The Trap of the Digital Double

Catherine Shannon, The Trap of the Digital Double, NYTimes, July 31, 2026.

Everything is strange. We work from home. We socialize online. Our private lives are increasingly public. People pretend to be brands; brands pretend to be people. We optimize our bodies until they break. And the more we know, the less secure we feel.

In this inverted world, we seek to understand what is real and what is true. To know the truth of ourselves, we begin at what feels like a natural place: the mirror. We wish to see ourselves as others do, and modern life gives us countless opportunities.

We are constantly confronted with our own image, whether we like it or not: on our phones, front-facing videos, selfies, public spaces (the communal mirrors in Aritzia’s dressing rooms come painfully to mind), our social media profiles, Zoom calls, FaceTime, Ring doorbells. But we can forget that mirrors both duplicate reality and reverse it. None show you exactly as you are. Everything is strange.

The historian Christopher Lasch wrote that “for the narcissist, the world is a mirror.” Almost 50 years later, this remains a tidy diagnosis, but it doesn’t quite capture the extent of the spiritual crisis that we’re now facing. I believe the room of mirrors that constantly surrounds us conjures something unsettling, something dark. It is a spiritual trap in which the imagined displaces the real: We choose a fantasy of ourselves over the reality of others. And that trap is baited and facilitated by technology.

Mirrors:

Let’s be honest: I shouldn’t know what I look like taking out the trash. But I do, because my Google Home security camera recently alerted me that there was a “Person Seen — Back Camera.” “Person” is a generous term for what I saw, which was a beleaguered, ghostly figure — greasy hair pulled back, hunched over a bag of trash like an old witch.

We are recorded constantly: in public, by the government, by private companies trying to sell us things, even by strangers. I shudder when I think about all the incidental pictures of myself that live on strangers’ phones. In my own personal horror film, there I am, eating a bagel, and some 17-year-old tourist zooms in on my pixelated face, screenshots it, and sends it to the family group chat — “this woman’s face lol” — and I become the inside joke that defines that New York City holiday for years to come.

It’s curious, especially given how little we looked at ourselves in the past, and how rare and imperfect mirrors were for thousands of years, that traditional wisdom teaches us to be wary of the act of regarding the self. The three major American faiths — the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all warn against the dangers of mirrors, vanity, pride and excessive concern with the self.

Mirrors are covered during shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning period, both to encourage contemplation of the relationship between God and man and to discourage vanity and self-concern. The Book of Proverbs teaches that pride is spiritually deleterious: “Pride goes before ruin, / Arrogance, before failure.”

Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. [...]

Islamic prophetic tradition (hadith) discourages the depiction of living beings in religious contexts.

The uncanny:

Inhabiting this mirrored, dual realm, this doubled existence, doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t even feel neutral. Something is off, and when something is off, Freud has probably attempted to explain it. He called this “the uncanny,” a concept that by its very nature resists a clean definition, though if you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you’ve experienced it firsthand.

Castration complexes and womb-fantasies aside, Freud does a pretty good job: The uncanny, according to his 1919 essay by the same title, “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” It is easy for something new or unknown to frighten us, but the feeling of uncanniness relies on its being known to us in some way.

The uncanny is a dark twist on the familiar. It emerges when the boundary between imagination and reality begins to blur, when hidden mechanisms seem to be at work beneath the surface, and when something appears alive that should not be. (Or vice versa, in the case of influencers, who can have that dead sharklike look in their eyes.) It is marked by repetition, by a sense of something fateful and inescapable. Freud noted that the uncanny is often and easily produced when a symbol begins to take on the full force of the thing it represents. It is difficult to imagine a more precise description of life online.

The doppelganger:

Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

There's more at the link.

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

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.

We need a more balanced approach to developing and deploying AI

Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu, We Must Address the Growing Rage Against the A.I. Machine, NYTimes, July 11, 2026.

On the whole US AI developers want to move as fast as possible while the public is increasingly skeptical and opposed. The Chinese are more cautious and want to develop AI while preserving social stability thus the Chinese public are more optimistic about AI than Americans.

Dismissing A.I. entirely would be a mistake. The technology can help diagnose diseases, predict protein folding, improve farming, forecast disasters better, design new materials, accelerate scientific and drug discovery and power robots in dangerous environments to improve human safety (such as in space, firefighting and minefields).

Yet how technology spreads is never inevitable. If A.I. is viewed as benefiting the few at the expense of the majority, then the public will rage against the machine. And A.I. won’t be able to make our lives better in the long run if it cannot survive in the short term. The real challenge, then, isn’t whether the United States or China will build an overwhelming, insurmountable advantage over the other. It’s whether either can figure out how to realize the benefits of A.I. without ripping apart its social fabric. Neither has found the answer yet.

Silicon Valley tech executives and policymakers across the country are waking up to that fact. States have introduced dozens of bills this year to put safety and privacy guardrails around A.I. The Trump administration issued a new executive order that seeks to give the government more oversight over new models before they’re released to the public. [...]

To get to the other end of the tightrope, we need radical and incremental solutions alike. Here’s one to start: a populist A.I. agenda that treats the technology as a public project. Just as NASA made space a national mission rather than a private one, the government should now do the same for A.I. to ensure that its benefits reach the public, not just the companies building it. Here are some concrete ways to do that:

One, treat some A.I. profits as a shared resource and distribute them directly to citizens. This can be in the form of a sovereign wealth fund, seeded by contributions from A.I. companies in the form of stock or cash. [...]

Two, support public-interest A.I. models that the private sector might not be incentivized to build. Examples include models to help citizens navigate government services and benefits, to help them gain legal aid or to help educate their children. We strongly believe in the importance of open-source A.I., which anyone can freely use and modify. [...]

Three, regulate one area that attracts bipartisan agreement: the way children and teens interact with A.I.

There's more at the link.

What can we learn from Nordic happiness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three misunderstandings:

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

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

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

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

How it came about:

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

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

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

There's more at the link.

The American political system is broken. How can we fix it?

Jerry Cayford has an interesting article in the curren issue of 3 Quarks Daily: Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness.

The opening paragraphs:

California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.

This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?

The final paragraph;

Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.

It's clear to me that we really do need to change the system. Would that work, is it sufficient, a start? Who knows. How do we get there?

Here's a comment I made:

Thinks for this (and the links). You've given me something to think about. I especially like the phrase, “political industrial complex.” That seems exactly right.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking. For all my life I’ve believed that America is a democracy, whatever that is. I’ve been something of a leftist at least since my mid-teens, I marched against the war in Vietnam (and was a conscientious objector); I did not jump for joy when Clinton was elected; but I did manage a little hop when Obama was elected. That didn’t last long. Trump 1 was a disaster. Through all this I kept telling myself: “Yep, we’re still a democracy, still a democracy, yessiree, still a democracy...” And all this time I’d read here and there: “No, America is not, a democracy; it’s an oligarchy ruled by rich people and corporations.”

Trump 2 has got me rethinking. On the one hand, the corruption is so extreme and so naked. That’s one thing. But at the same time we have the rise of AI and the link between AI and the Trump administration through Elon “the world’s richest man” Musk, David Sacks, who was tech advisor to the president until quite recently, and the various entrepreneurs and executives who’ve been glad to kiss the presidential ring. The AI business is tightly controlled by a small group of tech bros (& maybe a woman or two in there somewhere) who control an enormous amount of money. As a result we’ve got an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power around the presidency pumping money through the political industrial complex.

Take that in conjunction with the political industrial complex and it’s beginning to look like the country is one giant board game where the oligarchs are the game players and the rest of us are just pieces on the board (or NPC’s). It’s Plato’s cave reconstructed with 21st century technology. The oligarchs are running a shadow play and we think it’s the real game. It’s not.

Excerpts from Séb Krier's Omni-Thread from February

https://x.com/sebkrier/status/2018351274127962300?s=20

1. Existing models will continue improving and getting better. And they will continue to be trained while accounting for all sorts of things like cost, efficiency, steerability, personality etc. as we already see today. I think it’s more obvious than ever that there is likely no convergence to the One Big Model. [...]

4. Here, there is still a lot to work out, and I expect high complementarity with human workers for at least the next decade. Roles will evolve: as you start doing less coding, your work looks more like technical product management. [...]

5. You just keep going up layers of abstraction, and humans continue steering complex multi-agent systems, until fixed costs bite. Part of the reason why humans always stay at the top of the chain is that many decisions made are normative: about what you want to happen, where you want things to go, how you want to react to changes. This requires inherently human inputs, since there's no point in having an AI decide this alone no matter how smart without eliciting more information about what the relevant humans prefer. Put differently: the telos of the whole system is the amalgamation of what users/consumers/businesses want, and tracking whether you're actually achieving that requires human input. This is already the case today with highly complex gigantic companies that make 1000 opaque decisions a minute.

6. Remember, this doesn’t violate the basic fact that market-coordinated economic activity is downstream of consumer and business demand. Capital isn’t some sort of independent force of the universe. What is being built depends on buyers/consumers that are ultimately human, even if occasionally intermediated by agents. The "AI decides everything" frame misses something fundamental about what economic and political systems are for. But as we go through these transitions, there are also costs or externalities (both pecuniary and non-pecuniary). Some people lose jobs. New industries cause unforeseen harms. Terence Tao has a great analogy: the abundance of food solved famine, but of course also led to harms like obesity. The solution is not to slow down abundance, but to develop the right norms, technologies, and laws to curb the excesses.

7. Accounts of full disempowerment assume democracy disappears, but I don't think all roads lead to autocracy. I don’t think ‘this time it’s different’. Growth and innovation historically benefited from free trade and liberal democracy, and this will be the case here too because of its impacts on investment, human capital, institutional quality, self-correction mechanisms, and ensuing fly-wheel effects. [...]

8. As the world goes through these transitions, we will probably continue to see many commentators gloss over the vast benefits and improvements humanity will see. Progress in longevity, cured diseases, consumer welfare, massive reduction in poverty and famine, better education and so on. The arguments for market coordination over some sort of early-Soviet or Maoist collectivism apply even more in this world, not less. The world will generally become materially richer. [...]

9. If we allow sufficient deployment of technology, robots, AI and so on, while ensuring the supply of energy, housing, and other important inputs isn’t constrained to a strangling degree, then the production of many goods and services will go down in price. [...] In general I am more concerned with customer service operators in Bangalore than I am with upper middle class white-collar professions in the West. I think FDI [foreign direct investment] and aid will be critical if we want humanity to thrive.

10. But this doesn't justify regressive populist policies or a 'pause'. It's not even optimal if we were being maximally selfish, and the equivalent of saying "poverty, misery and illness should be preserved for a longer period of time, for the benefit of a particular group of workers in time." Opposing AI or technological progress is a particularly nasty version of degrowth: it kills people, it entrenches poverty, and generally locks in all sorts of tragedies for the benefit of a comfortable elite who can easily thrive with the status quo. However, this does mean ensuring the right welfare systems, democratic protections, ‘societal resilience’, public infrastructure etc is important, as many have repeatedly noted over time. Just because things net out positively doesn’t mean ignoring those who lose out in the short run is the best we can do. There’s so much work to be done still if you want to build a better world, and I think we desperately need new, better economists, scientists, sociologists, artists, and politicians more than ever. I have more faith in the zoomers than some of my peers!

[Hmmmm.... I'm not so sure of 10. Don't know what it means.-BB]

12. In the future, I expect politics and governance to be an increasingly important component of people's lives: many will care deeply about how things are organised and managed at the local or national or international level. Personally, I think it’s fine if a large fraction don’t care much about those issues most of the time, since I don’t think there’s an obligation for everyone to have an opinion on everything, and that preference will likely be easy to satisfy. [...]

13. And I do think status games will continue, albeit in a much more diverse ecosystem of sub cultures and geographies. But again: always has been. Even today plenty of people more interested in art have zero envy for techbro founder lifestyles, and conversely many engineers couldn't care less about being perceived as cultured. As people get richer, much of this will evolve too. [...]

14. Ultimately, AGI will bring about huge positive transformations for the world, many of which are hard to describe: could anyone at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution have told you about video games, eye surgery, deep sea diving, street tacos, and mRNA vaccines? [...]

15. Lastly, so much of the field uses "this time it's different" as hand-wavey justifications for flouting norms, justifying unusual political measures, ignoring fragile progress built on centuries of trial and error, and various yet-to-be seen proposals for haphazard action (made confidently despite the uncertainty that one might guess would come with handling unprecedented phenomena). I think this is misguided: AGI will be huge, and of course will affect everything around us; but in many ways it’s also not different, and as always, there's a lot to learn from History. Much still needs to be built, except that this time you will also have millions of agents by your side to make progress. 🚀

A case for regulating AI

Paul Ford, Can an A.I. Company Ever Be Good? NYTimes, Apr. 26, 2026.

Artificial intelligence can be wondrous, but the technology underneath is more than a little monstrous. It eats up all the words in the world, from blogs to books, often without permission. It burns whole forests’ worth of energy, digesting that raw material into its models, and gulps billions of gallons of water to cool down. These are the same qualities we perceive in Godzilla, but distributed. Is it any wonder that the Japanese word “kaiju,” or strange beast, has “AI” smack in the middle?

Mere greed didn’t get us here. In fact, ethics did. The big A.I. labs’ starry-eyed founders believed that the only way to stop the looming threat of a superintelligence that might kill us all was to create an aligned A.I. that would remain fond of humans. A friendly Godzilla could stop bad Godzillas before they got to Tokyo Bay.

Lessons of recent history:

Over three decades of watching the tech industry and watching big companies grow from tiny teams to global powers, I’ve observed the same pattern: Ethics don’t scale up. Tech companies like to start with a mission. Google wanted to connect the world’s information; Microsoft wanted to put a computer on every desktop; Twitter wanted to give all people a platform to publish their thoughts. These are good ideas — the stuff of TED Talks. But users show up with their own beliefs and ideas, by the millions. As a tech founder, you end up putting enormous work into making users behave (and stopping them from breaking the law). Lawsuits pour in, saying you did wrong, some because you’re a convenient target.

All the while, money keeps gushing in. You start out transparent, sharing your journey, but then before an initial public offering of shares, you must honor the S.E.C.-mandated quiet period and restrict promotional communications. After that, the transparency never quite returns. The market demands a rising stock price. Your company still makes a lot of software, but a huge amount of time goes to tax strategy and compliance.

At that scale, people start to blur together, and human users can become aggregate pools of statistics and growth vectors that go up and down — a mulch into which you plant your products.

The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale. Truly ethics-bound organizations — the U.S. justice system, the American Medical Association, the Catholic priesthood — have hard scaling limits. Their rules run deep, and their requirements to serve are so onerous that only a few people can do the job. Punishments for transgressors include losing their licenses, being defrocked and being disbarred. Software industry people might have good degrees and are often good people, but they are making it up as they go along. They take no oath, are inconsistently certified and can only be fired, not exiled from the trade.

What to do? Regulate:

But regulation is absolutely in the interests of both America and the big A.I. companies themselves. Let me add two more terms people should know: “Google zero” and “model collapse.” Google zero (coined by Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge) is when Google stops sending traffic to websites and just provides an A.I. answer instead. When that happens, websites get less traffic, sell fewer ads and make less money. As a result, they may not be able to produce as much content. Model collapse is related: It’s when the A.I. models run out of knowledge to digest. What then? Do they excrete their own prose to redigest? Do they just give up?

Silicon Valley types like to say that data is the new oil. I think that’s right in two ways: Data is valuable, but it’s also a commodity, and these new A.I. tools are infrastructure. We regulate the electric grid, so why not these?

In this new world, there are so many new things to regulate: Deepfakes, A.I. liability, copyright rules, model bias concerns and ecological costs top the list. And we will also need to protect the digital commons and incentivize people to write and do things online.

There’s more at the link.

People are beginning to sour on AI (and how!)

Ezra Klein, produced by Annie Galvin, Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores? NYTimes, April 21, 2026.

From the introduction:

If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.

Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.

Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.

So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.

And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.

From deep in the discussion:

Klein: Have you thought about the change in public opinion? Because it looks to me like we’re seeing a pretty powerful A.I. backlash rising.

You have polls showing now that more Americans are worried about A.I. than are enthusiastic about it. There’s a lot of counter-data center energy playing out throughout the country.

What have you made of how quickly the politics have shifted beneath A.I.?

Bores: That surprised me. Both how many people have focused on it, but also how bipartisan it has remained.

You, of all people, know about polarization — and most issues end up polarized. This one hasn’t so far. It has resisted that longer than I thought it would.

If you talk to voters, across Republicans, Democrats and independents, you see pretty similar attitudes; across state legislators, pretty similar attitudes; even in Congress, there’s more bipartisanship than you would think.

Surveys regularly show that about 10 percent of people want to put the A.I. genie back in the bottle, to pretend it never existed. I empathize, but I don’t think that’s the way forward. Ten percent of people represented by the super PAC Leading the Future want to just let it rip.

That is the super PAC that’s attacking you.

Yes. They want to just let it rip. They don’t care how many people it hurts, just how fast it moves.

Eighty percent of Americans see some benefits. But they also see a lot of risk and think it’s moving too fast and want to have some say in its development. The fact that it has stayed so bipartisan has surprised me, and also the fact that it has risen up in people’s minds so much has surprised me.

Has the pessimism around it surprised you? We were talking earlier about the period when there was a lot of optimism about tech, about software, about the internet.

I think you can really look from early computers, the early internet, all the way pretty late into the social media era.

Probably around Trump things begin to turn — Cambridge Analytica, algorithmic feeds. But that’s a long time when these systems and technologies are present for people, and there’s a fundamental optimism about them.

A.I. — ChatGPT, I think, is when this really burst into public consciousness. It’s 2023. We’re here in 2026, and the polling has already turned negative. The week before we recorded this, Sam Altman was targeted in two separate violent attacks. There was a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home.

Awful.

Two other people shot at his door.

I was a little shocked to see people celebrating these attacks online, saying: Where can we support the bail fund?

Yes.

This has moved into fury and fear and pessimism really, really quickly. Why do you think that is?

Well, there was a separate split in A.I. around capabilities. The debate used to be: Is this real or is it stochastic parrots? But usually, even before that: Is it just slop that is never going to actually replace a human?

Fancy autocomplete.

Exactly. Exactly. We had these debates on one dimension, which was: Is it good for people? Is it bad for people?

And then there was this other dimension: How big of an impact is it going to have? And I think that debate has collapsed. People are not skeptical of its power anymore — or some are, but fewer and fewer each day.

The intensity with which we’re having that first debate has really ramped up. But I think it has also been that we saw what happened with social media.

We saw what happened with these previous revolutions that were supposed to change everything for the better. We’ve seen platforms established with great promise, and then over time, once they get power, really turn on their users.

People are no longer willing to believe the story that is told about a technology or a platform always benefiting people. You see this argument from some of the A.I. founders. They say: Well, it will create material abundance for everyone. There will be no more poverty. Everyone will have everything.

And everyone is looking around saying: Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen. You’re a private company — you’re going to profit, you’re going to keep it all for yourself.

Sam Altman recently said it will be like a utility. But utilities are really highly regulated.

People are just not willing to believe that spin anymore, and yet they’re seeing changes in their lives really quickly.

Pope Leo XIV on engaging with A.I.

While my current interest in religion has been brought about, in part, by the fact – somewhat to my own surprise and that of my friends – I’ve been attending church for the last two months. In THAT context I’ve been asking: Why am I here? But I’m also concerned about A.I. and the culture that surrounds it in Silicon Valley which strikes me, to use a rather antique work, as rather idolatrous. So it is in THAT context that I present some remarks by Pope Leo XIV, “Preserving Human Voices and Faces.” These remarks were delivered on January 24, 2026. The rest of this post consists of selected excerpts, without comment. The subtitles are mine.

Humans as God’s interlocutors

From the moment of creation, God wanted man and woman to be his interlocutors, and, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa explained, he imprinted on our faces a reflection of divine love, so that we may fully live our humanity through love. Preserving human faces and voices, therefore, means preserving this mark, this indelible reflection of God's love. We are not a species composed of predefined biochemical formulas. Each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation, that originates from our own lived experience and becomes manifest through interaction with others.

If we fail in this task of preservation, digital technology threatens to alter radically some of the fundamental pillars of human civilization that at times are taken for granted. By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.

The challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves. Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks.

How can machines enhance us?

The question at heart, however, i s not what machines can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to achieve, by growing in humanity and knowledge through the wise use of the powerful tools at our service. Individuals have always sought t o acquire the fruits of knowledge without the effort required by commitment, research and personal responsibility. However, renouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines would mean burying the talents we have been given t o grow as individuals in relation to God and others. It would mean hiding our faces and silencing our voices.

Do not use AI as a substitute for human relationships

Technology that exploits our need for relationships can lead not only to painful consequences in the lives of individuals, but also to damage in the social, cultural and political fabric of society. This occurs when we substitute relationships with others for Al systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made "in our image and likeness." We are thus robbed of the opportunity to encounter others, who are always different from ourselves, and with whom we can and must learn to relate. Without embracing others, there can be no relationships or friendships.

Responsibility, cooperation and education as we engage with AI

The task laid before us is not to stop digital innovation, but rather to guide it and to be aware of its ambivalent nature. It is up to each of us to raise our voice in defense of human persons, so that we can truly assimilate these tools as allies.

This alliance is possible, but needs to be based on three pillars: responsibility, cooperation and education.

First of all, responsibility. Depending on the role we play, responsibility can be understood as honesty, transparency, courage, farsightedness, the duty of sharing knowledge or the right to be informed. As a general principle, however, no one can elude personal responsibility for the future we are building. [...]

We are all called upon to cooperate. No sector can tackle the challenge of steering digital innovation and A l governance alone. Safeguards must therefore be put in place. All stakeholders — from the tech industry to legislators, from creative companies to academia, from artists to journalists and educators — must be involved in building and implementing informed and responsible digital citizenship. [...]

Education aims to do precisely this: To increase our personal ability to think critically; evaluate whether our sources are trustworthy and the possible interests behind selecting the information we have access to; to understand the psychological mechanisms involved; and to enable our families, communities and associations to develop practical criteria for a healthier and more responsible culture of communication.

Civil War Among Chimpanzees

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

Near the end:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's more at the link.

TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche

Once again I"m bumping this to the top of the queue. And for obvious reasons. Once again a foolhardy President has taken the country into a war with no obvious end in sight, just a squandering of human live and productive resources.

* * * * * 

As part of a special WAR EDITION of New Savanna I'm reproducing a set of notes I wrote up during the 2000 Presidential Election. I first published them on NS back in November of 2011 and I'm republishing them now in recognition of yet another turn in the long-spinning wheel of American mythology. Yet another bump to the top, as I'm thinking of this stuff, this time in connection with the relationship between war and nationalism.

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

  

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened. [If I’m correct, then this could be verified empirically by doing content analysis of periodicals, looking at opinion polls, crime rates, etc.]

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

Addendum 2011: Obviously, this internal redirection of aggression continues. It may well have gotten worse – I wonder what ‘sentiment analysis’ would turn up if applied to documents written over the past decade? The problem facing us, of course, is not that of finding suitable targets for this displaced aggression. No, we have to restructure our way of living so as to reduce our need to have such targets. That’s a tough one, and one that will take a generation or three.

Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.

 

Note 2026: The second post in this series has a clip from the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, that can be taken as a comment on how Trump arrived at the decision to attack Iran: TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness.  

The Chinese are optimistic about AI, no Doomers

Vivian Wang, Where are China’s A.I. Doomers? NYTimes, Mar. 4, 2026.

People in China are among the most excited in the world about A.I., according to a KPMG survey of 47 countries last year. While 69 percent of people in China said the technology’s benefits outweighed its risks, only 35 percent of Americans agreed. Other polls have shown similar disparities.

The question is, why?

The answer may be related to how the technology has been deployed in each country, as well as how the government and industry leaders have talked about it.

I don’t find this at all surprising. AI Doom is a projective fantasy, as I argued a couple of years ago in 3 Quarks Daily. Continuing on:

... Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.

In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)

As a result, Chinese consumers are feeling the benefits of A.I., said Bai Guo, a professor who studies the digital economy at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

“A lot of things can already be helped by A.I., and people find that interesting, that’s useful, and so there are quite a lot of positive and active feelings toward it,” Professor Bai said. Potential dangers, such as unemployment or increased inequality, still feel remote.

The Chinese government has emphasized practical use: “Officials say that A.I. could help solve China’s thorniest problems, such as inequalities in health care, or an aging work force.” And so:

In August, the government laid out a plan, called A.I.+, for A.I. to penetrate more than 70 percent of Chinese society by 2027, and 90 percent by 2030. The plan said A.I. will “promote a revolutionary leap in productive ability” and “create higher-quality, beautiful lives.”

Because Chinese officials are promoting A.I. as an economic engine, they may also be silencing those who are more pessimistic about it. Crashes involving autonomous driving have attracted widespread attention online, only for posts to be censored. State media outlets have compared concerns about job loss for taxi drivers to the Luddite movement.

However:

Users have also raised concerns about how easily the government’s restrictions can be bypassed. A Chinese feminist group recently highlighted tutorials for making sexually explicit deepfakes that circulate openly on Chinese social media. Attempts to report the images were unsuccessful, the group said.

The Chinese government has also begun more directly addressing the technology’s potential for disrupting jobs, mental health or the Communist Party’s grip on power. [...]

For all of its potential, China must not let A.I. “spiral out of control,” Mr. Xi warned during a recent meeting of the leaders of the Communist Party.

There’s more at the link.

An economic analysis of Epstein's role as an intermediator [Glenn Loury]

Loury has written an article about this: Jeffrey Epstein as Middleman: An Economic Analysis, February 10, 2026.

From the opening:

Economic theory has always been more comfortable analyzing markets than the people who make markets possible. Textbook exchange is clean, synchronous, and explicit: a buyer meets a seller, a price clears supply and demand, and the transaction is complete. Yet much of real economic life proceeds otherwise. Buyers and sellers often do not meet directly. Information is fragmented. Trust is uneven. Transactions are staggered in time. Under such conditions, intermediaries—middlemen, brokers, fixers—emerge not as incidental features of exchange, but as central institutional actors.

The economics literature offers several ways of understanding why. In the theory of search and matching, intermediaries arise because finding a counterparty is costly and uncertain. Buyers and sellers may exist in the same economy but never meet at the same moment. A middleman, by standing ready and cultivating contacts on both sides of the market, increases the effective rate at which trades occur. In canonical models of intermediation, the middleman does not produce the good being traded; he produces access. His profit comes from reducing search frictions and exploiting his position as a node through which others must pass.

Enter, Jeffrey Epstein:

Once such a system is in place, it can become self-reinforcing. Individually, each participant may find it rational to rely on the intermediary. Collectively, the arrangement can be destructive. The intermediary becomes indispensable precisely because he sits at the intersection of multiple relationships, none of which fully sees the whole. No single actor has enough information—or incentive—to dismantle the system. Economics describes this as a norm-based equilibrium: stable, persistent, and resistant to reform, even when widely suspected to be rotten.

It is against this theoretical backdrop that the Epstein scandal acquires its deeper significance. Treated narrowly, it is a story of horrific sexual abuse and criminal failure. Treated analytically, it is also a case study in extreme relational intermediation. Jeffrey Epstein’s economic role was never easy to specify. He was not a conventional financier, nor simply a socialite. His apparent value lay in his position as a connector across domains that ordinarily remain separate: finance, philanthropy, academia, politics, and private life. He brokered access. He made introductions. He hosted, facilitated, and normalized encounters whose purpose was often left conveniently vague.

Here the reporting by DropSite News adds crucial texture. Rather than presenting Epstein as a lone operator, it reconstructs a dense web of interactions sustained over decades: repeated visits to multiple properties, overlapping social circles that included financiers, scientists, politicians, and university administrators, and philanthropic or advisory arrangements whose concrete deliverables were often ill-defined. DropSite documents how Epstein inserted himself into institutional spaces—elite universities, research initiatives, charitable projects—by offering himself as a conduit to donors, prestige, or influence, even when the precise source of his own wealth or authority remained opaque.

There's much more at the link.

Religion on the Ground, Sunday Service

Another bump, this time because I'm going to church this morning. Third Sunday in a row. (2.15.26)

 

* * * * *

 

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle. It's from October 2011 and I need to keep it in mind as I think about the future. See also, Religion in America, Going Forward, and Black Preaching, the Church, and Civic Life, both from 2015. (2022)

 

* * * * *

 

I learned something about religion this past Sunday. Or, if you will, I gained a richer and subtler appreciation for things I’ve know for some time, thing’s I’ve known because I’ve read them in books and articles, many of them quite good. But even the best of them must necessarily abstract away from concrete reality, and concrete reality is what I experienced on Sunday.

I went to church for the first time in years and years. I had a specific reason for going to church, and to THAT particular church. I wanted to check out Rev. Smith—not his real name, BTW. While I wouldn’t be violating any confidence by using the man’s real name, nor by telling exactly which church I went to, the fact is that I didn’t go into that church telling people that, as a reporter, ethnographer, or some other kind of thinker-about-religion, I would be writing about the service on my blog. Thus I DO feel that it would be ever so slightly out of place for me to name names.

I’d met Rev. Smith a week and a half ago at an emergency meeting of three neighborhood associations. Two bus lines were about to be discontinued, leaving many in the neighborhood without access to the outside world. So the leaders of these three associations called a meeting. Rev. Smith spoke briefly during that meeting, saying that he was starting up a new organization for empowering people in various neighborhoods. He only spoke for a minute or two but, oratorically, he went from zero to sixty in about 4.3 seconds. Zooom!

I chatted with him after the meeting, as did several others, and gave him my card after expressing interest in his new venture. I also figured I ought to check him out on his home turf, which is why I went to his church this past Sunday.

Yes, to the extent that I had expectations about his preaching style, the sermon he preached satisfied those expectations. Rev. Smith didn’t deliver the sermon from a raised pulpit. He put a lectern front and center, level with the pews. That was his home base. He had a Bible on the lectern, seemed like another book as well, and perhaps some notes. But he mostly winged it, referring back to scripture every once in awhile. He had a wireless mic so he could move freely, which he did.

 

I’d say he spoke for 45 minutes, possibly less, more likely a bit more. I wasn’t timing him.

If you saw a video tape in which the words had been rendered unintelligible but the prosody and music remained, you might guess there was some hellfire and brimstone in the sermon. Rev. Smith reached that level of demonstrative expression many times. But he wasn’t condemning his parishioners to punishment if they failed to do this that or the other. Yes, he was admonishing them to beware of the Devil, and he was urging them to find in themselves the capacity to be and do more than they thought possible. Through Christ it WAS possible.

“Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights”–those weren’t Smith’s words—they’re Bob Marley’s—but that was the message, one of them. And, as often as he crouched, paced, and exhorted, he also stood tall, smiled, and beamed: See, like this.

Every once in awhile he asked “can I have an ‘Amen’?” and he got one. Here and there people would shout, wave their hands, and the organist would play a few chords, as though he was pacing the sermon. In various ways here and there Smith would acknowledge the length of the sermon. I’d almost bet that was a feature of his preaching style.

As he built up a good head of steam he’d walk down the center aisle, and then return. Calm and collected, again. As the sermon went on, and his heights got higher, he’d walk a bit further down the aisle. Toward the end he even did some quick turns. He WAS a performer.

At the very end half or more of the congregation joined him down in front of the altar. Then he marched them up the aisle to the back of the church and delivered the benediction from there.

But that wasn’t the whole service, which lasted roughly two hours. The service involved singing—by the choir and the congregation, responsive reading, announcements, the offering—everyone paraded down front to put their offering the basket, and there was five or perhaps ten minutes where people were urged to move about and greet their neighbors. At one point visitors were asked to stand up and be recognized (I did). It was a varied and satisfying service.

You know what I learned from those two hours? The way to judge a minister is by the quality of his congregation. Perhaps that could even be pushed a bit further: It takes a congregation to make a preacher. Rev. Smith couldn’t conduct a service like that unless his congregation allowed him to do so and participated in the doing.

That’s Sunday, one day out of seven.

I don’t know what the Rev. Smith does the other days of the week. Of course, he has to run the administrative affairs of the church. I assume that, in various ways, he ministers to the needs of his parishioners. Some of that would be through Bible study and other education. There’s committee work; for example, there’s an 80th anniversary celebration coming in early November. Much of his work, I assume, involves counseling.

It’s the fact of this ministry that stuck me so forcefully as I thought about the service. Ministering to the congregation, that’s a concrete day by day job, and calling. Part of the job, and only part of it, is to lift their spirits on Sunday so that they can go through the week more effectively than they otherwise might.

If the church weren’t there, how would that happen?

Ezra Klein interviews Anand Giridharadas about Epstein’s social infrastructure

Ezra Klein, The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power, NYTimes, Feb. 13, 2026.

About Girardharadas:

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and many other outlets. He publishes the great newsletter The.Ink and is the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.”

I often think of his work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power, and that has been the perspective he has brought to his coverage of these files. I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.

Here are a few passages from a very long and interesting interview.

* * * * * 

Ezra Klein: You used the word “solidarity” a moment ago for this network. When you look at these communications, there are moments of solidarity.

You wrote, in some ways actually movingly, about Epstein having a talent for friendship. He has a talent for being of use to people. He becomes an adviser to them. You can’t be a great con man without understanding human beings at a very deep level.

But there’s also just an endless transactionalism. An endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers — ultimately, women and girls. And what feels oftentimes like it is attracting them to each other is not always what I would think of as solidarity or a fellowship but: What can you do for me?

If you can be the one who finds it for them, that’s real power.

Anand Giridharadas: And it’s different needs, right? The money people may not need money, although they always want more of it. They often want to seem and feel smart. If you have met people in those kinds of worlds — finance people — even if you make a lot of money in it, they’re often very boring people.

I don’t say this as slander. They know it. I’ve had so many conversations with people in this world where there’s an insecurity about how boring they are. So they want something else.

Then there’s a bunch of academics. Academics, I think, really figure in this story in a way that feels surprising. It’s a tough era to be an independent thinker, so the academics want money and access.

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary asked Epstein, “How is life among the lucrative and louche?” He wanted access to a party scene that’s not available to him. Advertisement

Everybody had something they needed. But his gift, if it can be called that, was understanding and mapping that so well.

* * * * *

There’s this amazing quote from Justin Nelson, Epstein’s personal banker. I’m quoting Nelson from the Times piece: He prepares a memo trumpeting Epstein’s large volume of business with JPMorgan, and noting that despite his status as a sex offender, he was “still clearly well respected and trusted by some of the richest people in the world.” His network is the proof that he is worth dealing with and not beyond the pale. Because if he was, well, then how would he still have this network?

He is revealing how these elites make decisions about trust — that I think are really different from the way folks at home go through the world and make decisions. I think you make character judgments about people, about how honest they have been and therefore will be.

These billionaires, these superelites, these superlawyers are working on a whole different kind of system. Their system has to do, as you say, with how loaded with connections you are in this network, how high your stock is on a given day in this network.

What Epstein figured out was how to game this. He figured out the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these people are actually not that serious about character. In fact, character may be a liability for some of them, may be an unnecessary source of friction.

These people are actually not that grounded in the evidence of how someone has lived. These people are making very thin-sliced judgments about how central you are in their same networks. Therefore, something as simple — and this is true — as dining at Michael’s here in Midtown can do extraordinary wonders for people in the superelite. 

I think if I had to think about what I have most learned from what is now 13 months of the second Trump term — most learned about this country and the character of this country and the way this country functions right now — perhaps the biggest surprise for me is about the distribution or the paucity of bravery.  

Now most people listening to this will not have heard of the restaurant Michael’s in Midtown, but Michael’s is an example of a restaurant — a perfectly nice restaurant — but also a place where, if you can arrange to have lunch there, you will create an impression among certain people in publishing in New York, certain people who are in network television in New York, certain people in finance in New York — that you are in a certain place.

And on your way in and out, someone might introduce you to this person or that person. I’ve seen this organism flourish. And then these people will just assume you must be fine. They’ll maybe ask you to come in for a meeting to promote your children’s book or whatever it is.

He exploited the facile nature of many of these elites who have the mental skills to be serious people who evaluate character, who look up people’s history, who might, for example, find a conviction for soliciting sex with a minor problematic — but who, in fact, if you dined at Michael’s, if you were at that party, if you were at Davos, if you were at TED, must be all right.

* * * * *

Let me take that as a moment to ask something cautionary. Because as you’re saying, you look at these files, and there are a lot of people named in them. The number of people actually close to him, about whom you can get a lot by reading the files, we’re talking in the low dozens, maybe.

We’re talking about the elites, the power networks, but actually most people didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein. Most elites didn’t have much to do with him. Plenty of people saw him for what he was.

Tina Brown has this great line where she’s invited to a dinner with Epstein, Prince Andrew and Woody Allen. And she responded: What the [expletive] is this — the Pedophiles’ Ball?

Melinda Gates sees him perfectly clearly.

So is Epstein a way you see the elite, or is this a subcategory? It’s not telling us that much about power. It’s telling us something about some set of powerful people, in which — as in any other culture or network — there are going to be people of better and worse judgment, higher and lower character, more and less transactional.

Even in this JPMorgan Chase example I’ve been using, there are people in the bank who are fighting hard to cut ties with him. They lose until it becomes completely untenable for the bank to keep going. But they’re there.

I think that’s right. It’s an important point to dwell on for a second because you could take a narrow view that only the people who are actively involved in crimes of pedophilia here are really this group of people we should focus on, and everything else is a distraction.

You could take the opposite view that this is an indictment of every person with more than $10 million in the bank.

I think both of those are incorrect. I believe in this notion, and I’ve seen it in so many forms over the course of my years of reporting, of what I think about as concentric circles of enablement.

There is no doubt that there is a core group of people who were knowledgeable about, engaged in and shared participation in crimes of pedophilia at the burning heart of this story. That is, obviously, its own circle of hell.

We know from testimony of survivors that it was more people than just him. He was trafficking them to other people. We have some of the names. We don’t have all the names. But that was happening, and that’s the burning heart of this story that can’t be forgotten.

And then there’s what made that possible. Very practically, that means: Who were the other people who didn’t do that but who were aware of it, who facilitated it, for whom it was not a problem, who were not later discouraged by it when deciding whether to let him into something?

Then: What was the circle around that? Universities that maybe knew that Larry Summers was pally with him or that were accepting money and just didn’t stop the thing.

Then you can keep going out from there. Sometimes it’s helpful to shift the metaphor. I think about when I was in India as a reporter for The Times, and you would have a problem of so-called honor killings in rural villages in North India. A young woman dares to have a boyfriend or some kind of dalliance before marriage, and her own father might kill her or men in her family might kill her or people in her village might kill her. It happens a lot.

If you take every instance where that happens, there’s often one guy who committed murder. So one guy.

But I think anybody looking at it would say it took a lot of other things going on to make it possible for that guy to commit the murder — and a lot of other people who didn’t commit murder, who would never commit murder, who were not OK with murder, who maybe opposed the murder — but a lot of people and systems and institutions and values are conspiring to make that murder possible.

So if you shift back to this example, I think if you just had a pedophile in Jeffrey Epstein who wanted to procure 15-year-old girls and rape them, and that was all you had, it would have been very difficult for him. This is not an easy thing to pull off.

It’s not just Kathryn Ruemmler [BTW, who has resigned from Goldman Sachs since this interview took place], who presumably had nothing to do with that burning heart of the story. It’s the fact that today, Kathryn Ruemmler, as you and I speak, is still the chief lawyer at Goldman Sachs. It’s the fact that association is not something — forget one individual — that institutionally, Goldman Sachs does not think today is a problematic association.

The fact that not just some professor at Harvard or some professor at M.I.T. was involved but that those institutions, two of the world’s most august learning institutions, essentially had this guy able to swim through their networks and be central to them. I remember talking to women at the M.I.T. Media Lab who were forced to give tours to Jeffrey Epstein at the Media Lab.

It’s these law firms that, before they were capitulating to Donald Trump, were able to be gamed by, again, not just individuals but entire organizations that were not able to have an appropriate histamine reaction to one of their lawyers being too close to such a depraved person.

Even when there were so many reasons to know he was a problem. Even when Tina Brown knew enough to call him a pedophile.

Even when Donald Trump was giving quotes to New York Magazine saying: Jeffrey Epstein likes them on the younger side.

It was, as you say, a quite small number of people who presumably were involved in the worst crimes. It was a larger number who maybe knew about them and looked the other way. It was a larger number still who maybe were just at parties where things happened.

But eventually, you’re talking about all or many of the most prestigious institutions in this country — universities, corporations, law firms, conferences, down the line.