7127038

ABSTRACT: AI agents now transact, publish, and act on external systems without contemporaneous human approval, creating new regulatory challenges. A growing literature has responded with proposals for legal personhood. This Article argues that personhood is neither necessary nor sufficient, shifting the question from status to enforcement.

The Article first shows that for two millennia, nonhuman legal personality, from the Roman universitas to the corporation, the Hindu idol, the waqf, and the river, has operated through human officeholders the law can locate, question, prosecute, and replace. Agentic AI inverts that design, exercising practical agency without legal status, sometimes with no identifiable human in the responsibility-bearing role.

The Article then sorts deployments into three categories: first, where one firm builds and deploys the agent; second, where the developer and deployer are separate but known; and third, where there is no identifiable developer or deployer.

The Article stress tests each agent deployment category against five liability doctrines: agency law, products liability, enterprise liability, negligence, and strict liability. It demonstrates that each fails at different points in the third category for the same reason: the absent responsibility-bearer. Bare personhood would supply a caption without a representative, assets, or a mechanism for cessation.

Finally, the Article assembles an alternative from regimes governing aircraft, ships, drones, driverless cars, and motor carriers. It develops a six-layer stack— registration, identification, verification, financial responsibility, lifecycle traceability, and suspension—so a responsibility-bearer can be identified, liability imposed, and the activity suspended. These layers place the human back at the end of the chain.

H/t Tyler Cowen

Canada's revenge: Wildfire smoke over New York City

Democratic socialism, American style: Douthat interviews Bashar Sunkara

Ross Douthat, A Vision of a ‘Society Without Capitalism’, NYTimes, July 16, 2026

Democratic socialists are having a moment. But can they actually remake the Democratic Party — and the American economy — in their image? My guest today, Bhaskar Sunkara [founding editor of Jacobin], WLB, is a longtime democratic socialist, and he makes the case that socialism has a universal appeal that transcends our current politics and will ultimately triumph against capitalism.

Well into the interview, Bill of Rights socialism:

Douthat: So you’re saying that if there’s a socialist contract with America, it does not promise collectivization and a one-party state?

Sunkara: I think we believe in a Bill of Rights socialism.

Douthat: So what is it?

Sunkara: There’s an immediate set of demands that you could call us attempting to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism.

This comes in the realm of decommodification of certain goods, providing them as social rights instead of them being dependent on your ability to pay.

Health care in America is partially decommodified. If you’re elderly, if you’re very poor, if you’re a child, you’re going to have guaranteed access to health care. We want to see that extended.

Same thing with things like Social Security and certain other benefits, or an expansion of the welfare state — not unlike Norway.

I also would go further and say that even within capitalism in the here and now, there are sectors of the economy that I would like to see greater state control of. In the old language of the left, we would call it the commanding heights of the economy, but even things like rail — there are benefits to selective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies.

That vision right there of socialism within capitalism, could be true of a lot of social democrats.

So beyond that, the question is: Why would you go about calling yourself a democratic socialist? For me, I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in a socialism beyond capitalism.

I actually do believe in an economy built on the idea that workers should control their workplaces and on this more radical vision of a society without capitalism, even if it still has a motor needed for investment and for efficiency gains and growth and so on.

Housing:

Douthat: OK. But those people in Queens who you mentioned, they’re concerned about housing, right? Is the leftward view of what housing policy should be for the Democrats, going forward?

Sunkara: I think everyone can see, across the political spectrum, that there’s a huge problem with housing construction in the U.S.

So Zohran’s policy, for example, in New York, is very heavily built around upzoning and making it easier for developers to build, and I think people agree with that.

But beyond that, I think on the left, we point to successful examples around the world of public housing being done right. We think at least part of the construction needs to be public housing. We also need to maintain and expand existing units.

I think that’s the room for the state to step up and do more things. But I think these solutions are largely, first and foremost, on the supply side. Then beyond that, we do believe in certain stabilizations and other things.

Douthat: Rent stabilization, meaning rent control or —

Sunkara: Rent control, which can be designed well. It could also be designed poorly.

But you could imagine, for example, telling landlords: “We’re going to clear the way. We’re going to allow you to create this big housing development. We’re going to fight against the interests of local homeowners, and you build your big piece of housing. But after 30 years, after you have a reasonable return on investment, that unit is going to have some degree of rent stabilization,” for instance.

That, to me, is a perfectly common sense, economically coherent vision for housing. I know there’s lots of talk on the left and in the Democratic Party about the debate over abundance, but fundamentally, any form of social democracy is grow-give.

There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

A.I.:

Douthat: What about A.I.? Bernie has taken some pretty strong stances, I would say. He has sort of staked out a position as the Democratic politician most open to both doomer narratives about A.I., but also most enthused about the prospect of strong government intervention.

What is the socialist position on the A.I. industry right now?

Sunkara: I think there’s a host of different socialist positions. I lean more on the side of just seeing it as any other technology. Companies are going to invest in new technologies. The economy is going to change. We’re going to need to adapt and figure out how to regulate it.

Obviously, any changes that we do, any regulation we need to do, need to make sense in an international context too.

It doesn’t make sense to tank certain U.S. companies if there’s going to be other companies creating the same disruption that are coming from other parts of the world.

But I think this gets to the level of policy where there’s legitimate debates. I think the idea which has been touted by figures as varied as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon is of the U.S. government owning a stake in major A.I. companies.

It makes perfect sense, too. But, fundamentally, we have to respond to a dynamic economy in which there’s always going to be new technologies, there’s always going to be new wants and needs, and new goods and services, and we need regulation that’s able to be flexible and adapt with changes. [...]

There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

What of capitalism?

Douthat: But just pulling back, I feel like we’ve danced around this a little bit, so let me just ask it directly: Is democratic socialism compatible with capitalism?

Sunkara: In the long term, no. We’re anticapitalist. We want a world beyond capitalism. But in the short term, while we’re within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms.

But in the long term, you know, I don’t hide my desire that I think the economy should be socialized, even if I think in the socialized economy, there needs to be a role for markets and also a role for worker-controlled firms to be able to meet people’s needs and provide new goods and services.

Douthat: What’s the distinction you make between capitalism and markets then?

Sunkara: Well, I think markets existed before capitalism. Capitalism is a regime of property ownership that says that as an individual capitalist or as a corporation, we own this private property and we use this private property to employ people and to produce goods and services.

And in my vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets. They would still need to meet goods and services and meet their payroll obligations and things like that.

But you don’t have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions.

There's much more at the link.