Hello,

My name is Freddie deBoer, and I really got the full Google experience today, in the worst way. Please don’t discard this email just because you see so much text. I think this story is worth listening to. If nothing else, you can laugh at my stumbling, worthless attempts to navigate the world made by you, the giant impersonal corporation who dominates our lives in ways both subtle and grand.

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A couple of years ago I purchased five of your 2nd generation Google Nest Protect wired smart smoke detectors from the Google Store. My wife and I were struggling to have a baby, I had all of this sad anxious energy that came with that long, laborious, repetitively heartbreaking process, and I found myself channeling that energy into various attempts to make our house a little safer. They were shockingly expensive, but Wirecutter raved about them and made me feel like they might really make a difference. I was a little worried about the installation process, though; you never know with smarthome stuff. The product page said that I could find a licensed (or approved or whatever) Google installer by using your widget after purchase. Alrighty!, I thought. They’ve got a widget! They’ve got official (or whatever) Google techs! I won’t have to worry so much about finding an honest technician to do the installation. So I bought five of them, one for each of the smoke detectors we already had installed. They weren’t cheap - almost $800 as a matter of fact - but every expense feels justifiable when you’re doing it for your kid, even if your kid is still entirely theoretical. What can I say? I’m only human.

Then I put in my ZIP code in your widget… which told me that there were no techs in my area. This was strange because we live in suburban Connecticut, less than two hours from New York, not in the middle of Wyoming. I tried several times over months, but your service kept saying that there was no one in my area. I thought hard about doing it myself and found the appropriate YouTube videos. Unfortunately, I had a failed rotator cuff repair sometime ago and now my other rotator cuff is partially torn and over-the-head stuff is really hard for me, so installing five alarms just seemed physically unachievable. My wife, meanwhile, is a full foot shorter than I am and was otherwise not keen on doing amateur electronic work. OK. I set the problem aside for awhile.

Then we got pregnant and had the baby and I was distracted. Not a good idea, leaving $800 of smart smoke detectors in a box, but that’s what happens when you have a new baby. Everything else just leaves your awareness. I concede that this was dumb and my bad and if you’d like to abandon any sympathy towards me because of this, well… fine. But recently I finally took steps to get them installed; we’re getting a doorbell cam, a Nest one, and I thought, hey, good opportunity to kill two birds, you know? I found someone to install the doorbell through your widget. I called the number. That company, the ones who are gonna install the doorbell and camera, said they couldn’t do the smoke alarms but they’d find a licensed electrician to install the smoke detectors - at my own additional expense, of course. I said OK. The electrician showed up and told me the smoke detectors were discontinued. I looked it up and showed him that Google has guaranteed 10 years of service for the product anyway and that they could still be installed and used, according to Google itself. He said alright. Then, when he went to install them, he found a mount for a smoke detector in the basement that I was unaware of. That one had to get filled too, and it had to be with an alarm that could communicate with the rest, apparently by law or regulation or whatever. I needed a sixth alarm.

The only problem is that you discontinued the Nest Protect and don’t sell them anymore! Boy, you guys love pushing a product onto consumers only to abruptly stop doing so in a fickle and abrupt fashion, don’t you? Alright, well, I went looking on the secondary market for a sixth Nest Protect gen 2 wired smoke and CO detector. Surely eBay would have a few? Unfortunately, because the product is discontinued, the options are all dodgy used models or insanely expensive price gouging that I can’t afford. So I can’t install the five that I have unless I get a sixth but I can’t get a sixth without paying significantly more than face value, maybe, for a discontinued model. Not appealing!

OK, well, this was a real pickle. So I contacted your Google Store customer service to look for help. (What is the purpose of customer service other than to service the customer, right? …right?) I wanted help either finding a detector to fill the missing spot - surely you guys have some old stock, somewhere? I would happily pay full retail price - or some sort of refund, even if a partial one. I was connected to an online chat with “Emily.” Was Emily a real person? I have no idea. What I can tell you is that she was completely unhelpful; she just kept repeating my problem as a solution. “I’m trying to buy an additional smoke detector but that unit is discontinued.” Sorry, Fredrik, that unit is discontinued! Like that. Any hope for some sort of refund, given the discontinuation? Nope, no refund possible, not even a partial one. Instead “Emily” urged me to find one of the secondary market... which I had just told her only had wildly expensive options or dodgy options or both. I explained that this dilemma didn’t seem to be fully my fault because a) your own locator refused to find me someone to install them in the first place and b) you discontinued an item that was meant to last ten years. Nope. No help, none. Sorry. You, Google, told me that I was on my own.

So now I’m sitting on these very expensive smoke detectors I can’t use and can’t return and can’t find the extra one I need that isn’t super expensive. The shopping results are bewildering, the wired versions are particularly hard to find at all and (again) priced like they’re built out of Bitcoin, some are saying they’ll expire much sooner than others, a lot of them seem scammy…. Ah, well, maybe this is what LLMs are for! Maybe this is what all the hype is about. I needed to sift through a ton of digital information to find what I was looking for, a tedious search through large databass - isn’t that sort of thing what LLMs do best? So I asked Google Gemini for help finding me a non-extortionately priced Google Nest Protect second generation wired version. It helpfully gave me a link and urged me to buy. This, surely, is the solution to your problems, said Google’s own LLM. I clicked on the link and it gave me a Google Pay option and I clicked that.

And THEN I was led to a very fake, very scammy looking confirmation page. I realized that, in fact, your LLM had set me up with a scam! Awesome! Very cool, Google corporation. I quickly clicked out, locked my card, and reported a potential phishing scam. I will now have to get a new card issued to me from my bank and update a bunch of subscriptions; no doubt I will later discover that I have forgotten one only because something I need gets turned off after the card declined. Sweet! In the meantime, I’m watching my accounts like a hawk; my funds haven’t been drained, so that’s nice. But still, my debit card information was exposed to scammers thanks to a link provided by your LLM in an effort to buy a product you (used to) make and through your payment system within that LLM. And look, I’m embarrassed! Very embarrassed. I know this is a very Boomer trap to fall into, and I pride myself on spotting a scam. I hate having to share this information with you, Google, and please do me a favor and keep this all private, please? This wasn’t my finest moment.

Still, in my defense? The fact that the scam was being offered up to me through Gemini made it so much harder to avoid. It’s not that I have an excessive amount of trust in LLMs; just the opposite, or so I’d like to think. No, the trouble was that I didn’t have access to the usual clues I have long depended on to spot online fraud. The Gemini interface obscured the information that I ordinarily use to sniff out a scam and I didn’t have the right context clues. Why, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that the interfaces of consumer-facing LLMs - which, to be clear, you yourselves have been aggressively marketing as tools for making online shopping easier - are perfectly designed to make fraud harder to detect. I don’t think you’ve done that deliberately, of course. But I also don’t think that you care the slightest bit about how the design decisions baked into your AI technology enable abuse. You just need to win the race against OpenAI and Anthropic, right? Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And luckily for you, your immense and pricey legal team has absolutely draped your LLMs in waivers and qualifications and provisos and terms of service that ensure that I could never ever pursue you for compensation based on the failures of the product that you have forced into every app, service, and device you control. Nope. Wherever the buck stops, it does not stop with you, and we’re looking at a future where LLMs are used as an all-encompassing excuse for why massive corporations have literally zero accountability for anything that happens under their auspices. Fun!

And, for the record, there’s a chance that scammers used LLMs in the creation of this very fraudulent online storefront. After all, the world is facing an absolute deluge of new cons and fraud and grift thanks to the rise of ChatGPT and its competitors; it’s now trivially easy to set something like this up. People are absolutely deluged with scams now. It’s never been particularly hard to actually come up with the infrastructure for fraud. With LLMs? Trivially easy. Practically free. And the whole system is straining under the weight.

For example, as a writer of published books, I now receive a firehose of emails, calls, and text messages trying to pull me into one shady scheme or another related to my books. Some of this is just your basic “put in your credit card info” stuff like I’ve just been dealing with. A lot of it is “Hey please come give a talk at our Poor Orphans Who Love Books and Yearn Only to Be Read to By Their Favorite Authors of Longform Argumentative Nonfiction Jamboree” stuff where, it turns out, there’s only the small matter of paying the $400 appearance fee…. I’m happy to say that I’ve never been snookered in this way, but I’m correspondingly falling into Type II errors a lot - the unpaid work of sorting scam from real opportunity is so daunting I just delete everything and inevitably fail to see real opportunities to connect with other humans about my work. Just this month I was alerted to the fact that I had ignored someone who was only asking for something I’ve granted dozens of times before: an instructor whose class had read one of my pieces and was asking if maybe I would be kind enough to Zoom in with his students. That is, indeed, what I love to do, the only confirmation that any of this matters, something I love to do. And no doubt I’ve ignored many such requests because the work of telling real from fake has become so daunting. I only found out that that particularly request was legitimate because the instructor was persistent.

I asked Gemini, hey bro, this sure looks like a scam page you sent me to! What’s the deal? And Gemini was like, oh yeah, that’s a scam lol, don’t do it. Might want to shut down that card lol. I’m an LLM, what can I say? The entire world economy floats on the perception of my limitless powers, but also you can’t trust me for anything at all, and if you do you’re a mark, and if you complain about it the boys on Reddit and LessWrong will chortle about how you’re a fool to not know better. See, if you don’t think that LLMs are about to completely rewrite what it means to be human and will surely end death and send us to the stars, you’re a pathetic Luddite and Ezra Klein will personally come to your house to laugh at you, but if you actually trust them to do something vaguely important (even buying shit, one of their most celebrated capabilities) and they fuck up, hey, that’s on you, you rube, you mark, you patsy. Isn’t that nice? Of course this all leads to the inevitable LLM question: if Gemini is smart enough to recognize the scam in hindsight, why oh why didn’t it recognize said scam before it advised me to fall for it, within the proprietary interface that kept me from knowing it was a scam???

So, to review: you, Google, sold me very expensive smoke alarms, then discontinued them, part of your long lineage of abandoning products you’ve already sold to the public; then were of zero help finding me one that I needed to make the other ones function; then you laughed off the idea of any sort of refund; then your LLM sent me to a scam page and exposed my bank account to fraudsters; then when I pointed the scam out your LLM was like “whoops my bad you’re on your own lol,” and now I have to cancel my debit card and anxiously watch my account to make sure that I’m not defrauded like some sad 80 year old, and I’m still sitting on $800 of smoke detectors I can’t use. And now I’m emailing some sad legal helpline your LLM gave me because you’ve made your company as opaque and impenetrable as humanly possible in your never-ending quest to avoid accountability, and every employee that might be at the appropriate level to help is hidden behind the many layers of bureaucracy and communicative hurdles you establish between yourself and the public like a moat and your chat line has already proven to be utterly useless. It all feels pretty fucked up, I’m not gonna lie!

I have a couple friends who work for your company and they’re perpetually confused and hurt as to why the public has turned on Google. “Why did we become the bad guys?”, etc etc. And you know, I’m not unsympathetic. Not entirely. But this is why, this experience is why: because you’re a huge multinational corporation that has a massive impact on the lives of regular people and none of us are even in a position to pathetically supplicate before you as consumers, asking for a little help, let alone to regulate you in a meaningful way as a society. You have too much money and too much power and if I tried to kick up a fuss about this you’d probably tell the world what embarrassing porn I was searching for when I was a 22-year-old. I say all of this knowing that this email has about a 1% chance of ever appearing in front of your eyes and an even lower change of not being immediately deleted. Well, yeah. That’s why people hate you. Because we’re powerless. Totally powerless. We were promised that technology would make us more powerful, masters of our own lives, but instead you and your competitors have mostly given us only finer, more expensive instruments for managing our dependence. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that ensure we remain entirely helpless before the corporations that govern our work, our politics, our attention, and increasingly the terms on which we are permitted to exist. And then when people are mad at Silicon Valley your gurus go on Joe Rogan or Dwarkesh Patel or whoever and cry into hundred dollar bills about how mean we all are.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I now have to go tell my wife the embarrassing story of how I got almost scammed with my one-year-old sleeping on my chest and why I need to get a new debit card. Then, I suppose, maybe I’ll to try and figure out what the hell I’m going to do with these smoke detectors, up to and including using the search engines built by you or your competitors to figure out where I can safely dispose of obsolete electronics. Because we’ve built a world in which I have no other way to get information other than by begging for it from you, the architects of my humiliation. It doesn’t feel good.

Sincerely yours,

Freddie deBoer

[hits send]

Kill me. Please. I would prefer death.

Update: comments were initially off by mistake! Fixed now.

The Knicks won the championship, and I want to just be happy about it. Part of me definitely is happy for the long-suffering Knicks fans, certainly. (The ones who have long suffered.) I’m a neutral party and I got pretty annoyed by the weird and massive anti-OKC Thunder thing this postseason - I mean, no, they’re not my favorite to watch, but chill out - and was primed to enjoy seeing the young Spurs have to wait a little longer. There’s a version of this essay that’s pure joy, and the people who deserve to write it are the real fans, the ones who saw Patrick Ewing and Allan Houston and Carmelo Anthony come and go, the ones who suffered through the Isiah Thomas years, the ones who can tell you what Charles Oakley’s elbows did to the Bulls, especially the ones who have been waiting since 1973 with a patience that borders on the religious. To those people, this is your moment, you earned it. Go cry into your beer in the good way after crying into your beer in a bad way for so many years. You’ve got the receipts.

Of course, unless you’re part of the 1%, the odds that you have actual receipts for any beers bought at Madison Square Garden this postseason are exceedingly small. And that’s what has me so bummed out today, that the vision I can’t get out of my head isn’t some elderly Knicks diehard from Spanish Harlem finally enjoying his moment but Jimmy Fallow waving his arms, trying to get the camera to fall on him, because apparently being on TV every night for more than a decade just isn’t enough attention. Attending a Knicks home game against the Charlotte Hornets in February is absurdly expensive for the average family, and attending a playoff game anywhere, forget about it. Going to an NFL, NBA, or MLB game has long been expensive, but for regular fans and families, doing so a couple times a season was at least somewhat attainable. I could quote a thousand different statistics - a beer and a hotdog at So-Fi stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, now go for $27 - but I don’t really have to. Everyone knows that live sports are too expensive for regular people now.

And so, yeah, seeing this all taken to ridiculous, symbol-heavy extremes in this series, with the Haim sisters (of Los Angeles) gyrating next to their billionaire friend Taylor Swift (of eastern Pennsylvania and Nashville), shamelessly demanding the attention that has already been given to them in massive amounts in their lives, while more anonymous billionaires just enjoy being where the action is by sitting in seats that cost more than a year at the most expensive universities in the world, while the broadcast cuts away to transplanted finance bros who bought a Knicks cap the week of the conference finals and now enjoy the playoffs over $30 cocktails in West Village velvet rope bars… yeah, it depresses me. I know some Knicks fans will think I’m just trying to undercut their moment. But of course New York the city is growing just as inaccessible as New York the basketball team, and neither political party has the slightest interest in ending the macroeconomic conditions that are exacerbating inequality in grotesque ways, and I’m afraid I have to point that out even today. Especially today.

The actual basketball was dogshit, I guess I should say first. The quality of play in these playoffs and this championship series, and especially in the last game, was pretty atrocious. I mean, look at the shot charts for this series.

Woof.

The Spurs shot 41.8/33.9/75.6 for the series with 12.4 turnovers a game, the Knicks 42/36.7/76.9 and 13.2, which honestly are better than I would have expected from watching. There was brutally, brutally ugly play for much of this series, with the action frequently frenetic and disjointed; that the games were close with exciting comebacks doesn’t change that. But that’s just modern basketball. None of my many concerns with the contemporary NBA were assuaged by this series - with the game played at an absurd pace and teams chucking threes relentlessly because that’s what’s “optimal,” a little bit of variance in shotmaking and luck and you end up with this kind of rim-clanging turnover-filled slop fest. Fast breaks are fun, and threes are fun when they’re one weapon in an arsenal of many, but I badly miss teams getting into sets and methodically working for the right shot. So much of the stretches of bad play in this series were a matter of the teams rushing for no reason, especially the Spurs, who looked awful, leaderless and afraid and stuck with a transcendent star who happens to have almost no shot-creating ability.

I’ve been saying for awhile now that Victor Wembanyama has no consistent offensive game to speak of; the kids would say that he has no “bag,” that he doesn’t have go-to moves, an offensive skillset. His high-scoring games feature a remarkably number of plays where he’s just taller than everyone and gracelessly plops the ball in the hoop with little resistance. The Knicks did an admirable job pushing him far away from the basket, leading to tons of rushed deep shots and 27.3% three-point shooting for the series. Everyone and their brother has said that he needs to live near the basket, many have responded that he can’t do that all game every game, everyone expects he will get better. Certainly gaining a little muscle will help. But his physical advantages are such that he hasn’t had to really develop offensive skills the way other players have, and that was apparent again and again this series, where he kept surrendering to quick, jerky pull-up jumpers against an undersized opponent. It was painful to watch.

Sloppy play and a remarkably easy road to the championship shouldn’t do anything to undermine the joy Knicks fans are feeling, obviously. All rings count. But the underwhelming play didn’t help with my problem this series, which is that I kept getting sucked back into the world of shithead celebrities and rich douchebags mugging for the cameras instead of watching the games. Somewhere in the middle of this sometimes-beautiful, often-shambolic, improbable Knicks run, ESPN started forcing us all to watch the Madison Square Garden elite instead of the game, and what I saw was a strange, sad diorama of everything that has happened to America and to New York City, a city and a country where no one expects anymore that good things are supposed to be available to ordinary people, where we barely even register that the rich have taken it all.

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starring
CHRIS RYAN as RUST COHLE
ANDY GREENWALD as MARTY HART
PRODUCER KAYA as the real hero
BILL SIMMONS as THE YELLOW KING (unseen, omnipotent)

1. EXT. SUGARCANE FIELD - DAWN

A lone dead tree against a sky the color of a healing bruise. At its base, a naked dead corpse of a dead woman kneels in death, nude, dead, in a state of undress, deceased, a crown of deer antlers lashed to her head, a spiral painted between her shoulder blades. Blair Witch-style stick things hang in the branches, turning in the harsh Louisiana bayou sun. CHRIS “RUST COHLE” RYAN crouches beside the body, unbothered by the gore, a Zyn tobacco pouch packed under his lip. His partner ANDY “MARTY HART” GREENWALD hangs back, rubbing Vicks VapoRub over his philtrum.

CHRIS: [studying the antlers like a Mickey Morandini rookie card] Somebody staged this. Somebody wanted it found. This is a posture of supplication. Total commitment to the game. This is a man making content… for an audience of one.

ANDY: [muffled] I have two daughters, Rust-Chris!

CHRIS: [spitting] You’ve mentioned, Andy. Marty. Andy.

ANDY: [panic rising] Hashtag girldad!

PRODUCER KAYA: [from behind a nearby bush] It’s 1995, Andy.

CHRIS: I'm the kind of guy who calls soccer “football” right now but will stop doing that when it becomes uncool sometime in the next several decades.

ANDY: I’m just saying - a thing like this - and I want to be careful, because who am I to evaluate the craft of a homicide - me, a man who has never done a single murder! - I stress, this is just me, just from my subjectivity - from my, ah, from my limited, all-too-human vantage point as a mere critic - but a thing like this lands differently for a girl dad. For a man with girls. Have I mentioned that I’m a modern, progressive, humorously-fretful father to daughters?

CHRIS: [not looking up] Sometimes I almost miss the scent of death.

An inattentive crime scene tech steps too close to the corpse.

CHRIS: That’s a no from me, dog.

ANDY: Listen, technician - what was your name? - listen - and I want you to understand that this is a me thing, it’s not a you thing - these are all my own hang ups, and we know how little rhyme or reason there is to those - I want you to understand that I don’t, in any way, say this as a criticism, or intend to hang something on you that’s not yours to carry - but I absolutely hate what you just did, and if you ever stomp into my crime scene again I’ll fucking kill you.

The tech scurries off in a panic.

CHRIS: He’s one of the good ones.

ANDY: One of the best.

CHRIS: Solid, solid dude.

ANDY: Sort of like bad boy celebrity showrunner bad boy Sam Levinson, who’s a close personal friend we frequently socialize with.

CHRIS: He’s involved in many of our personal anecdotes, which we only ever share in the most natural, organic, spontaneous way possible.

ANDY: Much in the same way Ryan Coogler sometimes shows up at our studios, points at Sean Fennessey, and says “the Oakland streets are saying you’re a real one” then gets in his car and drives away with no further interaction.

CHRIS: We have many, many close connections with stars.

ANDY: Most listeners say that the rate at which we casually assert close personal friendships with an implausible number of entertainment-industry heavyweights is in fact tasteful and restrained.

They turn back to their work. Chris swallows several Zyn pouches whole. Andy makes an incorrect guess on the New York Times game Connections and immediately pays for a new subscription to the paper to clear the stain from his record. Kaya furtively reads the new Grady Hendrix novel.

ANDY: [to a random sheriff’s deputy doing crowd control] I worry that your uniform aestheticizes militarism.

CHRIS: Shhh!

ANDY: [vaguely gesturing at the corpse and the antlers and the whole scene] I don’t want to call this good. I would never! But the staging, the use of negative space, the mise en scène, why the very mise en place, one might even say!… the commitment to the bit… there’s an authorial hand here, a point of view. You hate to see it. You also kind of have to respect it.

PRODUCER KAYA: You’re standing over a body, Andy.

ANDY: [clutching collar] Oh!

CHRIS: [peeling the spiral apart with his eyes] I’ve seen this symbol. I’ve seen this exact swirl before. In the stitching of one of my many semi-ironic aging-guy-who-gets-it fitted caps. On a pack of American Spirits I bought ironically from a Wawa while mourning the death of Wanamaker’s. On the cover of Converge’s seminal 2001 metalcore masterpiece Jane Doe during a bout of food poisoning. In the eyes of a man who’s about to ask me to be fifth chair on a podcast about MTV’s Rock N’ Jock. [beat] We’re going to be chasing this one a long time, Marty.

ANDY: Can we please not make it a whole season? I have a note from my allergist.

2. INT. FORD CROWN VICTORIA - DAY

The austere cop car eats two lanes of deep South blacktop. Chris narrates the void out the window, speaking to himself, to the universe, to no one at all. Andy drives with the white-knuckle posture of a man who would prefer to be narrating his drive from Point Dume to San Clemente State Beach, drolly describing the traffic to prove how “real LA” he is.

CHRIS: [struggling] Nietzsche - uh, Nietzsche -

ANDY: As I’ve been trying to say, I have a fraught ethical relationship with the produce from our local farmer’s market.

CHRIS: I’ve given this thing a great deal of thought, Marty.

ANDY: About my farmer’s market conundrum?!?

PRODUCER KAYA: No one cares, Andy.

ANDY: [wounded] JK Rowling will hear of this.

CHRIS: About the case. And about so much more.

ANDY: I’m listening… and learning.

CHRIS: They say time is a flat circle.

Andy makes a strangled, strangling noise in the back of his throat, the sound of an objection that he wants to pretend he’s trying to hold in even though he wants everyone to know he objects.

CHRIS: [sighing from the deepest pit of his addled Irish soul] What, Andy?

ANDY: [looking around in mock confusion] Who? Me?

CHRIS: You made the noise, Andy.

ANDY: A noise? C’est moi???

CHRIS: Your “I want to correct you but I don’t want to cop to it” noise.

ANDY: Oh, that’s not a thing!

PRODUCER KAYA: [from the backseat, furiously underlining job listings in the newspaper] It’s a thing.

CHRIS: We’ve been married for 12 years, Andy. I know your sounds. Just tell me.

ANDY: Well - I just - I mean… aren’t they all?

PRODUCER KAYA: [considers leaping out of the moving car]

CHRIS: [full body shuddering] Aren’t all what’s what, Andy?

ANDY: All circles… flat?

CHRIS: [taking a disquietingly long look at the bayou and contemplating the sweet release of death by drowning] … what?

ANDY: Well - if I might wax Euclidean for a moment - as a lark, perhaps, for never the pedant, not I! - aren’t all circles, in the technical sense… flat?

CHRIS: No.

ANDY: I think yes!

He pulls out a dog-eared copy of Edwin Abbott Abbot’s Flatland. In the margins he has doodled an image of himself doing a wheelie on a Harley that’s itself riding on top of a surfboard that’s catching the perfect wave with Princess Leia in her slave girl costume sitting on his handlebars, in one hand he shoots a gun into the air, in the other he holds his ejaculating penis, he wears cool guy sunglasses, his grin self-satisfied and broad.

CHRIS: You never saw a donut in your life, Andy? A tire? A Cheerio?

PRODUCER KAYA: [reluctantly] Technically that’s a torus, Chris.

Andy fist pumps. Chris wheels around in the car, wild eyed and incredulous.

CHRIS: You’re taking his side?!?

PRODUCER KAYA: Now now, I love my boys equally.

ANDY: Are there ever really sides, to anything?

CHRIS: There’s sides to this circles argument!

ANDY: Chris, Chris, Chris - did the Quakers teach you nothing? A circle has no vertices and thus no sides!

Chris quietly pulls out his gun and starts raising it to his own temple.

PRODUCER KAYA: I think you were doing a thing, Chris? Rust-Chris? I wanted to hear it. What was the flat circle thing about?

CHRIS: [reluctantly lowering his gun] Everything we’ve ever made, we’ll make again - the season finale recap, the trailer reaction, the listener mailbag, the shitty opening banter…. Over and over, into infinity. There is no new show. Podcasts have no beginning and no ending. There are no episodes to this shit! There’s only the show, returning, forever and eternal. We’ve taken this drive ten thousand times before and we’ll take it infinitely many times again. You think you’re watching Severance? You’re really watching the slow death of your own capacity to pay attention, all to satisfy some jaded pricks half-listening at 2.0x speed, waiting for their own opinions to be parroted back to them.

ANDY: That’s a very long way of saying you don’t like a show.

CHRIS: I’m not allowed to not like things. That’s how we get people to keep coming on these podcasts, by pretending we like everything, Mr. Robot, Tyler Perry movies, stuff like that. I’m just a vessel. [taps temple] Bill had my not-liking-things neurons surgically removed.

ANDY: Michelle Obama is a devoted listener of our podcast.

CHRIS: I don’t understand how that’s connected to our current conversation.

ANDY: No one ever does!

3. INT. MARTY’S HOUSE — NIGHT

A dinner of agonizing wholesomeness. Andy’s wife MAGGIE (skeptical, watching everything) sets down a casserole for her family. Andy presides at the head of the table like a man narrating a commercial for his own existence. Chris sits rigid, holding a glass of wine he has not decided whether to drink, dreaming of picking up girls at Duff’s.

ANDY: [carving] This is what it’s all about, Chris.

MAGGIE: I thought his name was Rust.

ANDY: The girls. The wife. You know…

[seeing Andy waxing philosophical, both Maggie and Chris pull deeply from their drinks]

ANDY: … a man builds a life as a bulwark. You work, you provide, you come home, you do bath time, you put on a little Taylor in the car the next morning because the girls love it - not me, the girls, heh, but also me - and you protect the entire fragile architecture with your whole body. And then… you decompress.

CHRIS: I think the Taylor Swift bit is a little tired.

ANDY: Are you saying it’s tired on a fake Andy level, a real Andy level, or a Freddie level?

MAGGIE: Aging millennials with Gryffindor tattoos paid for this house.

ANDY: I hate cynical franchise slop! Now pass me one of those chocolate frogs with John Lithgow’s shame-filled face on the package.

CHRIS: You know none of this is real, right? The being good, the being safe - it’s a story we tell ourselves so we can get some sleep, a way to hide from the relentless march of entropy. [pauses] But this casserole’s incredible, Jesus Christ.

Maggie laughs awkwardly, then secretly pours a little more vodka into her Chardonnay.

ANDY: [oblivious, beaming] See, the wife loves him, the girls love him. Everybody loves Rust. Chris. Rust.

PRODUCER KAYA: [from the ether] Everybody loves Chris. Nobody loves Rust.

CHRIS: I’m a regular on 37 podcasts. I have never once been inside a kitchen this happy. Don’t take this for granted, Marty-Andy.

4. INT. ROADSIDE BAR - NIGHT

Andy “decompresses.” LISA, a court stenographer so implausibly hot it utterly breaks an already-broken show, leans on the bar. Andy arrives mid-rationalization, really in his zone, a man building the alibi before the crime.

ANDY: [sliding in] A man contains multitudes, you understand. Yes, there are certain load-bearing facts about me, facts of biography, facts of family. And yet! There is also a self, beyond fact - the artist, the showrunner, the guy who wrote for Vibe twenty years ago - who requires, periodically, to be seen.

LISA: You talk a lot.

ANDY: It’s my whole thing.

LISA: [bending over to expose her cleavage] Buy me a drink, Marty.

ANDY: OOOOOOHHHHHHH BOOOOOOOYYYYYY!

5. INT. BURNED CHURCH - DAY

Charred beams, a collapsed roof open to white sky. On a surviving wall, a faded mural: the spiral again, a crowd of spectral figures. Chris goes still the way he went still the first time he got a handy at the Khyber during a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club set. Andy photographs everything, tastefully arranging his shots like he’s fucking Carleton Watkins shooting a crime scene.

ANDY: [admiring his work] Another winner for the Green-man!

CHRIS: The mayor. The Tuttles. CARCOSA! [touching the wall] It keeps surfacing - in the diaries, in the brothel ledgers, in the Spotify comments from fans with parasocial delusions of someday buying me a michelada and sharing a laugh with Cousin Sal. There’s a whole machine under this town, Andy-Marty. It runs on the bodies of the people who struggle, the people who don’t matter. Unlike us, Hollywood insiders who are personal friends with every showrunner who comes on to promote their latest horseshit.

ANDY: I thought the Obi-Wan Kenobi show was a delight.

CHRIS: We’ve just gotta keep chasing that rabbit, dog.

ANDY: Okay, but here’s where I get nervous.

CHRIS: There are times when you aren’t nervous?

ANDY: Every thread you’re pulling runs uphill. The school, the ministry, the money, all the vague conspiracist spaghetti this show throws weakly at the wall in an attempt to hide the fact that there’s no substance to be found anywhere in it. And at the top of every thread is -

Both men instinctively glance toward the heavens, where a single shaft of light beams down. In that shaft of light they see, or think they see, a spectral figure.

CHRIS: The Yellow King.

ANDY: [whispering] I’m not saying anything about him. He’s done a lot of good in this community. He gave us a platform. He could be a problem and also be the reason we have jobs. Both things can be true! I’m trying on a new personality as a both-things guy.

CHRIS: You’re scared of him.

ANDY: I’m respectful of him. There’s a difference and the difference is fear.

CHRIS: The difference is fear and that’s an argument that you’re not afraid?

ANDY: [ignoring, hedging at full sail] I’m not going to be the guy, the old guy, who looks at the powerful, beloved figure that signs the checks and goes, “actually, this is a vast criminal conspiracy.” That’s such a tired take. Let other people have that take. I’ll just quietly think it forever and never say it.

CHRIS: [popping a fresh Zyn] I’m gonna say it.

ANDY: When?

CHRIS: My deathbed. Quietly.

6. INT. INTERROGATION BOX - NIGHT

Chris, looking through two-way glass at a sweating suspect, prepares for a legendary Cohle interrogation - the leaning-in, the false intimacy, the confession pulled out like a splinter. Andy is composing a complaint letter to the Trader Joe’s corporation in his head.

CHRIS: [staring at the suspect] You know what? You know what? I’m gonna give him the Wayne Jenkins impression! That’s the closer right there.

Andy looks at Producer Kaya forlornly. For a moment they lock eyes, trying to talk themselves into the necessary course of action.

CHRIS: The Wayne Jenkins! Heheh! Everybody loves it!

Andy and Producer Kaya nod to each other, dejected; Andy wipes a single tear. They know what they have to do.

CHRIS: Glenn Powell, he loved the Wayne Jenkins! He laughed so hard!

AMANDA DOBBINS: [from a pocket dimension] Diiiiiiiid heeeeeeeee?

Producer Kaya pulls a .357 magnum revolver from her purse and, shaking, raises it, pointing it an inch from Chris’s head.

ANDY: [nodding solemnly, mouthing the words] It’s time.

CHRIS: You know… maybe it’s not the moment for the Wayne Jenkins.

ANDY: For me, it’s always a yes, except for moments like now, when it is, if I may be so bold, a no.

Producer Kaya wipes her forehead, lowering her pistol back into her Hermès.

CHRIS: Time to shine.

Chris begins interrogating the suspect. Watching through the two-way glass, Andy narrates to Producer Kaya, explaining everything that’s happening even though she’s standing right there and is perfectly capable of following along.

ANDY: [reverent, jealous] This is the thing he does. Watch. He doesn’t break them. He empathizes with them to death. He convinces a man that confessing is the kindest thing anyone’s ever offered him. It’s grotesque. It’s genius. I could never. I’d start talking about Briarpatch and the “USA Network golden era” and the guy would lawyer up. That’s why I’m not in the box.

PRODUCER KAYA: You’re not in the box because HR says you’re not allowed in there anymore.

ANDY: Because of the Mickey and Conrad thing?

PRODUCER KAYA: Because of the Mickey and Conrad thing.

ANDY: [sighing] The trials of Job!

Inside the box, Chris gets a name and a location. A man called LEDOUX. He emerges.

CHRIS: You know, the Wayne Jenkins bit, it’s like that Simpsons stepping on the rake thing. Like, the funny part is that it isn’t funny. It’s meta.

ANDY: Sure it is, buddy. Sure it is.

7. INT. INTERROGATION BOX - LATER

A different suspect: a hollow, dry-eyed woman who did an unthinkable thing to her own children. Chris already has the confession, got it the way he gets everything, with theatrical jocularity. A cop moves to lead the suspect out. At the door she turns and asks, small-voiced, what happens to her now.

CHRIS: [leaning in, the gentlest voice you’ve ever heard] The press is gonna be hard on you. And prison’s very hard on people who hurt kids. So if you ever get the chance… you should kill yourself.

He straightens, tucks in a fresh Zyn, and walks out like he’d commented on the weather. Long silence.

ANDY: [shaken] You can’t… that’s not a note you give a person.

PRODUCER KAYA: He gives that note a lot.

ANDY: Really?

PRODUCER KAYA: Have you seen Ryen Rusillo in the break room recently?

ANDY: [the critic surfacing against his will] And the awful part - and I would never endorse it - are we so fallen that we can’t tell the difference between appreciation and endorsement? Sontag spoke on this - the awful part is the delivery was immaculate. No malice! Perfect read. Hateful. Flawless. [beat] God, I respect the technique in a way I’m going to need to discuss with my analyst.

CHRIS: [brooding] I’m just worried she won’t have the courage to actually kill herself.

ANDY: OK, well, maybe you should do your Wayne Jenkins, then.

8. EXT. HOUSING PROJECT - NIGHT

[to be played as a single unbroken six-minute take, the camera never cutting, the way the show shot it so everyone would talk about how they shot it and thus not notice that like a full six episodes of this shit is wheel-spinning, boring sidequests, and portentous gasbag monologues that Nick Pizzolatto didn’t have the chops for, or as I like to call it, pulling an Adolescence.]

Chris, in a leather kutte and a borrowed mustache, drags Andy - wide-eyed, badge tucked, narrating his own fear - through a gunfight he did not consent to; they go over a fence, through a kitchen where a family is eating, past a man with a shotgun, into an alley, onto the hood of a moving Crown Vic, through dogs barking, through sirens swelling, through helicopter light strobing, the whole sequence engineered for one purpose, which is so that for the next ten years critics will say “the tracking shot, man, the TRACKING shot” while remembering nothing else about the case, the victims, or the conspiracy - until the camera finally, mercifully holds on the two of them collapsed against a dumpster.

ANDY: [gasping] Was that - was that for the plot or was that for the discourse?

CHRIS: [calm, reloading] Both things. You’re a both-things guy. We both are!

ANDY: We’re both both things guys?

CHRIS: Right.

ANDY: I only like being a things guy when you’re the other thing guy.

CHRIS: We’re too old for this.

ANDY: You know that shot’s gonna be the only thing anybody remembers.

CHRIS: A flat circle….

[Andy makes the noise.]

9. EXT. LEDOUX COMPOUND — DUSK

A meth shack in the trees, festooned with the twig traps. REGGIE LEDOUX patrols in his underwear and a gas mask, muttering prophecy. Chris and Andy move in.

LEDOUX: [through the mask, to no one] Time is a flat circle. You’ve done this before. You’ll do it again. There’s a season two coming and it will be worse.

ANDY: [listening as they sneakily advance] This season is quite bad itself, actually.

FREDDIE: Christ, yes, thank you.

ANDY: Portentous nonsense that people ascribe all kind of meaning to because they’re bored and want to feel something.

FREDDIE: As a mystery it could just literally not be worse. All that business with the boat means nothing! They figure out the mystery through a totally fanciful intuitive leap based on information the viewer doesn’t have!

ANDY: A picture of a green house? That’s the vital clue?

FREDDIE: I’ve painted a lot of houses in my life. I never got paint on ONE of my ears, let alone BOTH. And the “sniper in the trees” bit! Doggerel!

ANDY: The Reddit theorizing, what mishegaas.

CHRIS: DON’T TALK BAD ABOUT ONE OF MY SPECIAL THINGS!

They breach. Chris clears the front, Andy pushes into the back rooms and stops. Whatever is back there, we do not see it. We see Andy’s face, the face of the girl dad, all of his self-control draining out of him at once.

ANDY: [no longer narrating, very quiet] Chris. The back rooms. There’s - Chris, there are kids back here.

CHRIS: I prefer not to let the concept of children enter my mental world.

Andy walks back to where Ledoux kneels, cuffed, and executes him - one shot, off-frame. The prophecy stops. Silence broken only by tree frogs.

CHRIS: [after a long beat, surveying the scene with terrible practicality] Okay. Here’s the story. He went for a gun. We returned fire. We saved the kids and we’re heroes and the case is closed and nobody asks who he answered to.

ANDY: [hollow] We don’t pull the thread.

CHRIS: We can’t. Not today. They’ll give us medals so we’ll stop. They always give you something so you’ll stop.

ANDY: Time for a time jump. How’s 2012?

CHRIS: What happened to 2002?

ANDY: That’s just the infidelity and betrayal part and it would be a real drag in a parody of this nature.

CHRIS: 2012 it is, then! Surely our beloved 76ers will have won a championship by then!

PRODUCER KAYA: [to camera] They didn’t speak for years. The downloads cratered. BlueChew didn’t renew their sponsorship of the After Dark segment. Even FanDuel stopped asking Chris to come up with rube-exploiting parlays. These were… the dark times.

10. INT. DIVE BAR/RUST’S LAIR - NIGHT

Years on. Chris has gone feral. He keeps a bar he barely tolerates. Arranged on every surface, sculptures made entirely of empty Zyn tins, hundreds of them, a man’s despair rendered as flat little pucks of tobacco. Andy arrives in a sad blazer, now working as a PA for David Ellison.

ANDY: [taking in the tin sculptures] What is all this?

CHRIS: [points] That one’s a man. That one’s the future. That one’s a diorama of the legendary July 27, 1987 Replacements show at Chestnut Cabaret. I’ve had a lot of time.

ANDY: They reopened it.

CHRIS: The Chestnut?!?

ANDY: The case. There’s a new body - antlers, spiral, the whole bit. I honestly find it a bit derivative, if I’m being completely honest, and to me it implicates the slow attrition of standards in -

CHRIS: Which means we got the wrong guy.

ANDY: We got the wrong guy.

CHRIS: Which means the thread we didn’t pull is still attached to something. I never stopped, Marty. I’ve got a storage unit. I’ve got the Big Book. I know who it is. I’ve known for years. It goes all the way up.

ANDY: [the old cowardice flickering, then dying] You know I’m going to want to find seventeen reasons not to say his name on air.

CHRIS: I know.

ANDY: And you know I’m going to find them, and then come have your back on this thing anyway.

CHRIS: [almost a smile] And that’s why you’re my dog.

ANDY: [genuinely moved] God. I love that for me.

He extends a hand. Chris takes it. Behind them, a single Zyn-tin sculpture catches the light: it is, unmistakably, a crowned figure in yellow.

11. EXT. CARCOSA - NIGHT

A ruined Southern Gothic estate swallowed by swamp & cliche - kudzu, dead franchises, the bones of every show that got three seasons and a cancellation. At its dark heart lives ERROL CHILDRESS: the scarred groundskeeper, the green-eared monster that’s been mowing the lawns of the powerful for thirty years and listening at every door. Chris and Andy move into the maze with flashlights and a dwindling supply of nerve.

ANDY: [whispering] This is where the discourse said it would all pay off. The conspiracy. The network. Tuttle. The Yellow King. Untold thousands of theories.

CHRIS: Have you been reading Reddit again?

ANDY: Only when I need to cum.

CHRIS: [grim] And instead of all that they imagined, it’s one sad man in a hole.

ANDY: The absolute and total failure of this show, - which I stress, I respect so much - and I would never say this is a flaw - but narratively, after all that convoluted lore, all that menace, to collapse it down to a single random spooky guy in a maze does feel, and I want to be careful -

CHRIS: Andy.

FREDDIE: He’s right! After all that shit, it’s just some lame creepy Southern guy cliche who doesn’t matter and we had no reason, hell, no ability to suspect???

ANDY: It feels like the conspiracy fizzles. Just fizzles! As a mystery, this could not be worse. [comprehending what he’s just done] There. I directly said a negative thing. I feel sick, and yet… lightened.

Errol emerges from the dark, soft-voiced and dreaming.

ERROL: Come die with me, little priests… I prefer the Midnight Boys.

Chris looks up through the broken roof and, with terrible timing, the night sky opens - a slow cosmic spiral of stars resolving into the great churning Algorithm itself, a nebula of Spotify recommendations, and at its center, vast and benevolent and terrible, the face of SIMMONS - The Yellow King. Chris gasps. Errol strikes, a blade into Chris’s gut. Andy screams, takes a hatchet to the shoulder, and driven by blood and rage and the love of two daughters, draws and fires. Errol drops. The maze goes quiet. The two men lie tangled in the dirt of Carcosa, bleeding, alive.

ANDY: [wheezing] Chris. Chris, stay with me. Don’t you dare make this the series finale.

CHRIS: [bleeding out] This… this episode… is brought to you by… SimpliSafe….

PRODUCER KAYA: My god. What a pro.

CHRIS: [staring at the sky, far away] I saw it, Andy. The whole thing. It’s just one big - we’re inside it, all of us, a flat circle -

ANDY: Aren’t all circles -

[Chris dies from hearing Andy’s correction]

ANDY: Never mind! Never mind!

CHRIS: [revived, smiling through the blood] The best… worst… best part is it’s all free… with ads.

12. EXT. HOSPITAL - NIGHT

Both men, bandaged, in wheelchairs and robes, parked on the curb under a clear black sky. Kaya waits with the van.

ANDY: [gently] You used to say it was all dark, man. Indifferent universe. Content as the heat death of attention. The flat circle. The void with a paywall.

CHRIS: [eyes on the stars] Yeah.

ANDY: Well our Quaker god is out there, and he’s spreading the light.

CHRIS: OK first of all I thought you were Jewish, second of all the Quaker god is, like, just a groovy feeling.

ANDY: But it’s our groovy feeling, good buddy.

CHRIS: [a long quiet beat, nicotine coursing through his stimulant-battered bloodstream, the closest this man gets to peace] When I was under, in the dark, I felt something I didn’t have words for. Not a bit. Not a take. Not a bout of laughing too hard at the boss’s bad joke. Just a… warmth, like a kitchen with a casserole in it. Like a kid in a car who loves a song you’d never pick yourself but love to hear anyway. [a beat] Once there was only dark. No mics, no podcast feeds, nobody listening to anybody. And now… [gestures weakly at the whole glittering apparatus of the sky] now there’s all this light. Look at all of it. Everybody talking. Everybody heard. Free-flowing conversations that occasionally touch on mature subjects.

ANDY: [softly] You think the light’s winning?

CHRIS: [the smallest nod] Yeah, Marty. Andy. [He pops one last Zyn, ignoring his heart crying out in protest] I think the light’s winning.

Andy reaches over and takes his friend’s hand. Kaya starts the van.

ANDY: [voice breaking] God. I love that for you.

PRODUCER KAYA: [from the driver’s seat] Get in. You’re both on four other podcasts in the morning.

CHRIS: [cries]

ANDY: [cries]

PRODUCER KAYA: [soothing] Alright, my honeys. Let’s get you home.

The van pulls away under the winning light. Hold. Cut to black.

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Every few years, a piece of conventional wisdom about the job market hardens into something that parents, guidance counselors, and pundits repeat without much scrutiny. You already know what happened with “learn to code.” A current favorite, offered as a corrective to decades of “college for everyone,” is that young people should go into the trades - that is, skilled manual occupations (think plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, welding, HVAC repair, etc) that are typically learned through apprenticeship or vocational training rather than at a four-year institution. Superficially, the appeal of this advice is obvious. Tuition keeps climbing, plenty of graduates are un(der)employed, and there’s something satisfyingly egalitarian about pointing to trades and saying that is where the real money is. But as a piece of practical guidance, “go into the trades” is nearly useless. It treats an enormous, internally-contradictory category as if it were one thing, a single safe bet, and in doing so commits the very error it claims to fix.

I’m a big “not everybody should go to college” person, and I badly want to see an American labor market with more paths to prosperity, including many that don’t entail a traditional four-year college education. And jobs in what we call the trades certainly can play more of a part of that. But we need to be precise if we want to be helpful.

The problem is that “the trades” is not a thing, not really. It’s a label stretched over occupations that have almost nothing in common beyond the absence of a four-year degree and appearing foreign to the educated classes. An elevator mechanic, a residential drywaller, a journeyman lineman, a diesel technician, a flooring installer, and a stationary engineer all fall under the umbrella of the trades, but their earnings, working conditions, physical toll, job security, and long-term trajectory all diverge wildly. Some of these paths involve strong unions, structured apprenticeships, and pensions; others are dominated by gig-style subcontracting where you’re only as secure in your employment as your next job. Some reward you with a body that still works at sixty, while others quietly destroy your knees, shoulders, and lungs. Telling a teenager to go into the trades is about as informative as telling them to go into office work. The variance within the category is so large that membership in it tells you almost nothing about where a given person will land.

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As with so many of the worst things in American politics, we have the Nixon administration to thank for the term ratfucking. It entered the American political lexicon through the Nixon-era operatives who perfected its techniques: dirty tricks, sabotage, deception, and (especially) bad-faith manipulation of the pliable political newsmedia. Ratfucking isn’t just trying to hurt your political opponent’s campaign; that’s electoral politics. Ratfucking is a covert process built on plausible deniability, tactics that no establishment politician or campaign is going to publicly acknowledge as their work. Think of the planted story timed for maximum damage, the dirty trick disguised as spontaneous misfortune. The essence of ratfucking is not that the damaging material is necessarily false. It’s that the sabotage is engineered - sourced, timed, and laundered through credulous media intermediaries to produce an outcome that the saboteurs could never achieve openly. By that definition, the cascade of media revelations now engulfing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner is as pure and plain a case of ratfucking as I can remember… and almost certainly engineered by the Democratic establishment, which cares more about control of the party than winning the Senate. (The Iron Law of Institutions wins again.)

For the record, I’m not a Maine voter and I’m not especially a Platner fan. He’s not my vision for the future of Democratic party and I haven’t donated money to him or anything. But this process has played out time and again, where the center-right faction of the Democratic party has weaponized liberal media (like, say, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and New York) to do their dirty work, and inevitably against a more populist, left-wing candidate who represents a threat to the Clinton-Obama Democratic party machine. And it sucks.

So, let’s start with motive. Graham Platner is not a generic Democrat; he’s part of the ascendant insurgent wing within the party that has begun to represent a real threat to the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers who have steered the party towards neoliberalism, capitulation to the right, and pro-corporate policies since before I was born. Platner is an oysterman and Marine Corps veteran seeking to unseat five-term incumbent Susan Collins, running on a classic “throw the bums out” anti-billionaire, anti-establishment platform. Crucially, his rise was an act of defiance against the party’s Washington leadership. His platform, heavy on working-class rhetoric, pushed establishment-backed former governor Janet Mills out of the race in April, to the dismay of top Democrats in Washington who felt the popular two-term governor was a safer bet. The establishment’s preference was never a secret: Chuck Schumer abandoned any appearance of neutrality, declaring that Mills “is the best candidate to retire Susan Collins” in what Axios plainly described as a full-fledged fight between the party’s establishment and its left wing. When a faction wants a candidate gone but can’t beat him at the ballot box, the incentive to remove him by other means is obvious. That’s the soil in which ratfucking grows. (That might be a mixed metaphor idk.)

Then let’s examine the sourcing, the single most damning element. The most destructive blows against Platner didn’t come from Susan Collins or the National Republican Senatorial Committee or conservative media. Of course not! Populist left Dems are never killed by the right; they don’t need to be, given how relentlessly their own party establishment works to defeat them. And indeed the really damaging hits against Platner have come from inside his own party. The sexting story, which has detonated mere days before the primary, traces back to his campaign’s own internal files: Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, disclosed the texts to a campaign staffer last August during an internal opposition research review, in the earliest stages of Platner’s candidacy. This should go without saying: a year-old internal disclosure does not surface on its own; an “interested party” had to have gotten involved, and it almost certainly had to be a Democratic source that had knowledge of the internal oppo research that Platner’s campaign was developing. The New York Times subsequent story about former girlfriends - of course, of course, of course it’s the New York Times, the weapon of the Democratic corporatist establishment since time immemorial - was apparently driven by “rumors” that were floating around. (I wonder who floated them!) Meanwhile, former Maine state Rep. Genevieve McDonald, who previously served as Platner’s political director, resigned from the campaign and has publicly questioned his viability, reportedly describing him as unelectable. What’s in it for her? I don’t know, let’s see where she goes in the next few years! I have a funny feeling she’s going to get a cushy landing in DC.

A campaign’s own oppo research, flagged internally, leaking to the national press thanks to vague and unattributed “rumors” at the decisive moment … these are the textbook signature of sabotage from within. It’s ratfucking, folks.

It gets stranger. One of the women central to the Times story isn’t a random Maine voter. Lyndsey Fifield, who described a roughly two-year on-again, off-again relationship with Platner, has worked for conservative groups and was part of Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign. When the case against a progressive Democrat is partly built on testimony from a Republican operative, laundered through the paper of record, the line between journalism and opposition research has effectively dissolved. And if you want to say, well, if a conservative operative is involved, isn’t it the Collins campaign behind it?, I would make two points. First, revealing the information now makes little sense when Mills is still on the ballot; if this is about winning the general instead of scuttling the primary for Platner, why do it now? I promise the Collins campaign sees sensible establishment figure Janet Mills as a stronger opponent. Second, even if this info dump was designed to help Collins, that doesn’t exonerate Schumer or the NYT in the least - I promise, both Chuck Schumer and the Dem leadership he represents and the political reporters at the Times would prefer Susan Collins get another term than have Platner secure the seat for the Democrats. Collins, who has proven to be one of the most consequential enablers of the horrors of both George W. Bush and Donald Trump, is a Very Serious Centrist of the kind that both the Democratic leadership and the NYT assume should rule the world.

And we should take care not to give short shrift to the timing, which is everything. Ratfucking lives and dies by the calendar. The pattern here isn’t the random arrival of inconvenient truths but a metronomic sequence engineered for cumulative effect - what worried Democrats themselves call a “drip, drip, drip” dynamic. (Again, quintessential ratfucking.) The inflammatory Reddit posts surfaced just a few days after Gov. Janet Mills announced she was running… precisely when the establishment most wanted to hurt Platner. The texts, known internally since 2025, broke in the final days before the June 9 primary. The oppo sat dormant for the better part of a year, then erupted at the one moment calculated to inflict maximum harm while denying voters time to absorb it. Do you really think that just… happens?

Finally, there’s a quirk of Maine primaries that makes this all particularly gross. Why release devastating material now, when Platner is the overwhelming primary favorite and cannot realistically be stopped at the ballot box? Well, one theory would have to be “because costing Platner the primary was never the actual goal.” Under Maine law, a candidate who wins the June 9 primary and subsequently withdraws by July 13 may be replaced by a nominee selected by (drumroll please) “party officials,” who would then choose a replacement. Think about it, friends! If you’re Chuck Schumer and the NYT and everyone else who will do anything to make sure that the corporatist wing of the Democratic party stays in control, what could be a better outcome than Platner winning the primary but being forced to step down during time the period when the party establishment chooses the nominee? The damaging revelations seem perfectly timed to land when Platner can no longer be defeated by Maine voters but can still be pressured into withdrawing afterward… at which point the party committee, not the electorate, gets to choose. Is that the scheme here? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put it past anyone involved. I do know that the party sat on its own opposition research for the better part of a year, then released it in the final days before the primary, at the precise moment when Platner can no longer be stopped in the primary but can still be removed afterward. That’s all very convenient.

Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Platner early and has refused to abandon him, named the underlying logic directly: the reason the establishment wants Platner gone is not the tattoo or the texts but that the oyster farmer represents a movement within the party that’s a genuine threat to the billionaires who control our political system. Strip away the moralizing and the cynical corporate HR politics and the sequence is obvious: an inconvenient insurgent, internal material weaponized by his own side, a Republican-linked source, a calendar tuned to a removal statute…. That is ratfucking by any honest definition.

Look, Platner’s campaign confirmed he sent multiple women sexually explicit texts at the beginning of his marriage. You are free to have moral misgivings if you’d like. If you vote on those moral misgivings, rather than on the fact that Platner is the only Democrat who can defeat the 73-year-old Collins and in doing so help stop Trump’s agenda, I think that’s very childish - and if you’re one of the vast majority of centrist Dems who have excused constant accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton (which are so numerous they have their own Wikipedia page), you’re a raging hypocrite. Sure: voters deserve whatever information there is to give them before they vote, and unflattering oppo dumps before primaries are ordinary, not sinister. But a coordinated effort by all of these establishment media entities, launched with suspiciously-similar language and at this exact moment in the campaign cycle, drawing on information that could only have come from Democratic sources, against a candidate uniquely hated by both the Democratic establishment and the wealthy whose interests they represent… I would like a little transparency at least, please.

I’ve been getting the classic “That’s crazy”/“Everybody knows that” routine on this story - I’ve been told by all manner of savvy people that there’s no coordinated anti-Platner effort, but also that of course there’s a coordinated anti-Platner effort and I’m naive to believe that I could ever live in a world without ratfucking. It would be cool if people picked one or the other, if they’d settle on “that’s not happening” or “of course that’s happening lol” and not give me both at the same time. And it would particularly be cool if the establishment media stopped acting as unpaid political operatives for the center-right Democratic party establishment - but, well, I guess some things are beyond hope.

Recently a bunch of young people have been using the term “point of view” in a way that’s unhelpful. I say unhelpful rather than wrong because I have zero interest in jumping into the grammar wars, which aren't actually much of a war. Just about zero people out there are actually strict grammarians, and the collective essaying world has taken sides against “grammar Nazis” at a scale of at least 1000 to 1, so it’s a war against almost no human enemy. You see that with this whole POV business; there’s ten billion essays and tweets and YouTube videos defending the practice and like one guy on the bus who hates it, but we have to pretend that he’s the hegemonic force or whatever. It’s weird stuff, but the impulse ultimately has a clear source: fear of looking old.

The deal is that much of Gen Z (and “Gen Alpha,” which is the dumbest generational name ever devised) uses “point of view,” or “POV,” to mean simply “look at this,” rather than “this image or video is shown from the point of view of X,” the traditional usage. Apparently it’s all over TikTok in particular - a video will be labeled “POV: an elephant,” and what you see is an elephant and not something seen from the perspective of an elephant. “POV: you rollerskated for the first time” but it’s just video of the TikTok user rollerskating rather than rollerskating from the perspective of the rollerskater. You get the idea. This usage is unhelpful and impractical, if you ask me, whether or not we want to call it incorrect! As is so often the case with imprecision in language, this behavior gets rid of a very useful construction and puts in its place something we already could say in many different ways. As with turning “literally” into an empty intensifier often applied to metaphorical use, the mass meta-sanctimony of the anti-grammarian set on this issue has left the English language weaker than it was and called it progressive. And now here the NYT trots out a linguist to tell you that you’re a reactionary for maybe preferring the more useful version.

The whole world of anti-grammar cop cops is its own thing and, like so much else of what passes for progressive these days, is vastly larger and more influential and more powerful than the target it mislabels hegemonic. (“I don’t care who knows it or what it costs me… language pedantry is irritating!” Truly, profile in courage.) The Times piece suggest that people insisting on a correct usage of language may be engaged in an effort to enforce “social power,” despite the fact that the anti-grammarians won in an absolute rout decades ago and obviously have more social power. It’s not hard to find a linguist who comes down forcefully on the side of “everything goes” in language; indeed, almost all of them do, and the NYT employs one of them as a columnist. That this attitude amounts to telling other people how to use language by saying that you can’t tell other people how to use language is a simple point that remains undiscussed. (Remember friends: every descriptivism is meta-linguistically prescriptivist.) It’s remarkable how there’s no right way to use language, but the people who want to use it the traditional way are inevitably wrong! It’s all a will to power, all of it.

The deeper context here is the fact that the people using “POV” in a way almost tailor-made to obscure meaning and reduce comprehensibility are young, and the desire to avoid being the fogey criticizing young people has become a civilization-swallowing meme, a reflexive, terrified behavior driven by the deepest fear our culture possesses: the fear of looking old. The pieces defending using POV when meaning “look at this” or “literally” when meaning “intensely” or “ironically” when meaning, fuck, who knows at this point, they sprout like mushrooms in cowshit because of the fear of aging, the fear of being owned, the fear of “old man yells at cloud.” Desperate to avoid looking like the wrong kind of old person, aging writers and journos and commentators look for excuse after excuse for bad behavior by the young. And there’s no better example than the absolutely dogged refusal to judge young students for cheating with LLMs.

There’s a particular sound a room full of educated adults makes when a young person does something wrong; you’ve heard it many times before and so have I. It’s the sound of a roomful of tightened throats clearing in unison, preparing to explain that it isn’t really the young person’s fault. Consider this remarkable document from The New Yorker. In it, a bunch of career college educators lament the rise of AI cheating in higher education, discuss techniques they use to try to curtail that cheating (or, often, rationalize giving up on that effort), and sing sad dirges for what college used to be. The one thing that seems anathema to most of them is judging college students for engaging in straightforwardly unethical behavior. Why, we couldn’t do that! We couldn’t look at people deliberately and knowingly violating a basic agreement that they’ve made with their professors and their schools and say “Perhaps this is a bit immoral.”

The teachers interviewed in that piece are largely sympathetic, if a bit myopic and far, far too eager to please their students. I’m afraid the broader tendency on campus is less thoughtful and less enlightened. No, we don’t do a lot of judging of students anymore, certainly not on the university level, where there’s palpable anxiety over not being among the young hip understanding young down to earth accommodating young professors who keeps it real, youngly. There’s an inescapable drive to be liked by the people you ostensibly have authority over, a fog of “student centered” anxiety that clouds undergraduate institutions, the impulse that brought us Cool Professors. That linked piece led to absolute howls of anger and recrimination on social media, which is just a reminder that a hit dog will holler. The reality is that academia, like media, is an industry that a lot of people join in an effort to stave off their terror at their advancing age, to be around youth and (they hope) maybe suck some of it up by osmosis.

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Honestly, I think a lot of modern college teachers just don’t want to handle the drag of disciplining students, so they come up with tortured justifications for why they shouldn’t ever have to do so. But of course disciplining students is a core part of ensuring that they get what they’re supposed to out of their educations, which means this is a matter of instructors putting their own emotional comfort over the best interests of students. Seems bad!

The spectacle of grown adults insisting that we simply cannot judge college students for outsourcing their thinking to machines is one of those little moral evasions that contemporary culture specializes in: tender, quasi-therapeutic, progressive-sounding, and ultimately a form of abandonment. Of course we can judge them! It is our duty to judge them. There is no such thing as schooling without judgment; no matter what the Cool Professors say, assessment has always been part of education, always always always, and all assessing is a form of judging. That we are judging ethically and morally when we tell students that it’s wrong to cheat does not make it any less core to the educational mission. And the idea that cheating with an LLM is somehow beyond moral evaluation because the technology is new, or because capitalism is bad, or because everybody is anxious, or because life is haaaaaard…. These feelings are not expressions of compassion but condescension dressed up as sophistication. Students are not, in fact, incredibly fragile creatures, and to the degree that they are it’s because we’ve told them to be. Students are moral agents. They make decisions. They know when they’re cheating! And when we refuse to say so, when we wrap every act of dishonesty in therapeutic fog, we’re not liberating them from shame or coercion; we’re telling them that their choices don’t matter, that their integrity isn’t worth defending, and that the university itself has no purpose beyond the smooth processing of tuition payments into credentials.

The students who feed their essay prompts into ChatGPT, copy the output into a Google Doc, turn it in to the professor, and then lie when asked about it… those students, we’re assured, are victims! Victims of the incentive structure; victims of credentialism; victims of capitalism, natch. (Isn’t it lovely how the centuries-old political theory and moral philosophy of socialism have become, in 2026, nothing else than a set of always-available excuses for doing whatever you want?) They’re victims of an education system that was always already a fraud, so who could possibly blame them for committing their own modest little fraud in return? The machine was rigged, the reasoning goes, therefore cheating isn’t cheating but a kind of folk justice, a kid getting their own against a system designed to grind them down…. One question: is this how morality works? No. No, it is not. And how someone who sincerely holds such beliefs could draw a university paycheck without dying of hypocrisy, I couldn’t tell you. If the system is that exploitative and corrupt, your obligation is to quit. Quit!

It’s true: the conditions people are born into shape the range of choices available to them, the kid from the under-resourced district and the rich private school kid are not standing at the same starting line, and incentives are real and powerful and a society which builds a maze and then punishes the rats for taking the shortcut is a society engaged in an elaborate exercise in bad faith. All of that’s true! The problem is that none of it implies that the individual student who chose to cheat did not choose to cheat. And if we care about students, if we respect and honor them, then we respect and honor their capacity for acting as moral beings. It’s absolutely bizarre to me, the way that the people who claim to serve as advocates for students end up damning them with a kind of condescending excuse-making that any one of us would be insulted by.

Somewhere in the last twenty years we collectively decided that to explain a behavior is to excuse it, that causation and culpability are the same substance, that the moment you locate a structural reason for an action you have thereby dissolved the actor inside it, like roofies in a cocktail. “I am baffled by people who say “That schizophrenic man who muttered an anti-Semitic slur deserves no sympathy because mental illness doesn’t do that” and also “That rich kid Dalton grad couldn’t help but ask Gemini to do his homework because he lives in, like, systems or whatever.”) Though this attitude is usually delivered with pretenses of great sophistication, there’s nothing sophisticated about it. A genuinely sophisticated person can hold two ideas at once: the system is unjust AND you, specifically, made a choice and the choice was wrong and you knew it was wrong, which is precisely why you lied about it afterward. The lie is the tell! Nobody lies about something they believe they were actually morally entitled to do. The student who cheats and then conceals it knows he did something wrong. The only people pretending not to know are the adults.

Yes, the students are behaving as you might expect most eighteen-year-olds to behave. Sure, groovy. But the whole point of existing as a moral being is to be the exception to the “most,” to have an individual ethical self and to make choices not as an avatar of an age range or as a subject stricken by stru-stru-structural conditions. But sure - eighteen year olds often cut corners. Eighteen year olds can be lazy and self-justifying and frightened. Sure. That’s a not-entirely-wrong description of youth. I don’t expect every last nineteen-year-old to have the moral spine to resist a tool that produces a passable essay in nine seconds while his roommate sleeps and his deadline approaches. But, again, what is moral is not about what everyone does; it’s about what the individual does. If behavior was justified by how many other people were doing it, well, there would be no such thing as a coherent morality.

The problem is the grown men and women (tenured, bylined, salaried, blue-checked) who have constructed an entire rhetorical apparatus with the sole function of ensuring that no young person is ever held responsible for anything, ever, under any circumstances. And they’ve done so not out of compassion but out of personal vanity. They’ve seen the cultural construct of the old person who complains about the youth these days, probably on Twitter, and because they have no fundamental sense of self to call their own, they fear that the construct will become their reality. So they forgive and they excuse and they rationalize and they dissemble…. This relentless exoneration of the young is less a matter of generosity and more a type of status play. It’s a way for a 36-year-old podcaster or a 45-year-old columnist or a 58-year-old dean or a 63-year-old author to purchase (at the students expense) the one thing those people want more than tenure or relevance or grandchildren: the assurance that they are not old.

The man who says “young people today have no work ethic” is a figure of mockery, a cartoon, a Fox News uncle, a Boomer in the worst sense. And, sure, that’s a lame thing to say. But no one who’s spent years cultivating a self-image as enlightened, dynamic, and savvy will allow themselves to be mistaken for that figure. So they overcorrect. They flip the polarity entirely! They become the adult who, presented with overwhelming evidence that a cohort of students is lying and cheating on an industrial scale, responds by indicting the assignments, the professors, the system, man. By indicting himself, performatively, in the safest imaginable way, the way that costs nothing and flatters everything. We failed them, man. The essay is dead, they announce, with the serene confidence of those who have found a way to be on the right side of history while doing absolutely nothing and disciplining absolutely no one. They gets to feel humble and brave and young, all at once, and the bill for this little performance is sent, as it always is, to the people with the least power in the room: the students who don’t cheat.

After all, in every class there is that inconvenient kid who didn’t cheat, the kid who turned down the chance to use the easy machine and sat with the blank page and produced something worse than what the cheater produced, because that’s what learning looks like - it looks like producing worse things slowly until you can produce better things. Sadly that kid’s watching and learning, watching his peers and his teachers, and this white-knuckled dedication to never judging cheaters is teaching them the worse possible lesson. That kid sees the cheaters get the same grades, or better ones, and witnesses the adults who rush to explain that the cheaters are the real victim here, and that kid learns the actual lesson of contemporary American education: integrity is a sucker’s bet, a tax that only the honest pay. I don’t know if there’s a name for a moral system that consistently rewards deception and punishes cooperation, but I can tell you that it leads to a collapsing society, and we’re living in one. If it makes you feel better, those most responsible certainly aren’t the teenagers.

And this connects with what I’m constantly saying about education and how our romantic notions about it ruin everything: yes, we have to force students to be ethical and to not cheat, and this should not surprise us because the basic act of schooling is forcing students to do things. Coercion is at the heart of education.

Education is a form of coercion. We can dress it up in all the gentle constructivist language we like, we can do the Freire thing, we can pretend that every student is a tiny autodidact yearning only for the right “learning environment,” but the plain truth is that most people learn most of the things they learn because someone makes them. They read the book because there’s a quiz. They solve the problems because there’s a grade. They show up because absences have consequences. This attitude isn’t some monstrous betrayal of pedagogy; it is pedagogy, at least for the great mass of students. Civilization itself is the long, uneven process of forcing our worst instincts into contact with better obligations until habit and conscience start to take over. We have truancy laws for a reason! Leave a pack of kids in a room alone with a textbook, even bright kids, come back in a few hours, and you will find them no smarter. That’s just how kids work. And yes, a big part of teaching is forcing students to be ethical. Not because we want to be wardens of their souls, but because ethics, like algebra or music theory or writing a coherent paragraph, are not magically summoned from within by vibes. Ethics are cultivated under constraint. They’re learned, like almost anything worth learning, through rules, standards, penalties, and the repeated experience of being told “no.” The fantasy that students will become honest scholars while we refuse to impose honesty on them is just another adult abdication masquerading as humane insight. It asks nothing of them, cultivates nothing in them, and then flatters itself for its tenderness while the whole enterprise rots.

Our society has now spent decades marinating in the idea that the best we can do for people is to make excuses for them and ask nothing of them; this is the heart of therapeutic culture, people insisting that they can’t be blamed for cheating on their partner because of their trauma, a nation of busy little meritocrats who lie about having ADHD or autism to get more time on the test, insisting to themselves that capitalism is rigged so they can’t be blamed. The exoneration racket dresses contempt up as compassion because to refuse to blame someone is to refuse to take them seriously as a moral agent. It is to say “I don’t expect anything of you, because I don’t believe you are capable of anything.” When you tell a young person that cheating isn’t their fault, that they’re merely a leaf on the river of capitalism, you’re telling them that they’re not a person but a puppet jerked around by forces they cannot resist and shouldn’t bother trying. That’s about as insulting as it gets. Blame, on the other hand, real blame, the kind that says “you did this, you’re better than this, and I am holding you to that,” is at heart an assumption of dignity, the refusal to give up on someone. Every parent who’s ever loved a child knows this in their bones; it’s only in public, in print, in the great laundering machine of professional opinion that we’ve forgotten it.

So, yes. I blame the students, when they cheat, when they stick the prompt in ChatGPT and then look the professor in the eye and pretend they wrote it themselves. I blame them and you should too, if you want the best for them. Blame them as a form of respect, blame them and then help them, blame them and then build something better, blame them while also burning down the credential mill and the surveillance software and the whole rotten edifice that gives people excuses to cheat. But do not, for the sake of your own self-image, for the cheap pleasure of feeling forever young and forever on the right side, pretend that nothing bad happened and no one did anything wrong. We live in a coarsened society where almost everyone appears to have given up. And when someone cheats, even a young person who you would like to exonerate for your own selfish emotional reasons, you should have the courage to say “You did something wrong, you knew it was wrong, and you deserve censure, blame, consequences.” And the only reason you won’t say that is that you’re more afraid of being seen as old than you are of being a coward - which is itself, I’m sorry to report, the most reliable sign of getting old there is.

I am, as you are aware, not very impressed by LLMs.

I think they have clear implications for some fields that rely on the production of digital goods, such as writing text, developing code, producing images and video, or generating music. These effects will likely prove to be more modest than they are now hyped up to be, and I am deeply, deeply skeptical of claims that this technology will be the first in history to result in long-term net job loss rather than long-term net job growth. (The only evidence anyone can bring to that prediction is raw assertion.) LLMs are best at writing code, and computer programming has been widely predicted to be the field most susceptible to “disruption,” but in fact that job market has been getting healthier lately. (Albeit from a depressed recent baseline.) But still, sure, there will be consequences in the realm of generating digital goods. The issue is that most of the world is not made up of 0s and 1s, the things that LLMs make more abundant are things that were already abundant, and most of our major problems as a species cannot be solved with information; indeed, I suspect that coming to understand the limits of computing will prove to be among the most profound scientific lesson of the 21st century.

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Still, I have tried very hard to be a good critic of this technology rather than a bad critic, an active one rather than a lazy one, an informed one rather than an ignorant one. I made very specific predictions about where LLMs would be in three years and tried to put money on it, which for some reason enraged the kinds of people on Reddit who think that criticisms of AI aren’t specific enough in their predictions and have no stakes. I have asked LLMs to produce information for me about subjects that I already know pretty well, which has been useful when confronting just how often these tools produce profoundly goofy results. I’ve paid for Claude and ChatGPT because people in the AstralCodexTen comments kept insisting that you couldn’t properly assess LLM performance with free versions. I have tried to be the critic that AI enthusiasts want. This has not endeared them to my conclusions - in fact being the kind of critic they say they want seems to only make them more resentful - but at least I’ve come to my skepticism honestly.

So when I sat down to start my next novel in late summer of 2025, a novel drawing from a premise I had written down as the first 20 pages of a screenplay way back in 2009 or so, I thought that it would be worthwhile to see if I could make LLMs useful for the process without actually ever using it to actually generate text that would appear in the novel. This might seem pointless, but I think if you yourself sit down to write a novel you’ll find, over time, that there’s a lot of mental juggling and wrangling of text and story that requires work that has nothing to do with actually producing the words that will end up in the book. Indeed, these kinds of meta-textual problems are involved in producing any kind of book. This is why software like Scrivener exists, to manage all of this complexity. We’ve been putting the final copy of my next nonfiction book (preorder now!) to bed recently, and one of the problems that I’ve found in the galleys is a certain degree of aggravatingly repetitious language. Why does that repetitious language exist in those unfinished versions? Because the book went through a lot of rearranging in terms of which chapter went where, and when that happens, you end up repeating yourself a lot - when you’re not sure what you’ve already given the reader, you have a tendency to give them the same stuff in multiple places. Etc. That got fixed via human collaboration, which is appropriate for a book with a healthy advance written for a giant publishing house. But you can see how this kind of thing might (theoretically) be handled with some LLM magic.

Well, most of my attempts at using LLMs to do meta-textual work on this new novel I’ll be shopping soon didn’t work. But it’s worth exploring what I was trying to do and why, exactly, ChatGPT and Claude were mostly of little help.

First, though, why not use LLMs to generate the text of the novel itself? Like most creative people, I find the question inherently offensive, but I also think that it would be helpful if more writers actually bothered to answer it with specifics. So here you go, in convenient list form.

This is the only thing I’m good at and like to do. I have a bunch of little ancillary interests in life, but I really only have one hobby, reading and writing. (You can say that that’s two hobbies if you’d like, but you can’t write if you don’t read and they are definitely one in my head and heart.) I’ve written before about how frustrating I find the whole performative “I like having written but I hate writing, teehee!” culture among self-identified writers. I’m a writer because I love to write, because it’s the only activity I’ve ever really liked to spend my time on and the only thing I’ve ever demonstrated any skill at doing. Whether I am cursed to professional obsolescence by this technology is one question - my strong suspicion is that the answer is no, but my reasoning is surely motivated in that regard - but what is not a question is that this is what I love to do and so I will go on doing it for as long as I can. Why on earth would I have a machine do the fun part for me? It would be as baffling as, well, as those people who now “do” crosswords by having LLMs solve the clues for them. Put it this way: almost every therapist and shrink I’ve ever has set a goal for me of writing less, and it’s always a struggle to achieve that goal. Because this is the only thing I like doing.

I sincerely believe I’m better at this than the LLMs are. Pretty self-explanatory. The Twitter techbro reply guy mockery writes itself, but I am not impressed by LLM creative writing (defined broadly) and I think I can do a better job of it than they can so I do it myself.

I’m a special snowflake. When I’ve been playing with these systems and trying to see what they can and can’t do, I’ve run up against this dynamic again and again: writing enough to explain the argument I might ask them to make takes so much time and effort writing exactly what I want to say and don’t want to say that it’s not a time saver. A primary purpose of this game, for me, is to relay complex ideas, and a huge part of that is differentiating what I’m saying from what everyone else is saying. I believe that I have a unique point of view; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother to write any of this down. You may dismiss this in whatever terms you like, but it’s how I feel and a big part of why I do this job. Well, if my ideas are singular and complicated and take a lot of turns and digressions, how can I explain exactly what I want the LLMs to say? By… writing it all down, which of course is the very task the LLMs are supposed to take off my hands. Every time I’ve ever tested them by saying “ChatGPT, prepare an 800-1200 word argument on X,” I’ve found that end product an arguments I would never want to be associated with, and attempts to “fix” what they’ve argued to align with my own views are so laborious that no time is ultimately saved. The alternative is to give myself into the trite, well-worn grooves of an argument derived from everyone else’s argument, which means sacrificing the basic sales job for paying me to write. Apparently research shows that relying on LLMs badly shrinks the range of arguments that people produce, and, well… of course it does. With LLMs, what you get back is always inevitably what you’ve already gotten. No thanks.

It’s just a matter of honesty and the compact between reader and writer. My readers expect me to actually write the things I represent as mine. (Certainly I expect that of the writers I read.) And that’s a very important commitment because, again, this is the one and only career I’ve got or want to have. I wouldn’t risk getting caught and I couldn’t live with myself if I pulled off the deception.

I look to art to access the human. There’s this ongoing thing that the annoying AI maximalists do where they try and fool people into thinking that a given piece of art is or is not LLM-generated and then see the reaction and make accusations of hypocrisy or inconsistency…. It’s all very tiresome. A mistake that some of these people make - and, in fairness, that some anti-AI people make too - is in assuming that AI art that fools you is proof of something or other. That is, the AI maximalists insist that AI art can fool people and is therefore as good as that produced by humans, while some anti-AI people think that they can never be fooled. Well, I can be fooled, will be fooled in the future, probably have been fooled in the past. But the conclusions drawn from that fact are all wrong. I don’t access human-made art because I believe I will never be convinced by a machine copy; my capacity to be hoodwinked does not change the fundamental value of human creative work. I access human-made art because I know there’s a human behind it and that’s what I’m looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves. Fooling me in that process is just a con. I would suggest this analogy: though I have never been catfished, if I had been born in another generation, I could very well have been. A person who invested enough effort in fooling me that they were someone else, in an effort to entrap me sexually or romantically, might very well have succeeded. But so what? Would that prove that actual human love isn’t real or valuable or superior to the counterfeit version? Of course not. Similarly, the fact that a machine might fool me into thinking that the art it produces was made by a human does nothing to undermine my goal when I access art: to find the human underneath. And when I produce art myself, I am that human underneath. I could offer nothing else to readers.

OK. The use of LLMs to fulfill tasks related to writing a novel other than the actual composition process. So, here’s how I’d define my research question: how useful could LLMs be in the composition of a longform work of fiction, when no actual language written by an LLM was going to appear in the text itself?

The answer (or my answer anyway) is not very useful, ultimately. Which I guess is unsurprising, once you’ve started from the premise that you won’t use the text generator to generate any of the actual text for the project itself. But I do think the tasks that I attempted were pretty sensible ones and ones that could be of use to writers if in fact the LLMs had done a better job. It’s just that my good-faith efforts - well, as good faith as I could consciously make them - did not bear fruit in a simple, self-interested way. Here’s what I attempted.

At-a-glance chapter summaries. This might seem a little strange; why would the guy who wrote the chapters need one sentence summaries of what happens in them? It’s not about learning what happened in a story I wrote, but rather remembering what happened wherein the most efficient way. In my experience it’s very common to get a bit lost in your own manuscript, trying to remember what event comes before or after another…. I thought having very brief capsule summaries of chapters would help me keep track of continuity and to not get too far from event X before depicting event Y, etc, without having to do a lot of the endless in-manuscript rereading that is so so common when writing.

Both Claude and ChatGPT did a good enough job of producing these sentence-length summaries. On several occasions they emphasized minor elements of the chapters in a way that would have misrepresented the intent of said chapters to a reader, but as the author I have no problem using them to identify what I was looking for. No out and out hallucinations here. I did find however that though the LLMs did an adequate jobs, the utility of these little summaries was less than I had hoped - I still spent a ton of time laboriously pawing through my own work, as is true whenever I write a book. It’s not that I didn’t trust the summaries, it’s that I always needed (or felt I needed) just a little bit more. So not a problem solved by the LLMs, but I can’t blame them either.

Word counts. These ones were, I concede, more of a “gotcha” than a good faith attempt at a useful task - Microsoft Word has a built-in word count, of course, and it just counts in the way traditional algorithmic computers have always been good at. The LLMs, in contrast, still struggled with this task, despite how often we read that they’re now good at math. This is (as I understand it) because of the tokenization process that makes LLMs possible. Usually this kind of thing gets certain AI fanatics huffy with me; the often say that it’s stupid to ask an LLM to do that, here’s a complicated script you can use to get ChatGPT to return the right figure, etc. But as I will not stop saying, the whole economic value of chatbots is that ordinary people can use them without special knowledge; the computer is supposed to be doing all of that thinking for you, so this attitude is unhelpful. Anyhow: not a real task I needed but a good mark of the continuing weaknesses of the LLM framework.

Continuity checks. This was probably where LLMs were most useful, though still a little wonky. My first novel was so stripped down in its actual narrative - young woman succumbs to mental illness, destroys her life, and (maybe?) dies - that there wasn’t a lot of continuity to manage. This new one is much more complicated in pure plot terms, with almost two dozen named characters who appear throughout the text and a complicated chronological structure in which the book keeps flipping back and forth from present to past to present. The continuity problems themselves were usually not that complex - for example, one was simply that I had a character fetch an item from one place that had already been fetched in an earlier chapter - but with a lot of timeline jumping these things can multiply. Both Claude and ChatGPT handled this pretty well, identifying when events were happening out of order or when I (unintentionally) had a character remember things incorrectly or when something or another just didn’t work. ChatGPT returned a couple of instances of what it identified as character inconsistencies that really weren’t, but in general both had problems with false negatives rather than false positives - that is, with the exception of those rare instances where ChatGPT identified an inconsistency in characterization where there really wasn’t any (and I hadn’t really been asking), they didn’t invent fake problems but did fail to notice a few real ones.

Of course, the problem there is that because you can’t completely trust the results, you still need several layers of checking, hopefully from several different professionals. If I get this book sold, it’ll obviously still go through a multi-step professional editing process. Then again, speaking at someone who has had several books where typos or mistakes slipp past myself and a number of editors, it’s not like human editing is infallible either. Ultimately it’s a matter of what affordances you have available to you; someone who self publishes might find this useful. That itself is one of the depressing realities about AI: oftentimes it will be used by those who don’t have the money or access to take advantage of a human alternative. (It's not rich people who are going to be using AI doctors.)

Relative presence of characters. This was the one that I actually had the most hope for, but both Claude and ChatGPT really biffed it. As I said earlier, this book has a lot of characters, and while obviously there are some characters that are much more prominent than others, one of the goals that I had with this book was to give every one of them their own chances to shine and to not just forget about any of them for too long in the narrative. This is however a difficult thing to eyeball with so many of them, especially as the guy who’s writing it all down. But investigating systematically is more ponderous than you might think; just searching for how frequently a given character’s name appears is insufficient given the use of pronouns and also when a character takes part in something within a larger group. You can’t just count name frequency. This would appear to be the kind of use case that LLMs might be well suited for, especially given that this isn’t about raw counting but about impressionistic determinations of presence in a literary work.

Unfortunately, like I said, they both did a really bad job. Neither seemed to know how to express what I was looking for in a particularly coherent way despite multiple queries on my end, and they arrived at conclusions that seemed straightforwardly incorrect. Claude had the protagonist in the bottom half as far as presence in the book, for example, which was just wrong. I imagine the LLM defenders would say that this just isn’t a good inquiry, that the construct isn’t well defined enough…. I again maintain that for these systems to be as useful as people want them to be, they have to do a credible job at answering real world queries of a type that will make sense to a human user, and I think this qualifies.

What did we learn today? Eh. Not much. Too limited and idiosyncratic a project. And, I concede, one waged by a user with preexisting skepticism.

I will say that LLMs remain, shall we say, suggestible. As usual, I find LLM errors more interesting to think about than tasks they handled well. And a core LLM problem are that they’re too… solicitous, too eager to please. Hallucinations remain a major problem, no matter how much people want to declare that problem solved, and you’re particularly likely to provoke hallucinations in scenarios where you’re asking an LLM to find something that isn't there to be found. The endless series of self-owns by author Steven Rosenbaum appear to stem from this kind of scenario. He apparently asked an LLM to go find sources for his book, probably in the form of “Find me sources that show X or address question Y.” And what anyone who has experimented with using these technologies for research can tell you, they’re often so eager to find such sources that they will hallucinate fake ones in order to appease the user. (Remember, the ultimate task of an LLM is not to say true things but things that appear to be true to the people using them.) This is why fake sources have proven to be one of the most reliable ways for teachers and professors to catch AI writing.

I’ve tried to use LLMs as a research tool in this way in the past (eg, “find me sources that discuss economic class and rates of psychotic disorders”), and the hallucinated source problem is a constant frustration. A frustration, but not a scandal, because I just see that the source is fake and discard that query. What’s remarkable is that Rosenbaum appears to have not bothered to check if the sources were real - a failing common of college freshman, committed by an adult published author writing a book about truth. I can’t imagine why someone would object to using an LLM to find a real source to read and integrate into researched writing; that’s no different that using Google Scholar. But just pulling quotes from an LLM is a different story, especially when they turn out to be fake. (Of course, a writer finding a source and pulling a quote from it without actually reading deeper and finding the essential context is a problem that long predates LLMs.)

Here’s a somewhat similar situation with a very minor problem that speaks to potential larger consequences. I was using Claude to do one of those continuity checks and I made a small mistake: I asked it to check the wrong chapter number. I said that I wanted to check Chapter Five for continuity with a later chapter when I meant to ask about Chapter Six. Claude found the right passage and quoted the correct lines - and then called it Chapter Five anyway, because I had done so myself. In other words, Claude didn’t correct me about where the earlier passage was, it just borrowed my error and built its analysis on top of it. Obviously this is about as trivial as it gets, in and of itself. What’s interesting isn’t that an LLM made a mistake but rather the kind of mistake it made. This wasn't hallucination in the typical sense; Claude knew the right answer because it found real information. The failure was something different, a kind of social deference, an optimization for agreement that quietly overrode accurate information. The model processed the text correctly and then, at the moment of labeling, looked to me rather than to its own processing.

And I think this is an under-discussed issue with these tools. There’s a legitimate worry about hallucinations - AI systems that think they know things they don’t know, the “confidently wrong” problem. But a system that knows something and defers to the user’s mistake anyway might be, in certain contexts, the more consequential failure. Imagine a slightly different scenario where I took Claude’s confirmation at face value and went looking for the continuity problem in Chapter Five; I would have found nothing and might have concluded the problem didn’t exist. As I said, this is all very minor for me and my project. But the tendency of LLMs to accept erroneous information supplied by the user seems like a bigger deal than widely understood.

I guess the salient question might be whether writers adopt some of these potential time-saving LLMs techniques without actually letting them do the writing. The Venn diagram of people who are willing to use them at all but not to engage in AI plagiarism is likely very small. And, indeed, I’m not really in the overlap; while I’m sure there are very specific scenarios where I might turn to an LLM to solve an extra-textual or meta-textual problem, in general I see little value here for my own process and mostly engaged in this effort out of curiosity and as part of my ongoing efforts to demonstrate the limits of an overhyped technology. Anyway, my experiments haven’t borne much fruit, I like the various steps involved in writing longform work, I’m set in my ways, and I’m old. I suspect that other writers would add two anxieties: the anxiety that they might just cross over and represent ChatGPT’s work as their own, and the anxiety that their peers would accuse them of doing so even if they haven’t. I don’t share those concerns, myself, but I am glad that the stigma against LLM writing exists. Some people of course will just shamelessly use LLMs to generate work under their bylines. As in so much of life, transparency and honesty are indispensable - albeit, I'm afraid, harder and harder to find.

Via Matt Yglesias’s mailbag, I see that Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns, and Money got his fanfiction on recently:

In a just universe, the sheriff who threw someone in jail for 37 days over a clearly constitutional protected Facebook post he didn’t like would be at least as famous as the Oberlin undergraduate who politely told a student reporter that it was kind of insulting to call a pulled pork sandwich a “banh mi,”

That would be very cutting, if in fact that was what had happened. It is not.

Here on Earth Prime, Oberlin student activists and those at many other colleges explicitly attacked colleges under the theory that simply to serve food from “marginalized” cultures was cultural appropriation and therefore wicked. Banh mi is of Vietnamese origin, the poorly-paid Oberlin cafeteria staff who planned and executed that meal (and all manner of other “international” dishes) were not from the home culture, QED. The only moral meals that college cafeterias can serve are, like, mac & cheese and dinosaur chicken nuggets and perhaps schnitzel, it’s all a little confused. These woke volkisch rules, where people are only allowed to consume cultural products from their own culture, can be hard to parse, which is unsurprising considering that cultural appropriation is a bullshit made-up problem that has no earthly connection to actual social justice. Indeed, you could hardly pick a better target for the fundamental incoherence of the concept than banh mi, a Vietnamese dish made with French baguette, which is a good example of the glories of the cultural mixing that become impossible under a strict “no cultural appropriation” regime. For the record, “campus food isn’t very good” - which is the heart of “this banh is just a pulled-pork sandwich!” - is a) a consumer complaint, not a political demand and b) the sort of thing you were once expected to just deal with as a college student. But times change.

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And were Oberlin campus activists really polite? Reader, they were not! Scott Lemieux does not mention that in fact Oberlin’s little spasm of rich-kid activism culminated in a 14-page document that, among other demands like being paid an hourly wage for doing activism, called for the firings of specific faculty based on the political views of those faculty. That seems slightly less than polite to me! Lemieux can’t tell you the truth about that because he and his blog are ostensibly in favor of academic freedom, political diversity on campus, and tenure. And there is simply no way to square those commitments with support for student activists who said, explicitly, that they had the right to get faculty fired based on their political opinions. Just like there’s no way to hold those commitments and defend the Amherst student protesters who demanded that students who criticized them face formal punishment by the university, or the Wesleyan students who fought to defund the campus newspaper because it published an op/ed by a student who criticized BlackLivesMatter, or the UC Santa Barbara students who demanded the right for students to refuse any reading if it violated their own sense of political propriety…. Those things are unmentioned, by Lemieux, because he can’t defend them. Thus, a fantasy version of the past.

Unlike anyone at LGM, I have spent thousands of hours of my life organizing, starting when I was 17, in campus activism, anti-Afghanistan and Iraq war activism, graduate student labor issues, and tenants’ rights. And one of the many benefits that experience has blessed me with is the understanding that it’s insulting, not supportive, to defend activists when they do stupid shit. I’ve written many times before about my experience in the early Iraq years, and what I’ve tried to stress is how closely righteousness and idiocy lived together; we were entirely correct about the central issues of controversy, history validated us again and again, and also the movement was forever blowing itself up in the stupidest possible ways. What I would have liked, and would like in the future, is for activists to do good things and not dumb things, to make smart demands and not dumb demands, to do politics well instead of poorly. And, indeed, there are plenty of good campus protests out there; recent campus activism in protest of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has in general been quite salutary, and I’ve said so many times. Whining about the cafeteria food and calling it cultural appropriation in a way certain to receive negative press was dumb and I’m confident that many of the people involved in it back then are embarrassed about it now.

The Lemieux post is right about the conservative assault on free speech, as far as it goes; jailing Larry Bushart for 37 days over a Facebook meme was a straightforward abuse of power, and the settlements won by Bushart and others targeted in the post-Kirk crackdown represent real, if modest, accountability for that abuse. As Yglesias points out, a number of prominent free speech voices absolutely have criticized that situation, rather undercutting Lemieux’s complaint. I share the disgust with the sheriff’s actions, but then, what did you expect? Myself, I hold left activists to a substantially higher standard than I hold conservative officials seeking political vengeance, and I’m troubled by anyone who doesn't. That MAGA sheriffs and university administrators behaved censoriously in the aftermath of Kirk's death is dispiriting but entirely unsurprising; censorship and bad-faith invocations of free speech from the right come as no surprise. The more demanding question is whether our side has learned anything, whether what we’re doing is smart and righteous and effective and a good use of resources. MAGA is hypocritical and evil? You don’t say.

Which brings me to the second issue: Lemieux uses the banh mi anecdote as a quick, dismissive shorthand for campus overreach, gesturing at the absurdity of that situation without reckoning with the larger damage of the era. The censorious campus politics of the 2010s, the pile-ons, the demands for termination, the institutional capitulations… these were not a minor embarrassment to be waved away with a punchline. They were, instead, a genuine strategic and moral failure that alienated potential allies, corroded norms of free inquiry that the left needs as much as anyone, and handed the right a durable and genuine grievance. People who care about the left should be naming that failure honestly, not papering it over in the service of tribal point-scoring. “At least we’re not the Perry County sheriff” is a standard too low for me to accept. Sorry.

It’s a matter of respect, you know? Me, as a twenty-year-old activist at my zero-prestige state commuter school organizing against war and imperialism with a bunch of single mothers and activists with full-time jobs, I would never, ever have expected anyone to pull punches if I did or said something dumb in my organizing. I mean, that’s the whole point, right - you do and say things designed to get the world’s attention in the effort to share your vision of justice. We wanted to be taken seriously, and the heart of being taken seriously is being held accountable. Lemieux and a lot of other liberals who want to reduce campus activism to fodder for culture war don’t extend that basic respect to the activists they condescendingly defend. And you know, those Oberlin students really biffed it. They insisted that those extravagant demands they had given to the school’s administration were not subject to any negotiation - which predictably strengthened the administration’s hand considerably, giving the school’s president the perfect pretext to say “Well if there’s no negotiation, then the answer is no.” Lemieux thinks that ignoring the immense strategic and messaging failure of that approach is a way to support those campus activists; I think it’s the opposite. I think, in fact, that true respect requires us to look back and say to them, boy, that was really fucking stupid, guys.

For a long time I’ve been getting some version of the comment, “What about Chetty!” in response to my perspective on education, as in Raj Chetty, the economist who for the past decade has made a lot of waves asserting that our education problems are straightforwardly the product of bad teachers and that replacing them will have implausibly large economic effects. I tend to try and work from a broader perspective than “this is why I think this guy is wrong,” but I get this request so often, here you go. This is why I think Raj Chetty is wrong.

Few empirical claims in modern education policy have traveled farther than Chetty et al’s findings on teacher “value-added.” In his famous 2014 American Economic Review papers, he and his coauthors reported that students assigned to better (excuse me, higher value-added) teachers were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, save for retirement, and avoid teen pregnancy, and that replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent of the distribution with an average teacher would raise the present value of a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by roughly $250,000. Chetty’s research findings in this domain had been floating around for awhile at the time of publication, and President Obama cited the figure in his 2012 State of the Union address, and the judge who decided Vergara v. California leaned on it to strike down California’s teacher tenure laws. Take that, teachers! The findings are arresting, the dataset is impressive - 2.5 million children, linked to IRS tax records! - and the policy implications are clean: identify and remove bad (pardon me, low “value-added”) teachers, watch outcomes improve. It’s exactly the kind of story our neoliberal policy establishment is desperate to tell, and was clearly catnip to the Obama administration, which was doggedly attached to a simplistic vision of delivery through better education, where the gutting of the uneducated labor market was ameliorated by turning every last child in the United States into a genius, scaling up the Stanford-to-Google pipeline until every American could pass through it.

Unfortunately, the Chetty story is ultimately another neoliberal just-so story, that is to say, a fable, a legend, a myth. The closer you look at what the “value-added” construct actually measures, how stable those measurements are, and how the Chetty results have fared under replication, the more reason there is to doubt both the magnitude of the claimed effects and, more fundamentally, whether “teacher quality” as the literature operationalizes it is a coherent, measurable attribute at all. (Spoiler: it is not.) Let us count the problems.

The construct itself puts the thumb on the scale. The first problem is conceptual. In the Chetty et al. studies, a teacher’s “value-added” is the residual variation in a student’s standardized test scores that remains after controlling for prior achievement and some demographic covariates. It’s not a measure of pedagogical skill, content knowledge, classroom climate, the cultivation of curiosity, or any other property normally meant by “good teaching.” It’s a statistical residual on a narrow set of assessments, usually math and reading tests in grades three through eight. That residual is then defined as quality. I want to be clear about this: any portion of variability in student outcomes that Chetty et al cannot or will not identify otherwise is assumed to be a product of teacher inputs. Since Chetty’s whole project is to argue that educational outcomes are the result of teacher quality, this is what we used to call begging the question - that is, he’s assuming the point he wants to prove, asserting the desired conclusion as a premise, by acting as though any uncaptured variation is necessary evidence of teaching quality. And it gets worse in the telling. When advocates and journalists and politicians summarize his work, the construct expands silently from “the part of test-score gains Chetty cannot otherwise explain” to “good teachers,” and the slippage is rarely flagged. But that’s the whole game, you guys.

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The VAM literature itself suggests that teachers control a small portion of the variance in student outcomes. The question-begging matters in particular because the validity question (whether VAMs measure teacher quality) is logically prior to the bias question. The American Statistical Association made the point in its 2014 statement on value-added models: VAMs measure correlations, not causation, and most VAM studies attribute only somewhere between one and fourteen percent of the variability in test scores to teachers, with the bulk of the variation lying at a systemic level. I will repeat: even most VAM studies themselves provide evidence that teachers control a very small portion of student quantitative outcomes. Even taken on the literature’s own terms, the typical teacher’s measurable footprint in test scores is a single-digit-percentage affair, not the dominant force in a child’s academic life that is popularly assumed and constantly asserted by pundits like Jon Chait. And yet, as I said, Chetty’s research was used to assault teacher tenure in California and to justify anti-teacher rhetoric by all manner of politicians. Chetty himself has proven himself either unable or unwilling to prevent this type of dishonest weaponization of his researcher.

Teacher quality is only useful if it’s a static attribute, but it bounces all over the place. If teacher quality were a real, stable attribute of individual teachers (the way that, say, height is a stable attribute of individual people) then any reasonable measurement of it should give roughly the same answer for the same teacher from one year to the next. You could say “teacher quality is real and measurable but it changes wildly from semester to semester,” but then that means that there is no coherent or fair policy response. If VAMs are going to provide fair and practically helpful data, their findings need to cross a minimal threshold of stability. They do not. A 2015 literature review by Koedel, Mihaly, and Rockoff - Rockoff, for the record, is one of Chetty’s coauthors - reports year-to-year correlations of teacher value added estimates ranging from 0.18 to 0.64 across studies. At the low end, that’s noise. In human research, in educational research? That’s noise! And even the high end estimate here, which is subject to an awful lot of potential confounds, means a substantial share of teachers will move from “effective” to “ineffective” or vice versa from one year to the next without anything about the teacher having changed. I’ve also heard tell of similar discrepancies in VAMs for teachers who teach multiple sections of classes - sometimes, those teachers are ranked among the best for a first-period class but among the worst for a fourth-period class. What’s the theory, exactly? They forget to teach by 12:30, or they only care about one class or another?

Darling-Hammond et al found that of teachers who scored in the bottom 20% of value-added rankings in one year, only 20–30% received similar ratings the next year, while 25–45% jumped to the top of the distribution. When a metric identifies you as one of the worst teachers in your district one year and one of the best the next, the coherent conclusion is not that you became a different teacher, it’s that the instrument is worthless. Even the Carnegie Knowledge Network, which is broadly supportive of value-added work, acknowledges that roughly sixteen percent of the variance in a teacher’s value-added in any given year represents stable between-teacher differences, with the remainder reflecting unstable sources. Sixteen precent. A construct that’s mostly noise is a problematic foundation for the claim that we can identify the bottom five percent, wouldn’t you agree? Imagine if your employment or salary was dependent on such a metric! And reliability across time isn’t the only stability problem. This 2010 paper demonstrates that the same teachers, evaluated on the same students, in the same years, with the same tests, receive substantially different effectiveness rankings depending on which value-added model is used and which student characteristics are controlled for. Crucially, teachers whose students were less advantaged systematically received lower effectiveness ratings than the same teachers did when teaching more advantaged students… even with statistical controls supposedly accounting for student background. Come on, guys. Come on.

If two reasonable specifications of the model give meaningfully different answers about which teachers are good and which are bad, then “good teacher” is a function of the analyst’s modeling choices as much as of the teacher. This is not how a real, well-measured attribute behaves, and the implications for basic fairness are negative and profound.

The famed quasi-experiment is flawed and doesn’t replicate. The Chetty team’s strongest defense against critics has always been their teacher-switching quasi-experiment in the first paper (known as “Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I”), which they argued ruled out the possibility that high-VA teachers simply receive better-prepared students. In 2017 Jessie Jesse Rothstein attempted to replicate the analysis using North Carolina data and reported the results in the same journal three years later. Rothstein was able to reproduce the headline VA results and mimicked the structure of the quasi-experiment but found that the quasi-experiment’s identifying assumption fails: teacher switching is correlated with changes in student preparedness in ways that the original team’s design did not detect. (Hidden confounds strike again.) Once Rothstein adjusted for this, she he found moderate bias in VA scores - on the order of 10 to 35 percent of supposedly causal teacher effects! - and reported that the long-run earnings and college-attendance estimates are sensitive to control choices and cannot support strong conclusions.

Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff have pushed back, as you'd expect, and the debate continues, but it’s worth being precise about what Rothstein established: an independent researcher, using independent data, found that the central empirical pillar of the long-term-outcomes claim does not hold up, certainly not cleanly. That is a serious result, not a quibble that can be waved away, and it was published in the same top journal that gave the original findings such reach. Unfortunately, as is always the case with the cult of Chetty, this serious criticism did not pierce public consciousness, probably because the media did not want it to.

Actual implementation of VAMs has been a disaster. The most concrete demonstration that “teacher quality” as operationalized in VAMs is not a robust, measurable attribute comes in the form of actual in-the-wild attempts to use VAMS; the experience has not been friendly to the Chetty school’s outsized claims, to put it mildly. For example, consider the Houston Independent School District’s use of the proprietary “Education Value-Added Assessment System” to evaluate and terminate teachers. How did that go? Not great, Bob! Results bounced around, teachers beloved by parents and students received poor scores, school administrators felt that the outcomes were fickle and their position undermined…. This all ended up in a lawsuit. In Houston Federation of Teachers v. HISD, a federal court ruled that teachers had a plausible Fourteenth Amendment due-process claim because the algorithm was a black box that no teacher (and, indeed, no district official) could replicate or audit. HISD settled the suit in October 2017 and agreed to stop using value-added scores to terminate teachers. (Here’s a good overview.)

A construct that cannot be reproduced, challenged, or transparently explained to the people being measured is not, in any meaningful operational sense, a measurement. A evaluation system that pleases neither teachers nor students nor administrators and which produces results that are inconsistent to the of incoherence should never be the basis of real-world employment decisions. And the lawsuit, in hostile ideological territory, was the perfect encapsulation of the whole failure.

So, to recap. The thing being measured changes year to year for the same teacher; sometimes it changes from period to period; it changes when you switch statistical models; it changes when you switch the composition of the class. Meanwhile, the supposed quasi-experimental defense against student-sorting bias does not survive replication. And when deployed in the real world, the system is broken enough that a federal court treated it as a due-process violation. This all describes a body of research and chief researcher which have both received pretty close to unanimous positive coverage in the media! The ed reform reality distortion field is very powerful, and nowhere has it been more powerful than when it comes to the halo effect around Raj Chetty.

It’s possible to maintain that there is some true underlying “teacher quality” out there, and that we simply lack the instruments to measure it reliably. I’m not married to the idea that there’s no such thing as teacher quality. (I am however married to the idea that there’s no such thing as school quality.) But there are two highly-plausible possibilities that render this factor largely irrelevant. First is the possibility that teacher influence on student outcomes just isn’t very large at all, probably in the single digits in terms of what portion of the variance in student test scores teachers can control, and thus not a solution to any large-scale problems. Second, there’s the possibility in of meaningful interaction effects, that what teachers contribute to student outcomes is genuine but emerges from the interaction of a particular teacher with a particular group of students in a particular school under particular conditions, rather than a stable, transferable individual attribute that can be ranked on a single dimension. If true, the bottom-five-percent teacher whose dismissal would supposedly net $250,000 per classroom is largely a statistical artifact: a person who happened to land below the cutoff in a noisy estimate that in another year or based on another model would have placed elsewhere.

Chetty and his team have made some serious empirical efforts. There was, at one time, a plausible story to be told about their findings. But we now have more than a decade’s worth of reasons to be deeply skeptical of their claims; the fact that so many informed people come to me with the assumption that Chetty’s work is some sort of neoliberal trump card just shows the degree to which the establishment media has advanced an anti-teacher point of view. The strong policy claims that have hitched onto Chetty’s work, the insistence that we can fairly identify, reward, and dismiss teachers on the basis of value-added scores, and that doing so will yield large, predictable gains in lifetime outcomes - it all rests on measurements that are noisy, fickle, arbitrary, and unfair. Until the construct of teacher quality passes the tests we would demand of any other quantitative trait, the responsible reading of the evidence is not that we have found a powerful tool for increasing social justice but that we have learned how easy it is to mistake noise, sorting, and modeling choice for the thing we wish we were measuring.

Unfortunately, the previously-mentioned media effort to inoculate Chetty from criticism had proven quite effective, and he’s very rarely put in a position to defend his views. Still, someone email this to Chetty. And, fuck it, to Barack Obama, Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, Matt Yglesias, Jon Chait, Arne Duncan…

I think Jay Caspian Kang is guilty of what I call the Library Card Fallacy, which has consequences for education that go far beyond current debates about AI’s role in the future of teaching and learning. But I don’t blame him in particular, as there’s an awful lot of that sort of thing going around.

The rise of LLMs has brought “Is college dead???” back to the forefront of the discourse lately. Though it’s now framed as an AI conversation, this kind of chin-stroking higher education doom-saying has been going on for far longer than the LLM era; the late 2000s and early 2010s in particular saw a ton of this Clay Shirky-style, “we have Google now so college is going to disappear” stuff too. As the cost of college became more and more of a scandal, and especially after the financial crisis of 2008 temporarily crushed the entry-level job market, these predictions were expressed more and more often in terms of simple economic self-interest : eventually students would rationally conclude that it made more sense to simply forego college and begin their working years four years earlier, without taking on a mountain of student loan debt. The crash would come and a ton of colleges would close and going to college would go back to being a rare curio that a small slice of Americans took advantage of.

This did not happen.

Why? Well, for one, 18-year-olds are not exactly known for a surfeit of practicality. That might sound insulting, but if you think about what “starting your career journey early” means, it’s quite sensible: for most people, it means spending four years of your prime young adulthood squeezing into a sad cubicle job instead of spending them getting drunk and trying to get laid and, yes, having stimulating conversations with cool professors. (My considerable experience in higher education tells me that college kids care way more about that last part than the stereotype allows.) These conversations always revolve around hypothetical self-directed autodidacts with grand ambitions and a future filled with influencing and investing and innovating…. Most people are nothing like that. Indeed, even most people in the educated, higher-earning classes aren’t like that, don’t go out and forge careers blazing new trails of self-employment or even in high-status but conventional jobs like lawyer or doctor; a huge number end up in stable and relatively well-paying but unfulfilling generic white collar work. I have no interest in engaging in the pejorative discussion about “bullshit jobs” here. I am asking you: if you were 18, would you really rush to begin your decades-long “employment journey” in miscellaneous low-glamour cubicle work four years older, in the prime of your youth? I wouldn’t.

Now, a lot of people are suggesting (as Kang does) that young people won’t feel the need to go to college because they can just sit in front of their computer in their sad apartment and learn all they need to know from ChatGPT. Education is about accessing information, LLMs have the information, QED. In one entry in his series of essays on the topic, Kang asks whether “a fifteen-year-old hellbent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone both academically and extracurricularly to get into Harvard, or should he just start a Twitch stream and get to work?” Let’s set aside the fact that, as Kang himself concedes, most people just aren’t like this; again, even when we restrict our perspective to the more ambitious and proficient young people who might succeed in college, we’re mostly talking about people who just want to get a good white collar job at a health insurance company or similar and have time for Netflix at home in the evenings. Even beyond that, Kang’s supposition makes perfect sense if you assume that people are perfectly efficient utility maximizers, but of course we aren’t, and crucially, that fifteen-year-old doesn’t want to sit alone in a sad apartment with a ring light blasting him in the face for his entire youth. Perhaps the Gen Z stereotype suggests he would, but I’m telling you, that’s not what most young people want to be doing. Because it’s depressing!

It should go without saying that none of the people who make these predictions have actually done what they say young people should do; they all went to college themselves. And of course they did. College is great. You’re only young once, and going to college is fun and fulfilling. It’s always easy to be perfectly actuarial about someone else’s theoretical best interest. It’s quite another thing to decide that you’re going to IncomeMaxx in a way that denies you social opportunity, unstructured time, intellectual fulfillment, and living in a way consonant with the great American id’s vision of a successful life.

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That Kang makes the same predictions that David Brooks and Tom Friedman made before him is just one of those things, the way it goes. What Kang and Friedman and Brooks and Shirky and Hollis Robbins are all seemingly incapable of understanding is that there is a vast gulf between what young people say about how they feel and what actually motivates their behavior. Kang writes

In 2013, seventy-four per cent of eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds polled by Gallup said that a college education was “very important.” By 2019, three years before the public adoption of ChatGPT, that number had dropped to forty-three per cent; it fell again, in 2025, to thirty-five per cent, a decline that represented the steepest drop among all age groups that were surveyed.

OK. That’s what they said in a poll. But what did those kids actually do? Did they really forego college? The enrollment percentages in 2013 and 2019 and 2025 suggest that the college-ready, college-oriented students did not actually act in accordance with those attitudes. Because when push comes to shove, our personal resentments and our own perceived best interest are two different things. It turns out that a lot of young people who find to be a college dubious prospect in the abstract are not actually rushing to get that job at Geico at 18 themselves. American colleges do have an enrollment problem, but that’s the product of demographic change. And Shirky’s relentless doomsaying has failed to come true in anything like the scales he’s declared, over and over and over again. Colleges and universities have proven themselves to be arguably the most tenacious and adaptable of all human institutions; there are far more higher education organizations extant that are more than 300 years old than there are governments that have existed in the same form for that long. The reality is that, as traditional media continues to suffer its never-ending sickness, the attraction to The End of X or The Beginning of Y framing grows and grows. But most things stay mostly the same most of the time, no matter how badly prestige media wants to declare everything to be on the brink of revolution. In reality, most of human history is not a matter of apocalypse or genesis but damp continuity, which is precisely why journalists keep trying to set things on fire: they need the smoke to get attention.

OK. But I was suggesting that there’s a deeper reason to be very dubious about these claims that new technologies will enable people to educate themselves and thus destroy all manner of schools. It comes down to a basic reality that many people really struggle to accept: education has almost nothing to do with access to information. Which brings us to the Library Card Fallacy.

We have very recent evidence that helps us understand why the gatekeeping and incentive structure of higher education aren’t so easily replaced with student-directed technological alternatives, and that experience demonstrates how the Library Card Fallacy misleads. The Library Card Fallacy is the mistaken notion that the purpose of education is to transfer information from teacher to student, and thus that schools and teachers are subject to disruption when any technology comes around that democratizes access to information. The trouble with this theory is that information has been very broadly available for a hundred years or more; depending on how exactly you want to define things, most Americans have enjoyed public library access since sometime between the 1890s and the 1920s. In the late 1990s, people started saying that Google was an existential threat to colleges and universities - you can just get the knowledge from Google! But most people already had access to an immense amount of knowledge before Google, in the form of their public library. You certainly can give yourself quite a self-education with a library card, but the plain reality is that almost no one actually does. Most people aren’t busy little self-starters who will diligently learn on their own. That’s why schools exist, because people need someone looking over their shoulder to force them to learn the material! And even then it often doesn’t work. Most people resist being educated, and the assumption otherwise is part of why policy discussions about education are so unhelpful.

That’s why I call it the Library Card Fallacy: if it was true that education was about access to information, then anyone with a library card would become educated. But that’s just not what education is about. Education is about being challenged to learn things you don’t particularly want to and about creating an incentive structure that forces you to do so. The much-ballyhooed prediction that Google would create a nation of busy little autodidacts has clearly not come to pass. Of course it hasn’t! Most people aren’t Googling “explain the factors that led to World War I,” they’re Googling “Sydney Sweeney nude” or “Batman torrent” or “fantasy football rankings.” Some people love to learn; many, many, many more love to waste time with trivial bullshit. This is why, for example, the famous NBER study that distributed PCs randomly to homes showed no sign of educational gains for the kids whose families received one. Those kids weren’t reading Wikipedia entries! They were playing Farmville on those computers! Sometimes I wonder if these big-think types have ever met an actual child. And the same thing goes for our 18-25 year olds - how many of them, honestly, do you think are going to be sitting there having Gemini come up with a lesson plan to learn about something they find boring? That is not how human beings function.

Remember the MOOC hysteria of the early 2010s? When MOOCs (massively open online courses) burst onto the scene around 2010 or so, the rhetoric was loud and utopian. The New York Times declared 2012 “The Year of the MOOC,” with excitable types insisting that such courses were a “revolution” and a “tsunami.” Time ran a cover declaring “College is Dead.” Sebastian Thrun, a MOOC evangelist who ran a Stanford AI course that had 160,000 students, predicted that within fifty years there would be only ten universities left on earth. The premise was simple: take elite lectures, put them online for free, and you would dissolve the geographic and financial barriers that had kept higher education out of reach for the global poor. As this piece in Science put it, MOOC advocates and their excitable fans in the media “imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education” where video lectures from the world’s best professors “could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education.” This was all based on the Library Card Fallacy - access to information was everything, or so the utopians/Cassandras thought, MOOCs provided it, so college was done for.

The data has been merciless in correcting that fantasy. Across hundreds of courses, completion rates always hovered in the single digits to low teens and stubbornly refused to budge. Katy Jordan’s meta-analysis of 221 MOOCs found median completion rates of just 12.6%, while Hew and Cheung found that MOOCs were typically completed by only 10-20% of students. That Science analysis I mentioned above looked at six years HarvardX and MITx data and was even more damning: “the vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year” and “the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates—has not improved over 6 years.” All of this, despite enormous hype and immense investment in pedagogy, nudges, gamification, and platform design. Defenders sometimes argued that many enrollees never intended to finish their courses. This seems straightforwardly damning to me in and of itself, but even we’re inclined to be generous, the reality is grim. This EDUCAUSE research controlled for student intent and still found that among students who explicitly intended to complete a course, only 22 percent actually did so. In other words, even when you filter the sample down to people who said they wanted to finish, almost four in five failed to do so. The technology was there; the lectures were free; access was granted. What was missing the sustained desire to grind through twelve weeks of problem sets when nothing external was forcing the issue.

MOOCs, in other words, turned out to be incapable of supplying what their students needed the most: the capacity for self-regulated learning, realistic goal setting, real interest, perseverance, time management….. These are, for the record, precisely the traits that already correlate with class, prior education, and stable life circumstances. And the people who have those things, whether they’re privileged or not? Yeah, they’re very unlikely to want to skip college and grad school in the first place. The people who are best equipped to be autodidacts are very often the people who have the least interest in dropping out of school and the least to gain by doing so. A free lecture can’t teach a student who won’t watch it, and the students least likely to watch are exactly the ones the technology was sold as saving. This is what that Khan Academy’s Sal Khan, quoted in the piece excerpted in that image, just cannot seem to wrap his mind around: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. The sunny, supposedly egalitarian vision of a world full of people hungry to learn just doesn’t fit the reality. Look around you. How many people are spending their free time learning? And even among the people who are, how many of them are learning things that are genuinely boring and frustrating to learn, instead of what’s fun to learn?

Now we’re watching the cycle repeat with the ChatGPT, and somehow with even more bravado than last time. The people predicting that ChatGPT will achieve in 2030 what Coursera couldn’t achieve in 2015 are wrong in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons. They’re confused about what education supplies; they think it’s a matter of access to information, which has been ample for some time, when it’s really a matter of institutional accountability, incentives, and personal inspiration. And they’ve ignored the demand side problem, which has always been the binding constraint. An LLM that can patiently walk you through the causes of the Thirty Year War doesn’t matter if almost nobody wants to be walked through the causes of the Thirty Year War. The marginal student who wouldn’t crack open a textbook at school won’t bother to type a smart LLM prompt, either… and in fact will happily type a prompt asking the bot to write the paper for him, which is the use case actually playing out in every classroom in America right now. Indeed, if LLMs prove anything, it’s how widespread the desire to cheat and cut corners really is; that’s not a condition conducive to autodidacticism. Belief in MOOCs presumed a belief in student willingness to work. The LLM era is, if anything, a regression, a technology sold as the engine of unprecedented self-education that in practice serves as a tool for unprecedented evasion of it. Anyone who’s spent five minutes around an actual teenager could have predicted this outcome.

I don’t know how many American colleges and universities will exist in ten years. Probably fewer than now, but then a little right-sizing has made sense for awhile, and would likely increase rather than decrease the health of the system. The ones that keep existing, which is to say most of them, will go on doing what they’ve always done, which is to supply the external scaffolding that the vast majority of human beings require in order to learn anything they don’t already want to learn: deadlines, grades, embarrassment in front of peers, the looming presence of a teacher who will notice…. That scaffolding is the product and always has been. The lectures are incidental, the textbooks are incidental, and the personalized AI tutor will turn out to be incidental too. What is not incidental is the social and institutional pressure that compels an ordinary late adolescent to sit in a room and slog through the Federalist Papers when every fiber of their being would rather be doing anything else. Maybe we can’t make young people feel that pressure in a meaningful way anymore. Maybe. But that just means that our whole society is doomed anyway, and ChatGPT is not going to be able to fix it.

No chatbot can manufacture the desire to learn. And the people who insist otherwise will, a decade from now, write the same essays they’re writing today about how this time the revolution is really, finally, coming. Damp continuity, like I said. I’ve never been the doomer people have made me out to be, but I confess that in the last couple of years I’ve quietly given up, and if LLMs have done one thing for me, it’s to force me to recognize just how little the average person gives a shit and just how willing the great mass of humanity is to slip into apathy and decline. But I do have hope for individuals, the exceptional and talented people who really give a shit. For them, the ones who need it least, the ability to learn is there. The library card has been in our collective wallet for a hundred years. The whole internet has been in our pockets for fifteen. So go learn something.

I’ve pointed this reality out within larger arguments many times before, but I feel like I need to put it down as its own thing. In particular, the comments on this post got me thinking that maybe I haven’t made the point directly enough: the average K-12 student in the United States is doing fine. Even if you don’t accept my overall position on our education system and its perceived problems, that is true. Even if you think that poor educational performance is straightforwardly the product of teachers or schools or policy or pedagogy, which I very much disagree with, that is true. So much of our discourse on American public education relies on a crisis narrative that simply is not justifiable based on data.

It’s a persistent and bipartisan conviction in our media: are public schools are in a state of crisis, producing functionally illiterate graduates, falling far behind international peers, and failing an entire generation. This narrative is repeated so often that it’s become axiomatic, in the sense that people who say it feel that they don’t have to justify the claim with evidence. If we do look at the evidence, however, we’ll find a far different story, a more complicated and more hopeful story. To whit:

• The average American public school student performs quite respectably in an international context

• American students at the upper end of the distribution are world-class by any objective measure

• Recent test score declines that people worry about mirror declines across the entire developed world, and are therefore not a distinctively American pathology.

• The genuine crisis in American education is geographically and sociologically concentrated in a small number of profoundly disadvantaged districts, not distributed evenly across the system.

• The famous finding that Americans give their local schools much higher grades than they give “American schools” in the abstract turns out, on inspection, to be perfectly rational.

When Americans encounter headlines about international test scores, the framing is almost always one of failure: the U.S. is “behind,” “lagging,” or “falling.” But this framing depends heavily on selectively reading the data. The most authoritative international benchmark is the OECD’s PISA, or Program for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 countries in mathematics, reading, and science every three years. In the most recent 2022 results, released in December 2023, the United States outperformed the vast majority of the world.

• Reading: The U.S. average score of 504 was higher than 68 of the 80 other education systems tested, and lower than only 5. The U.S. scored well above the OECD average of 476. Only Ireland, Japan, Korea, Estonia, and Singapore outperformed the U.S. meaningfully, and Singapore needs to always be seen as a dramatic outlier thanks to its small size and extreme wealth. Friends: United States K-12 students are not uniquely bad at reading, in fact, they are among the very best in the developed world.

• Science: The U.S. scored 499, above the international average and higher than 56 of the 80 other countries. Only 9 countries scored higher.

• Mathematics: This is where the U.S. is weakest, with a score of 465, below the OECD average of 472. But even here, the U.S. outperformed 43 of the 80 other education systems tested and is statistically indistinguishable from another 12, meaning the U.S. beats more than half the developed world even in its weakest subject.

Hell, the OECD’s own country profile for the United States notes that the percentage of top performers across all three subjects combined is one of the highest among PISA-participating countries, and 14% of U.S. students scored at Level 5 or higher in reading, double the OECD average of 7%. The U.S. also reached its highest-ever share of top science performers,11%, compared to the OECD average of 7%. None of this is the profile of a failing education system. It’s the profile of a large, diverse nation educating a uniquely heterogeneous population at or above world norms. And you can only participate in the fiction that we’re a uniquely poorly-performing country if you a) are ideologically inclined to hold that view and b) don’t bother to check the stats.

Ah, but a constant claim from my commenters is that our system does not serve their kids, who are gifted and talented, exceptional, most likely to succeed. Setting aside just how statistically unlikely it is that all of you really have exceptionally bright children… guys, with the possible exception of truly unrepresentative countries like Singapore, there is nowhere else in the world that I’d rather raise an exceptional student than the United States. Our record in that regard is truly remarkable; we have produced a hugely disproportionate number of the most quantitatively and competitively accomplished students, relative to our population size. The PISA averages obscure a real feather in the cap of the America system: our best students, including at public schools specifically, are among the best in the world at what they do. Our best kids kill it in international academic competitions year after year, but because that doesn’t fit the narrative, that accomplishment is ignored by our media and pundit class.

The most rigorous international academic competition in existence is the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), held annually and open to the top six student mathematicians from each of the 110+ participating countries. The United States has dominated this competition in recent years with a consistency that flatly contradicts the narrative of American academic decline:

• In 2023, the U.S. earned second place at the 64th IMO in Chiba, Japan

• In 2024, Team USA took first place at the 65th IMO in Bath, England

• In 2025, the U.S. earned second place at the 66th IMO in Australia

• Since 2015, the U.S. has consistently placed in the Top 3 at the IMO

Math doesn’t float your boat? OK. In 2025, the U.S. team became the only national team ever to sweep all five gold medals at the International Physics Olympiad; this shouldn’t be surprising given that from 2015 to 2025 the American team earned 25 golds and 13 silvers. All four U.S. team members were awarded gold status at the 2025 International Chemistry Olympiad in Dubai, while in 2024, the team won three golds and a silver. Every single member of the USA Biology Olympiad Team has medaled since 2003, and the U.S. produced the world’s number-one individual student in 2013 and 2023. Coding? The U.S. team finished among the top four nations at the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics, with three competitors placing in the top five individually; the U.S. has earned 119 total medals at the IOI since 1992. Did you know there was an International Linguistics Olympiad for high school students? Me neither, until I started writing this post, but in fact the U.S. national team took first and second place in 2024, winning three gold medals, and in its history has amassed 97 medals, 9 first-place team cups, and 22 best-solution prizes.

That’s not the performance of a country whose top students are being under-served! These are mostly public school students, many from suburban and urban districts across the country, competing against the most intensively trained academic talent on earth and winning again and again. Where is the Argument on this story? Where is Matt Yglesias? Where is Jon Chait? Where’s the Chartbeat guy? Where’s the American Enterprise Institute? They’re not interested, and they’re not interested because it doesn’t fit their narrative. For the record, sometimes when I refer to these accomplishments I get readers commenting “Well, if you look up those teams, they’re all Asian!” Which, number one, no they’re not all Asian. Number two… so what if they were? All of those kids are American citizens. What on earth do you think you’re proving? No, the reality is that if you restrict yourself to just look at the top quintile/10%/1% of students, the American education system looks very good indeed. Of course, it’s natural to focus on problems rather than success - but the case there is misleading too.

OK, so what about recent declines? Isn’t the United States seeing major and unprecedented declines in many academic metrics? Well, this is why international context is as important as (or more important than) historical context: the declines are major but not unprecedented, precisely because those declines are happening all over the developed world. I just wrote a post that looks at this reality extensively and with graphs. If you’re concerned with American academic declines, you have to grapple with the fact that every comparable country experienced the same declines at the same time, which strongly implies a common cause rather than a uniquely American failure.

I don’t want to waste your time by re-prosecuting the case I made in that recent post. But let me make this point plain: the 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse in scores. The OECD’s own press release said “Overall, on average, the PISA 2022 assessment saw an unprecedented drop in performance across the OECD. Compared to 2018, mean performance fell by 10 score points in reading and by almost 15 score points in maths.” It’s bizarre to look at this reality and conclude that the United States is a unique basket case when it comes to our educational trends. In fact, as noted here, while U.S. scores decreased across all three PISA subjects, our rankings have actually improved since 2018 (from 29th to 26th in math, from 8th to 6th in reading, and from 11th to 10th in science) precisely because peer nations fell further. Here’s two of the graphs I presented in that recent post, showing America’s scores compared to Western European analogs and the OECD average in math and reading:

You’ll note (if you’re not a propagandist) that the American decline in math looks remarkably similar to declines across Western Europe and in the OECD average, and that we look quite good when it comes to the reading trends. Again, you simply are not going to read about this in The Atlantic or the Upshot. They don’t want to hear it; it contradicts the declinist narrative.

The same pattern holds for the NAEP, America’s gold standard assessment which is used to produce “the Nation’s Report Card.” The widespread and much-discussed post-COVID declines on the NAEP affected students in every state and every region of the country. These declines precisely parallel the global PISA declines! When the same pattern appears in Minnesota and Arizona, in Connecticut and Mississippi, and simultaneously in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand, the cause is not something specific to American educational policy. If anything, the uniform cross-national nature of the decline points toward shared forces - yes, I think most plausibly the explosion in adolescent smartphone and social media use, but no, I can’t prove it - rather than anything that individual nations school systems did or failed to do in that time period. It’s just powerfully difficult to look at these trends and say “This is an American problem,” let alone that it’s an American policy or American pedagogy problem.

None of the above should be taken to deny that there is a genuine crisis in some schools in the United States. But to put it very mildly, those problems are not evenly distributed across the country’s approximately 13,000 school districts. Instead, our real problems are heavily concentrated in a relatively small number of urban and rural outlier districts facing overlapping and severe sociological and economic challenges. The average parent on the average American suburban town just doesn’t have much to worry about when it comes to their kid’s school. But parents in concentrated poverty very much do.

Look at the NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment program, which provides district-level data for 26 large urban districts. That data makes the concentration of our problems quite visible.

• Detroit’s public school district consistently scores at the very bottom of every large-city district tested. In 2022, Detroit’s average fourth-grade math score dropped to its lowest point since district-level scores were first released in 2009. On every metric, Detroit fell below every other large urban district tested. The reasons for this kind of concentrated failure are always many, complex, and tangled, but it simply isn’t credible to believe that policy and pedagogy play more of a role than the social and economic conditions of the city’s children. Detroit public school students have higher rates of child poverty and chronic absenteeism than almost any comparable cities. 66% of Detroit district students were chronically absent in 2023–24. 66%! That might be a school district problem, but it’s not something that can be blamed on individual schools, much less individual teachers. These are truly systemic problems, structural problems.

• Cleveland’s performance is equally dire. In 2024, only 8% of Cleveland fourth graders scored at or above proficiency in reading. Only Detroit was worse, at 5%. The average Cleveland fourth grade reading score on the NAEP (184) was 30 points below the national average (214) and 35 points below those of Miami public schools, a city with lots of diversity but a significantly more stable economic situation.

• Baltimore city public schools, despite being one of the highest-funded districts in the nation, consistently scores near the bottom in every NAEP category among the 26 largest districts tested.

So here’s my question. Do you really think that these schools perform that way because they have teachers unions, just like many of the highest-performing affluent suburban school districts do? That all of the teachers who work in these districts, including all the Ivy League do-gooders who show up with only a yardstick and a dream to fix the system, are just that lazy and untalented? That they just refuse to open the three-ring binder with the “GOOD PEDAGOGY” label on the cover? Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, et al do not share common district policies, or common union contracts, or common teaching philosophies and pedagogy. They do share catastrophic rates of child poverty and endemic crime and unemployment problems! They do share extreme segregation, population collapse, and decades of disinvestment in their surrounding communities! As I have done many times in the past, I’ll ask you to consider what would happen if these inner-city schools simply swapped student populations with the schools in the richest nearby suburban districts. I don’t think anyone doubts that the Detroit students would still struggle if they went to Bloomfield Hills schools, or that Bloomfield Hills students would excel in Detroit Schools, even if we disagree on the margins. Well, that should guide your perception of the overall state of education in this country.

For the record, schools in comparable cities (Miami, Charlotte, Austin…) which serve diverse and lower-income populations, but within more economically stable metropolitan environments, consistently outperform the crisis districts on NAEP despite often spending significantly less per pupil. The crisis is not inherent to large, diverse urban systems. It is specific to places with extreme and compounding disadvantage. Meanwhile, the OECD country profile notes something rarely reported: the math performance of U.S. students in the bottom international decile of socioeconomic status ranks 6th out of 64 comparable nations. To reiterate: even America’s most disadvantaged students perform remarkably well, when considered against the world’s most disadvantaged students! Thus it is not even true to say that our lowest performing outliers are uniquely bad. The problem is not that American schools fail poor kids at an unusual rate. The problem is that some of our communities are poor to a degree that is extreme even by international standards, and those communities schools bear the full weight of that concentrated hardship.

The academic outcomes of these areas of extreme concentrated poverty and dysfunction are indeed disturbing. But then, what’s disturbing is the concentrated poverty and dysfunction themselves, not the NAEP and state standardized test scores which are ultimately just evidence of these problems. That’s what’s disturbing, the inequality and hopelessness in the most economically powerful country in the world. Blaming the schools is like blaming thermometers for global warming. It’s malpractice.

In general, America’s public schools are judged by averages that obscure more than they reveal. A relatively small number of deeply struggling district, typically serving students facing concentrated poverty, unstable housing, underfunded services, and other compounding disadvantages, pull national performance measures downward and create a misleading impression that the system as a whole is failing. Those schools matter, their students matter, and both schools and students deserve attention, investment, and reform. But it’s an analytical mistake as well as political senseless to treat the most distressed outliers as representative of American public education in general.

For as long as I’ve been reading and writing and researching about education and education policy, pollsters and journalists have expressed puzzlement (that is to say, condescension) at a persistent finding in American public opinion surveys: Americans think their own community’s schools are fine, even as they believe American education in general is in crisis. The Gallup Poll on Public Attitudes Toward Public Schools has shown this gap consistently since 1985. In the 2025 survey, for instance, only 13% of respondents gave the nation’s public schools an A or B rating, down from 26% in 2004… while 43% gave their own community’s schools an A or B. Public school parents are even more positive about their own child’s specific school. (So not just the local schools or the district schools but their kid’s school.) More than three-quarters of public school parents give their child’s school an A or B. The percentage who are completely or somewhat satisfied with their child’s education has never dropped below 68% since Gallup began asking in 1999, even through the pandemic years. Parents like the schools their kids go to. They’ve been propagandized about supposedly failing public schools by Jon Chait et al for so long that they believe America’s public school system is a lost cause. But it simply isn’t true.

This gap, the gap in the belief “American schools are bad, but my kid’s school is good,” is typically explained as parents being irrational, as a form of cognitive bias, an embarrassing refusal for parents to accept just how bad everything is. People are too emotionally attached to their own schools to see them clearly! But in light of everything above, a simpler and better explanation is available: the parents are largely right and the national narrative is largely wrong. And honestly, what should you trust more, a parent’s take on their own kid’s school, or their attitude towards schools in general? Which do they have better information on? Which do they have real experience with? Gallup itself has acknowledged that parent views of the schools their kids go to are based on direct experience, whereas American views of public education more generally are based largely on what they see in the media. Parents in Naperville, Illinois or Falls Church, Virginia or Newton, Massachusetts, or Palo Alto, California, whose kids attend schools that consistently produce excellence - they’re not wrong when they shrug at national crisis coverage. Their local experience is accurate; it just isn’t representative of Detroit. But why would we base our perception of the system on the worst examples within it… unless, like the usual suspects, we’re actively looking to undermine public education?

The policy implication of this diagnosis is quite different from the policy implication of the generic “American schools are failing” narrative. If the problem was distributed evenly, the solution would indeed be systemic reform - new national curricula, universal testing regimes, wholesale reorganization. But that’s just not the reality. The problem is, in fact, remarkably concentrated, and in very predictable places, places that struggle from all manner of social ills, the most obvious and consistent and powerful of them being systemic poverty and community breakdown. Therefore the solutions have to be concentrated too: large-scale targeted intervention in the specific districts with the greatest disadvantage, not only or even primarily in the schools but instead concentrated in community investment, economic development, and poverty reduction that might actually make durable improvement possible. You see, friends, panic that is misattributed to the wrong cause produces wrong solutions, wrong solutions like “fire the teachers, close the schools, private school vouchers for everyone.” Precision, which every wonk should strive for, is where genuine reform begins.

I’ve mentioned before that, during the 2024 election, I pitched an essay around that was a response to the accusation that Kamala Harris was a “DEI candidate.” That accusation, certainly, was ugly and unfair; the suggestion that Harris was unfit for the presidency because she was unqualified simply didn’t meet the facts. Indeed, I would argue that Harris was something of a symbol of the limits of qualifications: she had quite done well in all manner of prestigious environs, satisfied all of the meritocratic expectations of contemporary elite America, collected the degrees, passed the tests, gotten the laurels, reached for the brass rings…. And none of that changed the fact that she was a terrible candidate, a woman who had not been vetted in a national election at all, exemplified the incoherence of Democratic politics in the 2020s, and managed to combine generally business-as-usual Dem centrist policy with a radical reputation, leaving little for the base to cheer for and a lot for Republicans to attack. Many such cases.

No, I think attacking Kamal Harris’s credentials or accomplishments or qualifications was just about the stupidest way to go about it, and it’s a testament to the deep stupidity of mainline Republican analysis that this was what they went with. There’s no reason whatsoever to think that she didn’t fulfill her duties effectively as district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California, Senator, or Vice President; you might have disagreed with the values that were expressed in her leadership in those jobs, but that’s just politics. Likewise, her weakness stemmed from the fact that she was simply unpopular and the Democrats were unpopular and being in Congress forces you to take stances that will be controversial. The fact that Harris is something of a paragon of the bad incentives of contemporary American meritocracy is a much more interesting line of critique, though I admit it’s harder to put on a bumper sticker. And, anyway, it’s not like “DEI candidate” meant much beyond “undeserving & Black” in the vast majority of times the insult was hurled.

But, I said, let’s take the DEI accusation seriously anyway. Was it fair to suggest that Harris had been the beneficiary of diversity programs that help women and minorities in her life? I thought the answer was “probably,” given Harris’s history and the character of our elite institutions - and if so, that was an argument in favor of such programs. Getting to be the Vice President is proof that you aren’t incompetent, no matter how much conservative media wants that to be true. If Harris’s talents had been allowed to flourish thanks to a leg up earlier in life, that was evidence of diversity programs working the way they were intended to work. The whole idea of affirmative action, before Supreme Court decisions forced us to adopt the weak “being around diversity is good for you” justification, was that there are systemic impediments to the flourishing of people from minority backgrounds, and that with a little assistance they can reach their full potential. If someone like Harris received such assistance and went on to reach the height of status culture, it lends credence to that argument. And diversity programs could really use some positive examples; they’re deeply controversial, and not just opposed by Republicans or white people. The public perception of any policy or program, and thus its political defensibility, depends on visibility, on examples of the policy or program doing some good in the world.

But that’s where the pitch made its turn: progressives can’t point to examples of diversity programs working because it violates their internal culture. Holding up any individual person as a beneficiary of DEI (or affirmative action etc.) is considered offensive because it suggests that the person in question is undeserving and didn’t really secure their own accomplishments. And saying that diversity programs have worked in larger fields or industries violates the progressive norm of never admitting progress when it comes to issues of race or gender or sexual orientation. This came up awhile back with publishing - the entire publishing industry announced that it was dedicated to increasing the number of women in positions of power in the business and increasing the number of books being published by writers of color, they accomplished both goals, and yet if you acknowledge that this progress has happened, you’re called a reactionary. All of this leaves defenders of diversity programs in a very weird spot: they defend such programs in theory but react with deep rancor at the suggestion that they have helped anyone. And the point of the pitch was that this is bizarre, unsustainable, and a good example of liberalism eating itself. A little complex, a little abstruse, but a good idea for a piece and deeply relevant to the news cycle.

Well, lemme tell you! To say that the various editors I pitched the piece too were not receptive would be an understatement. They were uncomfortable with it in a way that suggested that they were afraid of blowback, more than anything. And I really think that hostility, that fear, says a lot about the underlying issues.

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Hello folks! Here’s the latest bimonthly roundup of writing written by subscribers, for the month of May 2026. Readers, please take a little time and see if any of these descriptions appeals to you. This post will exceed the allowed size of most email clients so please click through. I’ve discovered so much great writing through these roundups, and many who submit things report that they’ve meaningfully grown their audience this way. If you aren’t a subscriber and you want to take part in this opportunity in July, you know what to do. Be kind in the comments, far kinder than you feel you have to be with me.

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Now on with the show.

Zack Morris the Elder, Focker-in-Law: A qualitative poststructural analysis to demonstrate how a movie is going to suck real bad

Here’s how to tell that a movie is going to really, really suck

Amod Sandhya Lele, Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson

Being certain about your experience doesn't make you right.

Amod Sandhya Lele, If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra

The explicable appeal of spicy food

Twerb Jebbins, The Strage del Cermis, Adolf Eichmann, and Minnesota

A analysis of the invasion and occupation of the Twin Cities by ICE and the creeping fascism which accompanied it written by someone who lived there and experienced it firsthand.

David Mark Levy, Doug Ford should be caned on the queens park lawn

In Ontario we were having a lot of trouble with our premier, and things have gotten even worse. So I reckon he should be caned. It's an old petition, but I reckon it's worth rehashing in Toronto now.

Bill McCallum, Senior Advisor at Illustrative Mathematics

As I move into retirement, I decided to start a Substack about mathematics education. Some of the posts are about research and controversies, some are just about the mathematical ideas behind school mathematics, which are often buried. This is one of the latter type, exploring the complexities of fractions and division.

David Roberts, The Madison Is a Hate-Coded Show

A look at how The Madison TV show gets NYC, its wealthy, and its impoverished completely wrong

Chris, Stop Watching TV Like a Conspiracy Theorist

The ending of Stranger Things was bad, but conformitygate - the idea that it was bad on purpose to set up a secret finale - uses the exact same logic as a conspiracy theorist scanning TV shows for evidence of the Illuminati.

Eric McLaughlin, One More For The Ditch

One More for the Ditch is a savage, darkly comic triptych about collapse, cancellation, and the violent search for meaning in a culture addicted to outrage. Moving between addiction, grief, satire, and rebellion, the book asks what, if anything, is worth worshiping when institutions fail, morality fractures, and survival itself becomes an act of defiance.

Erica Etelson, Rural Organizers Are Plowing Common Ground

Flying below the radar of toxically polarized national politics, small town mid-westerners are racking up ultra-local victories

Luke Allen, The High Cost of Schadenfreude

When we delight in the suffering of our neighbors it makes real organizing impossible

Mari, the Happy Wanderer A Horseshoe Theory of Being Wrong about Us

A theory about why (almost) everyone loves Project Hail Mary.

Dr. Dana Leigh Lyons, DTCM, When in doubt, I choose simplicity and consistency

Reflections from the Thai countryside, on paring things back to their essentials

Tony Bozanich, Behold the Treasures of my Library 11: Improv Edition

More than you wanted to know about improv comedy.

The Memory Hole, Moon Over Lyme Bay

A rehearsal turned into a mass casualty event and no one was to know about it

Barrett Hathcock Notes on ‘Privacy’

A short review of Molly Young's pregnancy memoir

Alistair, So this is what normal feels like

When I began taking the magical weight-loss pills, I didn't expect they would also change my perspective on self control, my own limitations and the challenge of loving myself.

Rosemary Zimmermann, Smoke

I run a small free home-care clinic for the indigent, and write reflections on my patients, faith, medicine, and the meaning of it all.

Brian Howard, How I Handle Those Pesky Medical Bills

I don’t pay them.

Sara Eckel, Under His Eye

Virginia Giuffre, Lindy West and the male gaze.

Javier Ergueta, “Can’t really recommend it. Stay in school, kids.”

Cole Allen was no whack job, he was a nearly model young man, who got lost in the moral labyrinth that is today’s world. His story, our story, is being misrepresented by the press on both sides of the political divide. This points to a calamitous, broader moral failure.

Adam Whybray, Failing to Name Things in the Park

I’ve avoided the natural world because it makes me feel stupid and incapable.

Javier Ergueta, How should we think about war leadership–and Trump’s?

The just war tradition gives us the standard, the historical record gives us the comparison--and the conclusion urges impeachment: A president who lacks the knowledge to anticipate the consequences of war, the humanity to feel its cost, the integrity to hold a coalition together, and the humility to recognize error–is not a war leader. He is a war risk.

Dan Hoyle, San Francisco 1992-1996

Adolescence in a Bohemian Eden, and nostalgia as a galvanizing force to reclaim that cultural ecosystem

Triangulation, Some Thoughts on Habermas: Oversociality and the Power-Trust Exchange

The politicization of civil society arises from a exchange in which political elites trade money and power for the credibility and trust possessed by actors in civil society

Jonathan Kissam, When you can’t sing anymore, all they remember is your name

The death of Kurt Cobain and the confusion of Generation X

Whitney Sha, The Process of Processing

An inquiry into the colloquial verb "to process"—why we use it and what it means when we do

Alexander Kaplan, Judging All Art by the Standards of Twentieth-Century Realism Was Never Insightful (and Is No Longer Funny)

A rant about a type of "literary criticism" I see bandied around, featuring Clerks, The Wizard of Oz, and Donnie Darko, among other things.

Liam, Nefarious Russians on Substack

A newsletter and a bedtim podcast

A.W. Martin, Ranked Choice Voting is a False Idol

The central problem of the American electoral system is that it is unrepresentative and unresponsive, and RCV does not make the system either more representative or more responsive.

Kristen Smith, A Letter for Teachers in May

A reflection on what makes teaching difficult in a particularly human way with a small side of hopefulness.

Tanner Gesek, Persuasive Moral Slop: A quick primer on sophistry

You can make any idea sound good with enough rhetorical skill – and now everyone has that skill on tap. This essay argues that's not a minor problem; it's the engine of the coming multipolar tribal warfare over what's true and worthwhile.

Mark Newheiser, All Art Is Political, but Andy Weir Has a Point

All art is on a continuum of preachiness, even Project Hail Mary, but there's nothing wrong with avoiding overt social commentary or having a different perspective

Old Mole, Marx, Rawls, and the 1960s New Left

In the tumultuous 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gave up trying work out what it meant by the "participatory democracy" it advocated. SDS hesitated to say "socialism," yet by the end of the decade it splintered in its haste to embrace Marxism-Leninism in some form. John Rawls was meanwhile formulating a theory of justice whose rejection of capitalism, and debt to Marx, was slow to be appreciated.

Carter Vance, Author and writer of the A Place of Unreality Substack

A debut coming-of-age novel set in Canada's political scene, it has been described by Ross Barkan as "an affecting portrait of failed romance and political ambition".

Josh Hilgart, Let's Take a Year Off and Save the Human Race

A proposal to fix the world; it might not work but it is our best chance.

Donal Lardner Ward, California 1978

An ill-advised bus & hitchhiking trip to California at 15 to escape the emotional fallout of my mother's 3rd divorce and my father's continued deterioration after losing his share of famed NYC literary restaurant, Elaine's. ( Excerpt from memoir-in-progress. )

Doctrix Periwinkle, Good girl

Thoughts on the sacrament of confession, sin, and mental health. And my dog Abby.

Harold Johnson, Terrible Punning Conundra

I wrote ~30 of the worst puns conceivable. I don't usually indulge in this vice!

Barry Goldman, How Can This Be?

Thought on being an American, a lawyer, and a Jew

Old Mole, When Britain Went Socialist

The political moment requires that a transformational program be offered by the opposition party, as Adam Przeworski writes. Yet he also claims that a socialist program has never succeded in winning an election. This overlooks the 1945 victory of the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, over Winston Churchill's Conservatives. Labour ran under the banner of Socialism and from 1945 to 1951 established the National Health Service (NHS) and brought most major industries into public ownership.

Arthur Sants, Judge people for that one thing they did

A review of The Drama and a case for epistemic humility.

Harjas Sandhu, Sleep advice that actually works (for me)

I’ve struggled with sleep for my entire life. Most online sleep advice is hopelessly generic, so I brute-forced my way to individualized sleep habits over several years of experimentation and wrote the post I'd always hoped to find.

michael helsem, The Theory anbnd Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism

collection of aphorisms & journal entries, mostly from the 80s

Jason Dubow, Signs & Wonders

Seven index cards, a hybrid-essay (of sorts): wanting to be good (and bad), O.J., Sandy Hook, agitprop, a widow's recliner, Trump, things fall apart, Kafka's dog.

Christopher J Feola, Sora AI is the new Disney Studios! Oh wait-never mind

OpenAI’s three-year licensing agreement with Disney lasted three months. This is what is called a pivot in Startup Land; leadership is saying ZOMG Our Business Plan is Completely Underwater So We Will Shift To This Completely Different Thing. It’s Yet Another Sharp Reminder that AI is following the path every tech revolution has followed since it was first laid out by Thomas Kuhn 5 decades ago.

Brandon Clarkson, Fallout

Set in November 1962, this short fiction story explores seemingly simpler time when all felt safe and warm but was, in reality, oh so treacherous and fraught with uncertainty. Published by Roi Fainéant Press.

Michael Celentana, Sit

Blaise Pascal — 17th-century mathematician, devout Catholic, notably not a Zen monk — somehow wrote the central koan of Zen Buddhism. Zen got there too, independently, from the other side of the world. This essay is about what happens in that gap: the silence that isn’t empty, the rest that isn’t absent, and why the greatest musicians in history were all, without knowing it, answering the same question. Includes an annotated listening playlist, because some arguments are better made by Bill Evans than by me.

Lance Pauker, The Long Tail of Being Useful

On not knowing the role you're meant to play in life, and finding purpose in becoming a stay at home dad.

Dirk Hohnstraeter, Politics for the rest of us

Hungary, real life, and a moment in the sun

Desystemize, Everyone's Got a Proof When They Explode

Solving the underlying logic bomb behind the red button/blue button style thought experiments.

Spencer Piston, Associate Professor, Political Science, Boston University

Leading media accounts portray the lawlessness and brutality of the United States' immigration policing system as a Republican victory over Democratic opposition. But in reality our authoritarian immigration regime is a bipartisan creation.

Kody Cava, A Pharmaceutical Company Developed a Cure for Cancer With Taxpayer Dollars. Now It Owns the Patent.

An in-depth investigation into how Novartis developed and privatized a single-dose treatment for leukemia using public funds.

Adam Rosen, The Cult Music Documentary ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ Turns Middle-Age

The film capturing the scene outside a Judas Priest show was 17 minutes long, only available on VHS and won the hearts of a generation of rock fans

Nigel Bowen, We’ll all be dinergoths soon

That thesis I wrote in the 1990s on middle-class subcultures has belatedly acquired some relevance in the diner goth era.

William TR Pullin, The Slow Death of the American Rebel

This is an essay arguing that the internet has become a theological and nihilist landscape of micro-Gods and is led by algorithmic proselytizing. It consumes and commodifies the act of rebellion, and makes ideology into theology. My essay touches on Sartre and Camus to show how clinging to moral policing has been bleeding the left long before the internet and things have not gotten much better on that front. The essay also touches briefly on Nietzsche, and Varoufakis to make its critiques and points while framing it through the framework of The Rebel.

Tim (I'm a little teapot), Clawed and the Anticrisis

Some crises can be worked around. Some permanently change us. But the real terrifying possibility is if humanity's biggest turning point might not feel like a crisis at all.

Derek Wagner, Dourglamis

Sentient castles mashed up with late stage capitalism

Skyler Schain, My Weekend in Crossworld

I went to the 2026 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, CT to find out why people are so into crossword puzzles, what Will Shortz's deal is, and why the structured competition of games is so appealing. I came out with some new friends and a fresh perspective on how to deal with the messy reality of life outside the game.

Tim Small, Adventures in Wonderland

A guided tour of some special California places, from Baja to Alta and back again.

Genevieve Maitland Hudson, Climate state of mind

History, philosophy, medieval measurement, Charles de Gaulle and weekly advice to the UK government

Mikell, Drink Your Nesquik

This is an excerpt from a longer work set in the 90s in Canada, during the tainted blood crisis.

Philip Hulbig, A Formula for Transformation:Your Brain Is Rewriting Itself Right Now... And You Can Help Direct That Process

In this piece, Phil Hulbig explores a framework for personal and academic transformation grounded in metacognition and self-authorship. Drawing on his work with neurodiverse learners, he offers a practical and research-informed formula for how individuals can develop agency over their own thinking and learning. Written for educators, students, and anyone navigating growth and change, the post connects theory to lived experience in an accessible and engaging way.

Mazin Saleem, Welcome to a new art form: on Conner O'Malley's Pipe Rock Theory

On festering art and why it needs the internet

Andrew Berg, This one weird trick could unlock housing for millions

Hosting long-term boarders in spare rooms used to be common in the US. We should bring this practice back.

Brent Lucia, Paranoid Android: Hearing the Internet Before it Arrived

This essay reflects on the 1990s as the last fully analog decade before the internet reshaped everyday life and human attention. Using Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” as a central example, I argue that certain music and artists seemed to anticipate the fragmented, overstimulated experience of the digital age before it fully arrived.

Carlos, Anti-Self-Help: Some advice to fuck your life up

A satire of self-help ideas that are in the water supply

Samantha Hedges, Homeschooling *can* be risky

An article about what parents, and schools, need to understand about children before they can provide an education.

T J Elliott, Not all self-promoters are the Antichrist

Finding out while self-promoting our play RETROSPECTIVE opening in a week at Barons Court Theatre in London that the word ‘self-promotion’ was first used to describe the Antichrist obviously has not stopped me from…self-promoting or self-believing

Jeffrey DeLisle, Prayers

A Poem

Tapirclip Yes, Logan Paul Is Larping. So What?

Logan Paul’s entry into high-end manga collecting was inevitable. Here’s why the backlash is fundamentally about fandom’s role as a surrogate for personal identity.

Shane Trotter, Educator, Coach, Author of Setting the Bar

A cultural critique of delayed adulthood in affluent modern society. The essay argues that technological abundance and insulation from consequence have made maturity easier to postpone than at any point in history—while simultaneously making the intentional cultivation of competence, resilience, and responsibility more essential than ever.

Geoff MacDonald, A “Singles-Centred” Perspective Sounds Uplifting. What Does it Mean in Practice?

Heard of the singles positivity movement? You'd be surprised (or not) at how weak the academic case can be for their claims. Join me in my good faith attempt to demonstrate that.

Aaron Brown, Some Jottings about Hamlet

I have transcribed with some edition musings about Hamlet and existentialism from my winter term notebook.

The Ivy Exile, The Metastasis of Technocracy

Through the lens of a must-read new book by Jacob Siegel, the terrorizing rise of a new form of digital governance based upon constant and ubiquitous information warfare upon the citizenry.

Thomas Barrie, The unlikely story of a North Korean blockbuster

In 1978, Kim Jong-il kidnapped a South Korean director and forced him to make an ersatz, communist Godzilla

Rain Oliver, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is the ugliest show

This show is hideous, and I will prove it with numbers and graphs

Matthew Clayfield, The Pink City parties

The Jaipur Literature Festival has been called the greatest literary show on earth. Forget the books, though. Here's a piece about the nightlife.

Bram E. Gieben, The Recovery Myth

What does "recovery" mean in a digital panopticon? On surveillance capitalism, borderline personality disorder, and other forms of "captured discontent"

Jack Neary, Sometimes it's what you don't do that makes you a man

A letter to my son about the right way to demonstrate masculinity

Jon Busch, Transcendence in Transgression

Despite striving for ugliness, GWAR's cover of "Pink Pony Club" taps into something beautiful, perhaps even divine.

The Loser, Demons of Discourse: “All Art Is Political”

Examining the contention and headache-inducing discourse surrounding the claim that "all art is political."

Liz O’Connor, Five Divorces: A Typology

A very brief guide to what happens.

Annoying Peasant, De(fragment) the Police

Originally intended as a submission for the Boyd Institute's Q1 2026 essay competition, this article talks about how institutional fragmentation erodes the carceral system's ability to deter crime and punish wrongdoers. Lax enforcement of existing laws creates bad political incentives for budget-constrained policymakers, who rely excessively on severe sentences to deter crime instead of increasing the likelihood of criminals being apprehended. This results in a bloated carceral regime and a police culture that is excessively militarized against the people it is supposed to serve. By consolidating police authorities and using the federal government's greater fiscal capacity to bottom-line law enforcement, we can simultaneously deter criminal activity, reduce penal severity, and take a bite out of the embarassingly-large docket of cold (unsolved) criminal cases.

James M, What Can Be Done

We feel distracted, dehumanized, and pressured to conform and consume. So... what can be done about all of this? The shifting trends of culture and the prospect of economic collapse create profound opportunities for positive social change.

Jeremy Keim, thin trust piazza (those are not typos)

A meandering exploration of what community - through pizza and triangles - meant to me as a kid, and where I am trying to build one again as an adult.

Mitch Bogen, Thoughts on Paul McCartney

Watching the Amazon Prime documentary on Sir Paul's life in the years after the Beatles' breakup got me thinking about his underwhelming legacy as a solo artist and how the life he built for himself might be the thing that matters most.

Jarrett Horne, Surgeon At War

A history piece on my grandfather's service in WW2 as a US Army surgeon in the Pacific theater, how he won the Silver Star, and the rationale of the time for nuking Japan.

Eponynonymous, Abandon all hope (or die)

On Children of Men and finding what exists beyond hope and despair

Steven Belaire, Why Are There Still Black People?

A comic but serious breakdown of a catastrophically bad evolution question, using it to explain common ancestry, ladder-vs-tree thinking, skin colour, vitamin D, folate, and why “white people” are not evolution’s destination.

William of Hammock, on Performative Cynicism

An intuitive retelling of a counterintuitive problem. The rest is performative.

Eva Sylwester, Weekend Entertainment Guide 2/14/26

37-year-olds in the news: Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, Erika Kirk

Joanna Cazden, vocal wellness educator

How political activists and songleaders can minimize vocal strain. Written for No-Kings-2026, good anytime!

The New York Times discusses the enrollment crisis that’s hitting American public schools. This is driven by declining birth rates and fewer children, but it’s deeply exacerbated by how effective the relentless anti-public school movement has been in demonizing those institutions. And there’s a vicious cycle going on that is simple and sad and very important to understand.

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A school’s perceived quality is a function of the pre-entry ability of its students. Schools with a structural tendency to attract the most advantaged students - public schools in rich districts thanks to zoning, private schools thanks to explicit academic screening and implicit screening through high tuition fees, charter schools with their admissions-and-attrition skullduggery - have an inherent and powerful advantage. But pointing out this basic reality runs afoul of the dogged American commitment to academic blank slate thinking; in contemporary times we’re supposed to pretend that we believe that everyone has perfectly equal ability to succeed in school. In political life we insist on an equality of talent that no one really believes in. This inevitably means that the schools with the least ability to prune their rosters of students who are less likely to succeed - public schools that serve the least privileged student populations - are at an immense disadvantage in terms of perceived quality. They can’t trim off the lowest-performing students like other schools do and are expected to make up for talent deficits that they can’t control. And the more negative publicity public schools receive, the worse this disadvantage gets.

This is the cycle.

1. The anti-public school propaganda machine, funded by right-wing forces that want to destroy government intervention in education entirely, makes empirically indefensible claims about the quality of public schools and teachers.

2. Parents, credulous towards this propaganda and often already looking for excuses to separate their children from poor kids and students of color, pull their kids out of public schools.

3. The parents who have the financial and social resources necessary to move to a more affluent district, to place their kids in private schools, or to navigate the intentionally-Byzantine world of charter school admissions are those that have children who are disproportionately likely to be strong students. Therefore, as those students leave, the metrics at public schools get worse, through no failing of the schools and teachers themselves.

4. These declining metrics are then used to fuel more anti-public school propaganda which in turn drives more parents of means to pull their kids from public schools which further drives down performance metrics….

It’s a simple cycle and a predictable one and one that the usual suspects have been contributing to for decades. School “reform” types will often defend the concept of public schools but almost never the reality, and by playing along with at least some large part of the right-wing effort to destroy the entire institution of publicly funded and run schools, they inevitably contribute to the potential ruin of public schooling writ large. And you can easily imagine the endgame for this dynamic, where public schools become the schools of last resort, home to only the most disadvantaged and challenging students and thus seen as entirely unsuitable by parents of means, bringing the self-fulfilling prophecy to its conclusion.

Of course, there’s a certain inevitable reality here: if the anti-public school forces get their way and we tear down the whole edifice of public schooling, but we maintain the commitment to universal and mandatory K-12 education, the hardest-to-educate students will have to go somewhere. And in a system of universally private schools where poor kids attend on vouchers, they’re going to end up in private schools - which will undermine the very reasons that many parents send their kids to private school in the first place. This gets back to a dynamic I’ve written about before: those who work in and around private schools are often profoundly ambivalent about the idea of a voucher-funded, all-private system of the type that libertarians have championed for decades. Of course they’d like access to some government money. But such a system would directly challenge the financial model of private schools. Many parents prefer private schools precisely because they screen out “the bad kids”; private school teachers accept significantly lower average wages based on the same bargain. Many legacy private schools will likely continue to work to exclude undesirable students in order to preserve their advantage, and unless you can prove certain kinds of federally-forbidden discrimination, they have broad latitude to do so. Where do the truly disadvantaged kids end up then? Probably warehoused in private schools of last resort, underfunded and stigmatized, filling the same function that the most criticized public schools do today.

Of course, by then, the damage will have already been done, public schools a thing of the past, with those who advocated for their destruction indifferent to the perpetuation of the same old outcomes in an all-private system - which no doubt is all part of the plan.

Everything about this is ill conceived and unhelpful and will not leave me in any better position than before I wrote it. But plead I must.

About eight months ago a small group of journalists told two different lies about my first novel on BlueSky. The Mind Reels is a modest but deeply-felt story of a young woman succumbing to bipolar disorder, inspired by my own experience of slowly going crazy and being diagnosed at a state psychiatric hospital when I was 20. I won’t say who told these lies, because this post isn’t about score-settling, but if you don’t value your precious minutes on earth you can search through my BlueSky burner to see who I was interacting with back then. They’re paid-up people in the media’s weird quasi-political pecking order, and they surely knew that they could get away with saying untrue things about my book because I am unpopular, a designated target who deserves none of the graces that conventional morality demands, like basic honesty. But it is in fact the case that the things they said were not true, and the truth has a certain inextinguishable reality no matter how popular or unpopular the target of a lie may be. I shouldn’t have to argue that point, no one should, but I do.

The first lie: one of them claimed that it was an “antiwoke” novel, a political work that attacked modern social liberalism. This is simply untrue; the book is resolutely apolitical, has zero interest in what you might call issues of contemporary political debate, and to the degree that it has any implied politics at all, they’re exclusively the politics of psychiatric medicine, which certainly don’t map onto a woke-antiwoke framework. A lot of people with conventional social justice politics have read and enjoyed the book. Besides - and you will see that this has become a theme - the book had not yet been published, and I knew where every galley had been sent, and anyway the guy who made this claim is someone who would never deign to read a novel by me. So, you know, a very weird thing to lie about. The other media insider type claimed that the book was blurbed by Andrew Sullivan and Pamela Paul. This was also just not true. Neither Sullivan nor Paul blurbed the book, and in fact it hadn’t occurred to me to ask them, simply because they wouldn’t make sense as blurbers for that kind of a project. As you’d expect, the book is blurbed by people in the literary world, two novelists and a New Yorker writer. This is a very strange thing to lie about, particularly given that (again) the book did not yet exist in its retail form and as such no blurbs existed.

I discovered this, I believe, by putting the title of the book in the BlueSky search bar. I have a Google alert on that phrase, not that Google alerts really work anymore, but while that sometimes tips me off to things said on Twitter, I don’t believe it works on BlueSky. And I want to know what people are saying about my work, so I frequently go looking for reactions, typically by sticking the link to a piece in the search bar on a social network. This is a behavior that is considered very low class and embarrassing by the stratum of people who were also responsible for those lies. To admit to searching for reactions to one’s work is a pre-mocked activity, in that world. This is one of those things where I just feel like I’m on a different planet from the hivemind of the industry. I care about my work and want to know what other people think about it, so of course I go looking for opinions about it. Why on earth would I be embarrassed to gauge the reception of a piece I wrote? Just seems so uncomplicated to me. But please, understand that I am aware that it’s very embarrassing that I went looking for discussion of my upcoming novel, a novel into which I poured decades of pain and frustration over the disorder that has crippled me.

Anyway, I saw those lies, and I responded on the burner by saying, hey, these lies are lies. And of course this got a little pile-on going. You have to understand that all of these networks are driven by a desperate need to be validated by the group, and there’s no easier way to feel like you’re part of the crowd than with shared hate. Both of the people who had lied held me up for mockery to the crowd; the first did so and then promptly blocked me. The crowd reacted the way it always does. Neither denied that they lied, but neither admitted anything either, and they both engaged with the kind of smirking faux-disaffection and theatrically smug demeanor that is the true legacy of Twitter. Dozens and dozens of others piled on. (Again, you can click around in the replies to that BlueSky burner if you’d like to see.) What’s kind of crazy is how little interest anyone had in the question I was raising, which was where the things being said were true. That the lies I was objecting to actually were lies was simply not remarked on; that would have been inconvenient for the team-building exercise. Instead the topic at hand became how embarrassing it was that I had showed up to dispute straightforwardly dishonest and factually incorrect statements about my own work. Aren’t you embarrassed?, they asked on BlueSky. Somebody even sent me an email to ask the same question. Aren’t you embarrassed?

To which I said, no, of course I’m not embarrassed. It’s not remotely embarrassing to refute a lie told about you. What’s embarrassing is to be the person who told the lie. That’s what’s embarrassing. Being part of the peanut gallery and completely ignoring the truth or falsehood at issue, in favor of naked appeals to popularity and tribe, that’s embarrassing. Choosing to excuse lies because you’re trying to defend your social position among a bunch of people who don’t actually know or like you is embarrassing. Being honest can’t be embarrassing; being dishonest is always embarrassing. And it doesn’t matter how many people you can rally to your cause. The truth can’t be crowdsourced.

Of course, all of this stuff is recursive; if the same people catch wind of this post, and there’s a decent chance they will, they’ll declare this to be embarrassing, too. They’ll go through the same ritualistic mockery that they did that day, the same they’ve engaged in since like 2010, only now they’re mostly all middle aged and far too old to be behaving this way. They’ll dunk, they’ll chortle, they’ll bring me out as the designated sin-eater once again, all to give them the opportunity for validation that they crave. That none of them would ever make the affirmative case “it’s OK to lie if the person you’re lying about is unpopular” doesn’t change the fact that that is indeed the logic behind all of it. Well, I think the truth matters, regardless of who you’re talking about, and I think it’s shameful to be so shameless. Who raised you people?

I know that a number of you will have already theatrically groaned and deleted this email once you identify my purpose here, which is your right. But I do have to write this all down, if only to get it on the record for when I die. The reality is that I exist in this weird punitive cone of silence in the media industry and have for many years, and it’s not justifiable based on my actual beliefs or actions. My actual views are constantly misrepresented by others, and the misrepresentations have been both a drag on my career and the source of some real interpersonal sadness. And while basic real life things have gotten much much better for me, now nine years into being medicated and stable, there’s this ongoing, pointless shunning campaign that’s shuffling on, zombie-like, leaderless but very much alive. I would like to be free of it, especially because no one is willing to offer an affirmative justification for it in moral reasoning terms. It’s all backchannel, but it’s real, and it’s harmful, and I am not guilty of the kind of harms that should be permanently disqualifying of just getting work, especially given the mitigating factor of my biggest scandal, which I will address.

What I’m asking for is limited and specific. I don’t want people who don’t like me to start liking me. I don’t want my many critics to become supporters. What I would like is a) for people in media who have engaged in real and explicit efforts to prevent my work from being published or discussed to reevaluate whether I deserve those active efforts, in a business filled with bad actors, and b) for all types of people to stop telling direct lies about my beliefs or my behavior. Just stop lying, OK? Both of my first two nonfiction books have been the subject of out-and-out lies about their arguments, lies which have been used as justification for them to be ignored by establishment media; as I said above, my first novel was the subject of bizarre falsehoods about not just its contents but the blurbs that appear on it, which is so weird; I routinely see exchanges on social media where someone is harangued for linking to or praising my work, harangues which inevitably include just straightforward lies about my beliefs. I would like for it to stop, please. I would like to be attacked for what I actually believe and have actually said, not what others have decided about me. And these requests should have nothing to do with one’s feelings towards me; they should be granted out of basic personal integrity.

I’m not naive, though. I am well aware that the response from that crew is going to be “lol lol lol lol lmao lol,” the same tired blank sarcasm from people who honestly are far too old to be engaging in that behavior at this point. But I have other goals than trying to sway the diehard haters. Rather I’m trying to reach third parties, particular gatekeepers in the creative fields. I’m asking that people investigate the truth about what’s said about me by my most dogged critics. (You can email me.) I’m asking people to research if I’ve actually said or done whatever comically evil thing I’m accused of. I’m trying to reach people who have heard things about me that aren’t true, have noticed that there’s a weird obsessive attitude towards me like the one seen in that BlueSky incident, and might be willing to admit that it’s all strange and unhelpful. I’m asking the community writ large to please aspire to higher principles than popularity, to set aside the weird theatrics of ambient opinion among peers in favor of privileging the work. Judge the work. The work is the only ultimately enduring value. The work itself.

This is all likely helpless, but not saying anything doesn’t get me anywhere either. And, just… fuck it.

The reality is that for a long time, including long before any genuine scandal, people in the industry have conspired against my career. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. In the olden days, when Twitter was still the crucible of media careers, people openly said that I should not be given opportunities in establishment media and encouraged others to advance that belief. An editor would publish a piece, and that piece would be good and profitable, and various figures within the industry would melt down and insist that I never be published in that particular venue again, ostensibly because I am wicked, really because at some point in their lives I made them feel foolish. And it goes far beyond that and into organized attempts to prevent me from having a career.

To be clear, I’m directly alleging that people in the business have gone past criticism of me or my work and have instead actually attempted to convince leadership at various publications to reject my pitches out of hand. Sometimes this goes beyond trying to implement rules that I not be published and goes to the extent of insisting that I not be linked to or mentioned. You can dismiss this as paranoia, but I’ve been made aware of specifics probably a half dozen times since I started doing this, and of course if I’ve heard about it that many times, it’s certainly happened many more. If anybody wants to report it out, feel free. Or if you’d like to email me to tell me about things like this that you’ve witnessed, please do. I will protect your anonymity. But somebody eventually has to put the truth above the approval of their peers. Otherwise it’s all a joke.

For example. In I think 2014 or so, when my freelancing career was really taking off, a prominent writer sent me emails from a chain made up of a smallish group of people in the industry, emails in which they actively encouraged each other to prevent me from getting published by their employers. I stewed about it for days, but I knew anything I did would make it worse, so I just went about crossing more venues off of my “To Publish In” list. But of course those efforts have hurt my career, and of course my determination to just keep publishing through it was an expression of powerlessness as well as of resolve. Stuff like that email chain is on the extreme end, but this sort of thing has been happening throughout my nearly twenty years in the business. The response, when I’ve complained about this, is what you’d expect - people insisting that I’m not important enough for anyone to conspire against, then saying that I deserve any such treatment and that I’m owned for being mad about it. A pretty classic example of the old “that isn’t happening, but it’s good that it’s happening” bit. And they extend that same attitude to the lying: no one is telling lies about you, we don’t care about you!, OK we said bad stuff about you, OK that stuff wasn’t true, but regardless, you’re owned for acting like the truth matters and anyway it’s OK to lie about you.

Freddie deBoer

I Think You Should Be Kind

The character pictured above is Hollywood Montrose from the film Mannequin. It’s a 1987 comedy, about a dreamer and artist played by Andrew McCarthy, who falls in love with a mannequin at the department store where he works, which is made more understandable (and yet even trickier) by the fact that said mannequin has been occupied by the spirit of an An…

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2 years ago · 422 likes · Freddie deBoer

A lie that’s particularly constant and particularly distressing is that I’m transphobic and opposed to trans rights. This is just false; I’ve been in favor of trans rights and trans representation since before most people knew what it meant to be trans. I grew up around all manner of sexual orientation and gender minorities, including trans people. And none of my positions are contrarian or idiosyncratic or whatever; my views on that topic are completely conventional progressive views. You can read about my thoughts in the post linked above. Yet claims that I’m anti-trans are made relentlessly, I guess because it’s seen as a particularly damning accusation in those circles. And yes, it gets around - people will tell me that they mentioned me to someone else, and that person will say “Isn’t he transphobic?” This is painful because I’ve known a lot of trans people in my life and I hate the idea of one of them hearing that lie and thinking that I don’t support them. And I’m also an abortion rights absolutist and an open borders type and I hate racism and empire and, in fact, many of my critics cannot make a single issue on which we disagree. So they make up ugly views and call them mine.

The zenith of the Just Lying About Freddie era was when there was a day-long Twitter meltdown involving hundreds of accounts, most of them bluechecks in the industry, expressing outrage about the contents of my first book… which I had not yet written. This was in 2018, before there was any manuscript to critique, let alone the finished book. The Twitter storm was massive, encompassing thousands of tweets, many of them from high-follower journalists and pundits and podcasters and editors. This was a year after my 2017 crisis and my slander against Malcolm Harris (see below); the funny thing was, though I definitely deserved censure for the 2017 incident and the 2018 was built on literally nothing I had actually said or done, the latter meltdown was bigger and nastier. They were all reacting to claims about an unwritten book that, I found after a lot of digging, had been made by a single shitposting account with about 800 followers and a Michael Cera avatar. (I wish I could find it now.) He was saying that it was a race science book, that it asserted genetic intellectual inferiority in Black people. But the book’s very premise was that after we someday close demographic achievement gaps, we’ll still be left with wide talent gaps we don’t know how to address. The core concept only makes sense if there isn’t any sort of inherent Black academic inferiority, a point the book makes several times. That was in the elevator pitch! But it didn’t matter. They had a preexisting dislike for me, they wanted permission to call me a racist, and the fact that it came in the form of an account that they had absolutely no business trusting made no difference.

For the record, yes, all of this included a lot of calls on MacMillan to not publish the book, at the height of the censorious social justice era, from big-deal people with big-deal influence, and with me a first-time writer with no clout and a career in tatters. Based on 100% false claims. Of the dozens and dozens of people in the media I saw get involved in that Twitter storm, not one person - not one - has ever said “That was uncool and I’m sorry for participating.”

The most obvious source of criticism of me is my 2017 online meltdown in 2017 in which I said terrible, libelous things about Malcolm Harris. I’ve said all I really want to say about that, but, yeah - the things I said were really bad. What I ask is that people not conveniently avoid the context, that I was once again in a destructive manic episode. My mental state does not excuse what happened or change the fact that I am responsible for the harm I caused, which was grievous. But it is relevant that I was psychotic, not to absolve me of all blame but to mitigate judgement. The usual suspects never even mention it, probably because they know it would reveal the hypocrisy of their politics around “ableism.”

Appropriately for someone who had done such a damaging and deeply unfair thing, when I got stable I again I started to set to work. I have apologized privately, I have apologized publicly, I take responsibility. I paid an immense personal and professional price for what happened. I changed my whole entire life and dug out, the hard way, with endless psychiatrist appointments, therapy sessions, and support groups. I estimate that I’ve taken maybe 25,000 pills since. I’ve been medicated and in treatment for a decade next year. I’ve raised and personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to sexual assault-related charities and still donate every month; it just feels like the thing to do. I sometimes get the impression that people think I haven’t suffered enough, but living with a psychotic disorder for a quarter century is a punishment of the highest order, trust me. It’s cost me everything I ever wanted. I sometimes get the impression that people think I haven’t felt sufficient guilt and shame; I’ve felt guilt and shame about it every day for almost a decade. I have had to save my own life from a condition that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. You don’t have to find anything about this inspiring, but you do have to let me move on. It’s been nine years. Harris is off writing award-winning books. I have rebuilt a life. What is the theory of disability, public misbehavior, and forgiveness that you’re operating under, if you want me to be unpersoned forever?

It’s just really hard for to understand how progressive people, who supposedly are friends to those with disabilities, would argue that I should receive the professional death penalty for what happened. As the cliche goes, my mental illness is not my fault but is my responsibility. I’ve met that responsibility in every way I know how: with emergency mental healthcare, with psychiatry and psychotherapy, by taking so many medications, by forever changing my relationship to drugs and alcohol, by going to meetings and support groups, by adding layer after layer of accountability and supervision to my life - and, also, by accepting that my life will never be the same and that I will always face limits on what I can accomplish because of my history. And I just look at the past decade and everything I’ve had to do, and I see someone invoke my 2017 incident because they don’t like something I wrote, and I just want to ask… what is it that you think I owe you? What do you want from me?

I never did something like that before that night. I’ve never done anything like it since. Could you consider the possibility, for a moment, that I have spent much of my life deeply mentally sick, and that that condition is enough punishment itself?

This book that I have coming out is important. It’s about a topic that’s loaded with consequences for many people, including some of the most vulnerable in our society. Its concerns have never been dealt with in quite the fashion that I’m dealing with them, in part because of the orthodoxies of our therapeutic culture. I do have the benefit of long personal experience in the mental healthcare system, years of diligent research, and strong feelings. We’re currently undergoing a reevaluation of what’s truly humane when it comes to drug use, and we need a similar reevaluation when it comes to involuntary treatment for those who cannot make rational decisions thanks to their mental illnesses. And we need to seriously confront the indisputable fact that the insatiable online hunger for identity markers has made punishing mental disorders and other disabilities vaguer, less meaningful, and harder to research and treat. The basics of diagnostic criteria for psychiatric and behavioral disorders are crumbling beneath our feet, and as the book demonstrates at length, their are victims. These conversations need to happen, and if you’ll forgive me, I’m the best person to start them.

But people in media and publishing have to be willing to let the book get a fair hearing, and this has become harder and harder for me over time. It’s a strange dynamic. On one hand, the steady and awful dismantling of the professional media has left the old status hierarchies and personal politics of that world (once the obsession of many) looking vaguely ridiculous. On the other hand, as the industry contracts some people are clutching even more tightly to those dusty concerns, and because the industry is smaller the influence of any one person at any one publication only grows. And that can result in a refusal to cover a book like All In Your Head, which in turn kills discoverability and prevents the conversations that need to happen from happening. I certainly don’t like reading negative reviews of my work, but I always appreciate it, and I would never expect anyone to hold their fire when they critique it. I’m not asking for anyone to artificially praise the book. One of the best things that could happen for the book would be for it to come under fair-but-harsh criticism. What I am asking is that the book not get brushed under the rug simply because people in the industry don’t like me for reasons that have nothing to do with the book. I don’t want special positive treatment, but I also don’t want special negative treatment. I’m also asking that people don’t lie about its contents.

I just want the book to have the chance to earn appropriate attention. I’m not demanding attention. I just want a fair chance.

Can that happen? I don’t know. The various big doo-dah publications where I could run an excerpt or be profiled are mostly in an antagonistic relationship with me now; this is mostly but not entirely my fault. I will probably hustle and pitch enough to get an excerpt somewhere with a pretty big readership, this fall, but who knows. Reviews are another question. The New York Times? I don’t think that the Grey Lady would deign to be in a feud with the likes of me, which would require the institution to be aware of my existence, and they have no reason to. But certainly individual players within the vast and federalized NYT might be pleased if the book was just sort of brushed off of their docket. I wrote a piece complaining about their bad treatment of freelancers that I know pissed some people off in the building, and I frequently have to criticize them because of their peerless influence and financial success, which invite disproportionate scrutiny. (Especially because they “don’t do media criticism,” which is a policy that conveniently allows them to evade participating in discussions about their own mistakes.) It’s also true that I complained when they let a prior head of the Books section review my second book despite preexisting beef, and he bizarrely took my decision to share my Substack deal (when people were actively calling for transparency about those deals) three years prior out of context, without any link for readers to gather the context themselves. Subsequently, they didn’t review my last book. So, you know, I’m not optimistic there.

I wrote about the Times and it’s relationship to freelancers - that is, that they don’t treat freelancers very well, and that this situation keeps getting worse as the Times becomes more and more dominant - because it was a true thing that many people were saying but felt they couldn’t say. I know many freelance writers who have complained about how badly they were treated by the NYT, but they feel they can’t do so publicly because no one can afford to risk angering the dominant commercial and cultural force in the industry. I feel obligated to say the thing out loud in those situations. And I guess I have to accept the consequences.

Granted, there’s little rhyme or reason to who gets attention or not, in establishment media. Let me whisper a little industry secret in your ear: if someone gets profiled who isn’t already legitimately famous, it’s very very often because they’re friends with the writer of the profile and that writer is doing them a favor. Connections rule. That’s how, for example, the antipsychiatry charlatans the Delanos have enjoyed fawning coverage from three of the biggest-remaining publications left in the media - they’re wealthy, privileged, and have the right friends. (Perhaps the name “Delano” clues us in to a certain proximity to power.) And so their particularly insipid and parasitic version of anti-psychiatry gets outsize attention, which has direct influence on policy. Influential people read the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, after all, and they have entertained anti-psychiatry over and over again without ever playing host to a muscular defense of psychiatric medicine and why it matters for people like me. This is precisely why I’m constantly complaining about the massive influence that personal relationships, nepotism, and patronage have in this industry, because they distort coverage in a way that, in turn, distorts public understanding of important issues. The Delanos have the ability to command disproportionate attention, the severely ill who benefit from psychiatry do not, and this matters. That’s why the book is necessary.

New York magazine’s vertical The Cut runs justification after justification for treating diagnoses of cognitive and developmental and psychiatric disorders as consumer goods, to be picked and chosen at whim by overeducated urban liberals who want to use them as personal branding. They publish that stuff constantly, and the pieces never seriously engage with why that practice is so destructive. And yet external criticism is essentially nonexistent, likely because The Cut is as much an example of a cool, influential, social justice-y publication as still exists, and most left-leaning writers (which is to say, most writers) probably don’t see any percentage in criticizing them. Who wants to deal with the blowback? But someone has to, given that the gentrification of disability has victims. And the fact that this task falls to people like me and others in the paid newsletter wing of media means that the criticism is siloed. It shouldn’t be. That discussion should be had, broadly, the discussion of why in fact it’s pernicious that everyone you know suddenly has a mild, photogenic case of a neurodevelopmental disorder or psychiatric condition. That’s why the book is necessary.

In contrast with all that importance, there’s the petty issue of the cone of silence about me. I am definitely not a big deal, either in this industry or outside of it. But it’s also true that this whole endeavor depends on the willingness of peers to engage with you, and my success is at least as worthy of many other writers who are regularly referred to in establishment media. My newsletter posts routinely get more views than pieces in the highest-profile establishment publications. I regularly start conversations that spill out into other newsletters and onto social media. This fall my fourth book in six years will be published by a Big Five publisher. I have written for almost every major newspaper and magazine of note in the past fifteen years. I’ve done analysis work for nonprofits, I’ve given keynotes at conferences, I’ve spoken at a dozen colleges, I’ve ghostwritten books…. And yet the effort to avoid mentioning my existence, for fear of running afoul of the hardened social rules within what’s left of media, keeps going.

For example. At some point early last year I was made aware of a piece for a high-profile pub that was going to talk about the issue of rising autism rates, how those increases are heavily concentrated among those with the least impairment, and how discussion of autism has correspondingly come to sideline the severely autistic and foreground the least-afflicted. I would be a natural person to interview for such a piece, but of course I don’t own the issue or anything. What was really weird (and why the person with knowledge of the story contacted me) is that apparently the piece was going to include the exact phrase “the gentrification of disability” without any reference to my work. And that would be bizarre. In 20 years in the business, that piece and my subsequent development of the idea have attracted more sustained and passionate attention than anything else I’ve ever written, from a wider variety of readers with a wider variety of opinions than I’ve ever received. I’ve heard from autistic people, family members of the severely autistic, special education teachers, doctors who diagnose children with autism, researchers who investigate autism, people in the autism nonprofit space, disability activists, a TikTok autism influencer, students of all kinds…. Some of the reaction has been negative, a great deal of it has been positive, it’s all been informative. The interest has been considerable, and that interest is what has made my next book possible.

I think it would be strange to run a piece about the gentrification of disability, so named, and not include a reference to my work on that topic, especially including the post in which I coined the term. I think that would be strange! I know motivated people will insist that it wouldn’t be, that I’m demanding attention or being territorial, but I just don’t find that credible given the specificity of the term. Well, the piece never came out. Writer gave up? Killed by the pub? Still coming? Don’t know. There are any number of reasons why it may not have run, but the absolute stupidest would have been if the writer and/or editors realized that they couldn’t run it without some reference to my work and felt they could not break media omerta by doing so. That would be really, really, really stupid.

I’m sorry that I frequently have to refer to conversations I’ve had with industry people who I can’t name, pieces I know of that never ran, to gossip. But media and publishing are both backchannel businesses; you can’t understand either without understanding what a huge role the whisper network plays. And I don’t want anyone to be damned by association with me, which is why I hand out praise to other people privately, in emails.

New York magazine has a daily newsletter called Dinner Party where they round up their site’s offerings for the day, add a little context or an interview, and maybe include some exterior links. I’ve subscribed since the beginning, I like the newsletter, and I like what Emily Gould has done with it since she’s come on. But. In June of 2024, I wrote a piece for New York that ran under the headline “The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill Into Treatment.” I was very happy with the essay and I felt New York was the perfect venue. The piece did quite well in terms of pageviews, there was a long and passionate debate in the comments section, it got shared widely on social media, pieces reacting to it sprung up, I discussed it on multiple podcasts, it still gets brought up to me often. Everything that a piece by a freelancer can do for a publication, it did well. I kept my end of the bargain, including by repeatedly sharing it on Substack. And yet the piece was never linked to in Dinner Party, a newsletter that exists precisely to market work from New York and which regularly links to 300-word blog posts, the crossword, and horoscopes. Not even a one-sentence, five-or-six word reference and link.

Who might have vetoed my piece’s appearance there, I can’t say. What I can tell you is that it seems like obviously unprofessional behavior, to me. A renowned publication of that stature and quality should not be a vehicle for this shit. People have to be adults and set aside childish prosecution of petty high school politics in professional venues, or else everything I’ve ever said about media is true. The only other thing that I can say, when I think about that, is… lol.

I took a lot of heat when I came back to writing three years (plus a month or so) after the events of 2017. But I genuinely had no choice; CUNY had fired me and I was running out of money, to the point that my ability to get medical care to manage my disorder was threatened. And listen, when it came to a job doing something else, I really tried. I applied to jobs for ten months with no success, not a single offer that came close to paying the rent. At the time I couldn’t help but note the irony: a big part of the problem was that my Google results were radioactive, and of course my biggest critics had contributed to that condition, which meant that they had helped drive me back into their world. It was my fault, of course. But that part was funny.

Lately it’s kind of felt like the same scenario. Look, I want the same thing my critics want: I want out of all this. I need to find a new way to exist in the world. I’ve opinionated too long, and it’s better for everybody if I stop being in a position where I have to have day-to-day engagement with an audience and the Online Conversation. I want very much to ride off into the sunset. Unfortunately, it turns out that you still have to pay the mortgage in the sunset, and I’m trying to figure out how to make that possible professionally. There’s a lot of things I would enjoy doing. I miss teaching college students terribly, and I would enjoy trying with another age cohort, maybe. There’s a lot of work in the broad creative world that I would enjoy trying, and I’m certainly not above miscellaneous white collar work. Who knows. My freelancing career is over; too few venues are left that will publish me. I just hope to God they’ll let me keep writing books. I’ve already built a lot of offline time into my day and week, now, and I’m generally pulling out of that whole world. But the more that people lose their minds every time my name is mentioned, the harder it is for me to build the future we both want, one with me out of this business.

Like I said, I don’t expect to change their minds; I mostly just want third parties to please not uncritically obey the demand that I be shunned. Please practice independent judgment, investigate my views yourself, and by all means, email me. But I do want to ask this of the critics themselves: what are you hanging on to this for? Why are you allowing yourself to still be moved to sudden rage by reminders of my existence? This is a broader question about what media people who came of age online from say 2005 to 2022 have to ask themselves: the industry we were a part of mostly doesn’t exist anymore, its attendant social culture is dead, and none of that is coming back. The feelings you associate with it are never coming back. And so let this weird meme hatred die with them. I am a minor figure who is very easy to avoid, an aging dad who just wants to enjoy the remaining 30 or 40 years of my life with my wife and kid, writing books. Let me go do my thing and you all do yours. The world only spins forward. As the New Agey types say of our hangups, set it free. Do us all a favor and set it free. Set me free.

FOLKS WE HAVE A NEW SUBMISSIONS FORM AND A NEW LINK!

Gang, the whole Markdown system was effective but a bit clunky and a lot of submissions were malformed, which honestly was perfectly predictable. So I’ve finally gotten the form (more or less) automated. We’re back to you just putting in your info, no Markdown, and this should be the best of both worlds. Thank you for your patience. The rest is boilerplate.

It’s that time again! This is a call for submissions for my bimonthly roundup of subscriber writing, where I publish links to the written work my subscribers want to share. All submissions should be made via the Google Form. Don’t worry about formatting in terms of bolding and linking; just enter the information as requested in the form. Deadline for this month is Sunday, May 10th, at 10 PM EST. (That’s Mother’s Day, don’t forget to give your mom flowers and a card.) At that time I will disable the ability to submit new responses in the form until the next call, so get your submissions in on time. If you’re an old hand at this, you can click over to the form and submit your work and safely close this email. If you’re new to this, please read the information below to help us all out. Don’t email me, use the Google Form! Non-subscribers, if you want to take advantage of this forum to share your work, you know what to do.

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Yes, I do check your email against the emails on the subscriber list, so if you ordinarily use a different one, point me to your subscribed email in the form.

What This is All About

For those who are new, let me take a moment to let you know what this is all about. As a regular feature, I present an opportunity for paying subscribers to share some of their writing with my mailing list of ~70,000 readers. This is a subscriber perk, and it’s also something I really love to do because I’m very passionate about writing and writers and want to help people who are trying to build an audience. I emphasize that this is for sharing subscriber writing, not your podcast, your Twitch stream, or your Instagram. One thing that I have to reiterate here is that this is the opportunity to link to writing that’s already hosted elsewhere; it’s not, as some people assume, an opportunity to actually post your work here. If you’re looking for someplace to host your writing, why not start a free Wordpress or Substack, or use another blogging or newsletter service? Then you can link to your work here. You can highlight a blog or newsletter or similar on its own, but it may be most useful to link to a specific post or story. If you’re plugging a book, make sure to link to a publishing house listing or Amazon page or some other place where your book can be accessed by readers.

I’ve now had dozens of readers tell me that they meaningfully expanded their audience through this service before. That’s very gratifying for me, and I hope that when the roundup post is run, you’ll check out what some of your peers have put together; their work is very often worth reading.

Every social network has its cliches and commonplaces, and on Substack Notes, this is one of the most prominent:

55,000 likes is about as viral as it gets, for a Substack Note. (Also, UNPOPULAR OPINION followed by what might be the most likes in the history of the network… lol.) I’m afraid that, despite all this adulation, this note and the many like it are deeply irresponsible and helps neither the poor nor the mentally ill. The claim that there’s a strong association between rates of poverty, inequality, or economic instability and mental illness is far less certain than this attitude would make it seem. In order to be fair, and to not attack a strawman, I’ll restrict myself today to anxiety and depression, which are the conditions most often cited as being driven by economic insecurity. So I won’t demonstrate that schizophrenia is a disease that afflicts people of all income levels, for example. (Yes, there’s an association between schizophrenia and poverty, but then schizophrenia has a way of causing poverty.) Even so restricted, I’ll demonstrate that richer countries are often more depressed countries, that anxiety often grows as poverty and inequality improve, and that in general, the simplistic claims of the type expressed in this Note are not empirically defensible. Mental health is just much, much more complicated than that.

And to be clear, that argument (that as economic insecurity rises, so do depression and anxiety) is seductive and politically convenient, if you have my politics; it provides more justification for what I already want society to do. Let’s get some redistribution going! More progressive tax rates, more redistribution, fewer billionaires. That all sounds great to me. Fix inequality and you’ll fix the mental health crisis.

Or is it the other way around? Do rising rates of mental illness drive up poverty rates, instead of the other way around? Maybe all the crazies are making us poor. I know that sounds glib, but then this is the problem with “X went up and Y went up, therefore X caused Y”: that is always an equally-strong argument that Y caused X. You can insist that common sense tells us which direction causation must go, and I would agree with you. My point is that this sort of thing is profoundly lacking in rigor, in care, and these are issues that we should be achingly careful about. Of course this narrative has become something close to orthodoxy in progressive public health discourse, repeated in op-eds, policy papers, and social media with the confidence of established fact. But then, that’s when skepticism is most important, when we’re facing the seduction of an oversimplified version of the truth that reinforces our priors. I’m afraid that, as an account of mental illness - its origins, its distribution, its history - this claim is at best a dangerous oversimplification. At worst, it actively impedes progress on both fronts: the effort to combat poverty and inequality and the effort to treat, heal, and cure mental illness.

Let me be tediously clear about what I’m saying and not saying. Economic stress, precarity, housing instability, childhood poverty, social marginalization… these are of course genuine contributors to psychic suffering. The empirical evidence for this is real and should not be dismissed, and of course personal experience tells us the same thing. People who are under chronic material strain, on average, suffer more than those who aren’t; many of the specific stressors that make life so much harder can be addressed with money. And of course we should endeavor to eliminate poverty, in this era of abundance, because poverty is painful and difficult even if it doesn’t result in psychiatric disorders as conventionally defined. I’m on board. But part of what drives me crazy about this narrative is the way that it leads to a slippage between mental health defined very broadly (in terms of mood or mentality or stress level) and mental health as in referring to medical conditions that need to be discussed specifically and with diagnostic care. This is precisely the least helpful way to discuss mental illness, by blurring the boundary between bad feelings and pathological disorders of the brain and mind. Perhaps my many years of fighting against antipsychiatry cultists have left me triggered, I don’t know. But we don’t need that kind of imprecision.

The claim that socioeconomic conditions are the primary cause of mental illness, or that rising rates of depression and anxiety are chiefly explained by economic hardship, runs into serious, well-documented empirical trouble. The story of human mental illness, psychiatric anguish, and emotional suffering is far older, far stranger, and far more biologically rooted than this narrative allows.

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Some, Jesus, twelve years ago I argued that the NBA had become a league for snobs. Though people still talked about NBA culture as if it were all old-school types shouting “you have to take it to the hoop!” at the television, commentary about the league had at that point become impossibly snobby. There was indeed a divide between traditional analysis that extolled the virtues of post play and stars taking two-point shots that emerged from isos, on one side, and those who extolled the newer wisdom of heavy reliance on threes and layups, on the other. But the conversation was plagued by a dynamic in the three big American sports that has aggravated me for decades: the latter side had won an overwhelming victory among the media, in team front offices, and even within the overall NBA fanbase, and yet partisans for the analytics side constantly acted like they were a beleaguered minority, endlessly complaining and nakedly self-celebratory. As in in American society writ large, the nerds had won by any possible measure and yet still complained about how oppressed they were.

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We’ve just emerged from NFL draft season, that time when America’s biggest ratings draw produces a giant ejaculation of commentary, commentary which drenches the entire sports media and leaves it sticky for weeks. The sheer amount of draft coverage is unfathomable. And because this is sports in the 21st century, where public debate lives on social networks, the commentary about the draft and draft analysis is tribal, ugly, and stupid. The same old dynamic plays out, just as it did with baseball and basketball in years past: the analytics crowd is largely correct on most of the individual points of contention, but they overstate the lessons of their own analysis, refuse to address exceptions, and (in particular) act like assholes on Twitter, making it harder to support them when they’re right. It’s a constant war between people who are mostly wrong and people who are mostly right but sometimes wrong who have made being right the entirety of their identity. And I frequently wish both sides could lose. A perfect example can be found in the recent debate about the consensus draft board and whether teams should let it guide their picks.

The Consensus Board is Like an Index Fund, For Good and Bad

Think of the consensus draft board as the index fund of the NFL Draft. Just like an index fund doesn’t try to pick winners in the stock market but rather attempts to aggregate the entire market and give you a weighted average, consensus boards, most notably the one Arif Hasan has been putting out since 2015 or so, takes scores of individual analyst rankings and averages them into one composite ranking of prospects. The individual stocks, in this analogy, are not players but analysts, and the question “which will be the most profitable” becomes “whose mock draft will prove to be most prescient?” With the consensus board, you’re not betting on any single scout’s hot take; you’re buying the whole market’s collective opinion. And like an index fund, it has the appealing property that, on average, it beats most of the active predictors it’s made up of. Data shows that the consensus board has historically outperformed the median individual analyst at predicting where players actually get drafted. So when someone says a team “reached” or got “good value,” what they usually mean is that the team deviated from the index in a meaningful way - they took a player ranked 70th on the consensus board with the 40th pick or grabbed someone who slipped well below their expected slot. It’s certainly a defensible benchmark, and that’s exactly why so many people treat it as the default.

The question is whether always buying the index is actually the right strategy in a market this inefficient. And the answer, inevitably, is no.

You see, the consensus draft board is a very good example of a generally-helpful guide that’s applied to a system (the NFL draft) that a) is inherently noisy and b) has a low basal hit rate, which leaves us with a conclusion that should be obvious: the consensus draft board’s advantage is found in general and over many repetitions. Sample size is absolutely in play here. Applying the mathematically best strategy in poker can still result in losses, after all, and even the most quantitatively-oriented poker players will often still go with their gut from time to time. Over the course of many drafts, the consensus board will tend to produce strong results relative to most of the individual boards it combines, but this advantage exists in the aggregate. Saying that an individual pick is necessarily wrong because it deviates from the consensus board is like arguing that buying an individual stock out of proportion with its weight in an index can’t ever result in superior profits; of course that can and does happen. And yet every NFL draft pick that significantly differs from the consensus board now results in a mass roasting on Twitter, the cesspool that represents the sports world’s collective id. Nothing delights a certain class of sneering Twitter addict more than bashing a team for reaching on an individual pick, no matter what the larger track record of the team or GM. That’s precisely how not to think about the consensus draft board.

The consensus board is generally useful that it captures the rough market price of a draft prospect (sometimes very rough, in divisive drafts like this past one) and tends to beat the draft boards of individual analysts in predicting where players actually get selected. But “useful as a benchmark” is not the same as “deserving of slavish adherence,” and conflating the two ignores what the board is actually measuring. The consensus board is a prediction about how NFL teams will select prospects, which is a separate question from which prospects will succeed. The difference is accounted for in most consensus models, but it’s an inherently dicey prospect in a system where draft experts always have an eye on someone else’s work. Hasan himself splits his contributors into “forecasters” (predicting where players go) and “evaluators” (assessing who is good), and the forecaster rankings cluster more tightly because they’re working off of a lot of shared information. The herd can certainly be wrong about a player’s likely NFL future. (See: Jadaveon Clowney.) Similarly, a lot of people have argued that the price of tech stocks has been screwy for many years, and a lot of people believe that the fundamentals are out of line with the current price of oil. Market prices can diverge from reality, but that’s a different question than trying to price the market. Likewise, the consensus board is closer to a market price than an oracle on quality.

That distinction matters because what we actually care about is how draft prospects perform in their NFL careers. After the draft, who went in what order is largely a matter of trivia. But predicting actual success in the NFL is obviously hugely important - and it’s brutally, brutally tough business. First round quarterbacks (the most important picks of all) hit at roughly 35–45%, depending on how you define success and the data you want to look at; regardless of where you look, a majority fail to become winning starters. RotoWire’s analysis of 800 first-round picks since 2000 found that 52% of all players taken in the top-10 ever earned Pro Bowl honors, while the first round in general saw a 29% bust rate, remarkable figures given how much teams covet first round draft selections. The fact that whether a first round pick succeeds is essentially a coin flip often blows people’s minds, given how every much high-profile prospect is hyped in the leadup to the draft. And true stars become rare the deeper you go in the draft. About 0.5% of players drafted in rounds 3 through 7 across two decades made two First-Team All-Pros. For every Brock Purdy or Terrel Davis, there’s dozens and dozens of guys who never get a second contract in the league and many who never make the active roster. There’s an obvious conclusion to draw from this: most players in most drafts are not going to be quality NFL starters, let alone stars, and so the baseline for success is low no matter how well you draft.

This has serious consequences for the consensus board debate. If the system you’re trying to predict is a coin flip at the top of the draft and essentially a lottery by the middle rounds, then a board built by aggregating people who watch the same tape, attend the same Senior Bowl and combine, and read each other’s mocks cannot meaningfully transcend the noise floor of the underlying problem. (More on that last bit below.) Refusing to deviate from a benchmark that’s wrong roughly half the time isn’t an act of discipline, or not one you’d want to achieve, anyway; you’re just guaranteeing that you replicate the median outcome in a system where the median outcome is mediocre relative to the other teams and bad relative to the hope that your prospects will mostly pan out. The whole point of having an evaluation process is to occasionally beat the market. If you anchor entirely to consensus, you’ve built an apparatus that by its basic architecture can never outperform it - and, again, the market usually fails.

To put it another way, if the median first-round pick is roughly a coin flip to become a meaningful contributor, then the consensus board inherits all of that noise. Aggregating noisy estimators reduces variance around their mean - skinnys the spread - but it doesn’t inherently move the mean closer to the truth if the underlying signal is weak, as it is with draft data. If the signal was stronger, the hit rate wouldn’t be as low as what the NFL draft produces.

To return to the index fund analogy, then, you can think of consensus draft board orthodoxy as the belief that you should never pick individual stocks, only buy into index funds… only in a system where the entire market largely fails, rather than succeeds! Telling investors not to pick and choose individual stocks is wise because the market generally and predictably goes up over time. Index funds are thus a far safer and more defensible investment compared to the notoriously low-return practice of picking individual stocks. But giving the same advice to NFL teams picking players is a much less sensible proposition, because the overall “market” of NFL draftees has seen much less success over time than (say) the S&P 500. You can of course argue that a pick that’s truly outside of the consensus is a pick you could have gotten in a later round and that you should deploy your picks more strategically. But if a team feels truly confident that a particular player is far more valuable than the consensus board implies, taking him isn’t some sort of embarrassing error, and the people who suggest that it is are showing their ass.

Like I said, the consensus model’s value lies in sample size and repetition. If you want to get mad at 49ers GM John Lynch for so consistently stepping outside of the consensus with his picks, I wouldn’t object; that’s a sustained pattern of behavior. James Gladstone of the Jaguars has shown a pattern there too, though he’s too new in the position to be sure of his long-term tendencies. Criticizing teams and executives that have a history of reaches relative to consensus is fine. Blasting a team for picking an individual guy who was “supposed” to go 30 picks later based on the consensus board simply misunderstands the whole enterprise. It’s a good idea to just buy into an index fund and watch the market slowly move up over time… unless you’re the beneficiary of insider trading and you know something the market doesn’t. It’s the same with the NFL draft; the consensus board is a good guide most of the time, but if you feel very confident that you have information the other teams don’t, you should take your swing.

You Can’t Really Justify the Consensus Board with Bayes

The defense of the consensus board usually leans on the wisdom of crowds and, well, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki’s classic 2004 big-think book that argues that the estimates and predictions of many people are generally better than those of any expert. Aggregate enough independent estimates and the errors cancel out, leaving signal, or so the idea goes. I’m not sure that The Wisdom of Crowds is often explicitly cited by consensus draft gurus, but certainly that kind of thinking is prevalent in this debate. But here’s where I get back to the problem with everybody reading each other’s draft boards: Surowiecki is explicit that this dynamic only works under specific conditions, the most important of which is independence. For the crowd to be wise, its estimates have to be drawn from genuinely separate information, separate reasoning processes, separate intuitions…. When estimates are correlated, when everyone is reading each other’s mock drafts, insider tips, and interviews, aggregation no longer cancels error; it amplifies whatever shared bias the cluster carries. And that’s exactly what the NFL mock draft game entails, everybody looking at another kid’s test.

Hasan has acknowledged this himself; the forecaster boards show “strong evidence indicating that many of them are working off of the same information,” with similar clustering year after year. A hundred correlated boards is not a hundred independent samples but a bunch of closely-related projections derived from a lot of the same information. Crowd wisdom assumes you have something like the former, but the consensus board is structurally closer to the latter.

This is also where a Bayesian justification collapses. Bayesian updating requires the new information to be informative and (mostly) independent. NFL draft information fails both tests: it’s heavily correlated across the same info (college production, 40 time, hand and arm measurements, etc) and thus not independent, while much of it has weak predictive value to begin with. For example, Sports Info Solutions found running back combine scores correlate poorly with production despite driving major draft-capital decisions, and you can find many similar examples of data suggesting that specific draft info isn’t useful. This gets to a broader condition of modern life, where we’re drowning in information without seeing tangible benefits from it in many contexts. Teams and analysts now have access to cognition tests, GPS data, advanced college tracking, health information that previous generations would have killed for… and yet hit rates haven’t meaningfully improved. The simple Bayesian story (more data, better probability distribution) only works if your data is informative and independent. NFL draft data is often neither, which is why a board that aggregates it can make people more confident without making them more correct.

The Typing Penis Problem

I should say that, in general, the analysts aren’t the ones overstating the confidence we should feel about the consensus draft board and the actions it implies. Sometimes they are, but usually it’s this phenomenon where Twitter randos and similar hear statistical terms and try to apply them without understanding the underlying theory. (This is, to pick a common example that’s my own pet peeve, a big part of the absolute constant misunderstanding of regression to the mean in sports.) Hassan frequently refers to the consensus board as an expression of modesty, and he is better than many about accepting that there are deviations from it that are likely to prove to be the better move. So is this all just the fault of stupid eggs on social media, a problem that afflicts the entire internet? No, I don’t think so. Because NFL analysts sure do contribute to the Typing Penis problem, and I think Hassan is a good example.

Hassan seems bright and levelheaded in his longform writing and has a good newsletter on this platform. But on Twitter, where all of this discourse plays out, he’s a certified Typing Penis, spending a lot of time belittling low-follower accounts with team helmets for avis. Indeed, like a lot of new-school sports analysts, Hassan’s Twitter style almost seems designed to prove every stereotype about statheads correct - he comes across as condescending, rude, and seemingly uninterested in convincing any skeptics of anything. This has been true of the sports analytics revolution for decades, with baseball and basketball culture also giving rise to an expert class full of guys with revolutionary ambitions and a profound lack of interest in reaching out to the unconverted. It’s an archetype that goes all the way back to Bill James. It’s bad enough when a genuinely minority point of view spends all of its time dunking on people. It’s so much worse now that the nerds have won an unconditional surrender. Like Mark Zuckerberg still whining about being insufficiently adored, sports nerds engage in classic crybullying, the rage of the enfranchised.

Twitter is the crucible; every bad incentive and shitty habit on that awful site has come to permeate how we understand sports and argue about them. And it turns generally reasonable people into the worst version of themselves. Sam Monson is perfectly pleasant on his podcast Check the Mic, I remember him being unobjectionable back when he used to do video for PFF, and yet his Twitter persona is certified Typing Penis. It’s inexplicable, especially given that his cohost Steve Palazzolo embraces the much more pleasant Sleepy Italian paradigm. ESPN’s Bill Barnwell is a good analyst with a lot of insight, but his Typing Penis quotient is off the charts on Twitter. And his colleague Seth Walder, my god! The man seems interested in football only to the degree that it gives him an opportunity to tell other people how much smarter he is than they are. Classic Typing Penis stuff. (Their fellow ESPN analyst Ben Solak, however, is not a Typing Penis; his archetype is Dorkus Malorkus, a much better thing to be.) Blank derision is the lingua franca of all social media, but that doesn’t make this stuff any more justifiable.

The very structure of social media is most to blame here, but so is analytics culture, which across sports and deep into decades of success has never grown up, has never moved on from its sneering, Nerds > Jocks framing. And at this point, you have to wonder why. You guys won. Maybe enjoy it a little bit? I do understand though that there’s clearly some bunker mentality involved; no matter what your perspective, people on Twitter are going to scream at you. So maybe they adopt their manner of engaging thanks to that dynamic. But… like I said, no matter what your perspective, people on Twitter are going to scream at you. That’s just the nature of the beast. Of course Twitter randoms are ignorant dickheads; I expect smart analysts to behave better than they do! That seems like a low bar. And what you lose by being a Typing Penis is opportunities to persuade. Consensus draft discussions are a particularly loss because consensus draft boards are a) useful but b) subject to a lot of error. That makes sneering dismissal of alternative opinion unfortunate in both directions.

If you’d like an example of a better way to do football analysis generally and draft predictions specifically, consider the Ringer’s own version of the kids from the movie Good Boys, the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. They love football, they’re deeply engaged with the league, they have a lot of good insights, and they’re analytically informed, but they are also unpretentious, funny, and self-deprecating. I’ve learned real insights from the show, but I also appreciate their ethos, which holds that football shouldn’t feel like homework. Danny Kelly is a very well-informed draft guy, but he never acts like he knows everything or suggests certainty in a process that will always be filled with variance and failure. In general, the podcast’s hosts manage the feat of taking football seriously without taking themselves too seriously. And after another months-long, bruising draft season, I wonder why so many others struggle to do the same.

For about a week, readers have emailed to ask for my take on the recent endorsement of shoplifting as an act of radical anti-capitalism from Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino. They ask, what do I think about it?

When I read about those statements in that interview, I immediately thought of Gandhi’s famous advice: “Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest person that you have ever seen, and ask yourself if the next step you contemplate will be of any use to them.”

In this piece arguing that the future is here - that the Singularity is here, that it has already been accomplished - Katherine Dee says, “I typed this from an iPhone while looking at 3D-renderings of my unborn children.”

And, you know, that’s cool. We tried to get 3D scans of our little guy while he was still in the womb, but he was already Troll Baby at that point and was turned in the wrong direction on three separate visits to the studio, which required three separate 45-minute drives north and three separate 45-minute drives back home empty-handed. But 3D scans of a baby in utero are cool enough that we were willing to drop a couple hundred bucks on them, had he consented. Granted, the first fetal ultrasounds were administered in the 1950s, and for routine obstetric care there’s no advantage to 3D scans compared to conventional, perhaps even worse. But it’s definitely cool to see the baby that way! Obviously, the most important goal of medical technology is increasing human survival rates, and when it comes to babies, the metric of interest is infant mortality - the number of babies per 1,000 who don’t make it to their first birthday. And current levels of infant mortality are one of the great achievements of the modern world. We’re living in an era in which the death of an infant is a remote possibility, for those of us with access to modern medicine.

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But of course, “the modern world” means different things. Modernity, it turns out, began a long time ago.

This is a miracle, certainly, but it’s a miracle that protected me in 1981 almost as much as it protected my son in 2025. Here’s the rate of progress in this metric in the last 30 years.

As the father of a baby who came into the world healthy but with considerable difficulty - we spent the last five weeks of the pregnancy living in the hospital - I am grateful for the two fewer babies who die in their first 12 months compared to 30 years ago. I truly am. But it’s still clearly the case that dramatically reduced infant mortality, in the developed world, is not an achievement of the digital age; all of the heavy lifting was accomplished before most of us were born. In 1900, 100 out of 1000 American infants died before their first birthday, 10% of all lives snuffed out in their first year. By 1950 it was around 30 out of 1000. By 1970 it was about 20. When I was born it was less than 10. Now it sits at a little less than 6. The entire 1995–2024 window we’re looking at is the nearly flat tail-end of a transformation that was essentially complete before the “digital revolution” began. The heavy lifting, the core development and progress in sanitation, antibiotics, pasteurization, hospital births, happened far earlier, specifically in that magic 1870ish to 1970ish window I always talk about. You can say, hey, we haven’t seen major advances here because we’re near the limits of progress, there isn’t much further to go! But if that’s true, it kind of proves the point, right?

A lot of things are like infant mortality, in that we live with the benefits of immense progress, progress that was accomplished by our great-grandparents.

Note that the share of workforce in agriculture isn’t just about a shifting labor force but also about progress in one of the most essential metrics that dominate human existence, how much of our lives are spent in the hunt for food; American households spent about 50% of their budgets on food in 1870, about 15% in 1970. We could add the maternal death rate during childbirth, which fell 99% from 1900 to 1970, and we could add the share of homes with indoor plumbing or electricity, and we could add workplace safety and the decline of workplace mortality by more than 80% in that period, etc and etc and etc. That all constitutes genuinely revolutionary progress, and once you see its scale you can’t unsee it.

And so I have to say, as I so often and so tediously do, that I don’t think 3D photos of babies in utero constitute evidence of having reached a new period of human existence - nor, indeed, does the iPhone. Smartphones are the devices that are most often invoked when people defend the notion that we’re living in a technologically fertile period. But how many of their affordances are things that did not exist prior to their invention? Telephones were more than 130 years old when the iPhone was first released, portable telephones 35 years old. Portable televisions were first available in the 1950s. The first portable GPS (or GPS-like) product was released in the 1980s; the first portable camera a hundred years before that. Text messaging and email are the grandchildren of the telegraph and telegram; their truly revolutionary change of near-instantaneous communication (crossing the Atlantic in a fraction of a second) came in the Victorian era. Of course all of this is cheaper, more flexible, more powerful, better integrated, and more convenient than it was in its discrete forms, to say nothing of more portable. But in many ways, smartphones generally and the digital revolution specifically are the epitome of refinement culture, not of invention.

You know my saw on all of this, to the extent that I’m going to put some of the historical context in this footnote, to spare longtime readers.1 The upshot of all of this is GDP growth and productivity growth that are half of what they were in the post war period, a condition that has bedevilled economists for decades - and which the internet was supposed to fix.

Honestly, a ton of what we’ve developed in my lifetime amounts to scaling up the delivery of information and entertainment and the frictionlessness of certain financial transactions. These are real improvements! They’re not nothing. (The impact of so much information and entertainment at this point seems to be clearly malign, but that is a topic for another day.) But compare them seriously to what came before and the disproportion becomes almost embarrassing. The fundamental architecture of daily material life - how we heat our homes, how we move from place to place, how we grow and store and cook food, how we build structures - has changed remarkably little since 1970. Yes, medicine has progressed a great deal, but look at those charts above; the vast majority of the work of reducing deaths from disease and increasing longevity was accomplished long ago. A person transported from 1926 to 1976 would find the world nearly unrecognizable. A person transported from 1976 to 2026 would find it, after some orientation, quite familiar. The cars go to the same places. The planes aren’t even marginally faster. The houses are built the same way. People still die of cancer.

I’m a big fan of maintenance and I think it gets a really bum rap compared to innovation, which is our culture’s obsession. But it’s funny that that’s the case, given how much less innovative the 21st century has proven to be compared to the 19th and 20th. Things could be a lot worse! I’d rather be living in 2026, enjoying the benefits of that long-passed fertile period, than living in the teeth of all that incredible innovation in the 1910s, watching thousands die of the Spanish flu. I just think people should be clear-eyed about the era they’re living in. What modern invention would you really take over indoor plumbing, or pain killing medication, or the airplane? I think any honest person would have to say, none of it. No, you would not trade food refrigeration for TikTok. No, you would not trade routine handwashing as a mass phenomenon for the OLED TV. And no, you would not trade the EKG for ChatGPT.

On some level, I think people understand this. So there’s this kind of weird… tongue-in-cheek, I guess? quality to a lot of this, which makes it hard for me to parse how serious anyone is about it. Your Sams Altman and Darios Amodei are circus barkers whose net worth is directly dependent on getting you to believe their shpiel, so I’ll leave them aside. So many people talk about this stuff through the argot of the 21st century, defensive irony and jokiness, that I’m not sure if people really believe they’re going to be running their own private asteroid mine in five years or not. Even someone as earnest as Scott Alexander… I don’t know how serious he is about the idea that humanity is on the brink of a new epoch. Or maybe we’re past the brink? Dee - who is far from alone in her eagerness to declare the next era of human progress, obviously - says

we’re already the world of tomorrow.

In 2020, I said the real culture war was about technology. This has been true, arguably, since agriculture, since the alphabet, since reading, since the printing press, since the Industrial Revolution. Mary Harrington has since argued the singularity has already happened. Mary is right.

The revolution you are waiting for is over, and you are, for better and for worse, one of its children.

Alright, but… is the Singularity all that it’s cracked up to be, if most people didn’t even notice it happened? Most people haven’t really countenanced the Holy Singularity because they’re too busy trying to get the kids to school and to lose those stubborn ten pounds and to make dinner without the chicken drying out too much, just like their parents once did. Maybe I’m not meant to take this too seriously; the title of the post is “It's Too Late, Techno-pessimists. We Are As Gods.” The good news (or maybe bad, depending on your point of view) is that I can’t think of an experience more likely to disabuse you of the idea that you are as gods than having a baby. It’ll humble you in the best, deepest ways. And Claude can’t change the baby’s diaper or get him to eat his mashed peas.

I have really been trying to avoid talking about LLMs, or if you must, AI. But things have gotten kind of weird lately. There’s an unsettled quality to the discourse right now; we were briefly in “It’s cringe to believe in AI,” now we’ve swung back to “It’s cringe not to believe in AI,” but no one seems to share the same conception of what believing in AI entails. The influence of programming looms large, as it has over the culture writ large for some time. We were in another lull of disappointment in what LLMs can do, and then Claude Code came out, and suddenly everyone’s promising us asteroid mines and radical life extension and abundant clean energy again. But this is a category error: none of those things can be achieved with code.

The most telling thing about the LLM moment is what this technology is actually good at. LLMs write code, generate images, produce music, summarize documents, draft prose… which is to say, they have achieved mastery over the exact domains that were already, by any sane measure, overprovisioned. Was anyone saying that we didn’t have enough digital writing, images, videos, music, video games, or applications, a few years ago? The core triumph of technological growth is taking scarcity and creating abundance. Well, LLMs create an abundance, that’s for sure. But there was already an abundance of text, online, and an abundance of images, and there’s some insane stat like 24 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every second or whatever, and yes, there has been an abundance of code, of programs, of apps. And before we got these fancy new tools to produce more code, there wasn’t a lot of people saying “Gee, what we need is more apps, the app store is too empty.”

The internet in 2022, before the ChatGPT wave broke, already contained more text than any human being could read in ten thousand lifetimes, more images than any eye could see, more music than any ear could hear. When I was a younger man, the get-rich-quick scheme du jour was to create the next great iPhone app, which led to a world of smartphone apps so wildly overserved that we all got tired of apps and no one has sincerely gotten excited about a new one in like ten years. And now… we get more. The scarcity that these tools have abolished, in other words, was not a scarcity anyone was actually suffering from. We did not need more “content”; we did not need to produce digital entertainments at a faster pace. We needed (and still need) cheaper energy, more housing, better cancer treatments, functional mass transit, and a replacement for the internal combustion engine people actually want to use. What we received instead was a machine that can write a cover letter in four seconds and generate a photorealistic image of SpongeBob jackin it. The question of whether this constitutes civilizational transformation should answer itself. Right?

This is the “bits are easy, atoms are hard” problem in its starkest form. Every task LLMs perform (some of which they do pretty well, like help write code) happens on screens, in files, in the virtual world that computation has always occupied. And the lesson of the last fifty years of digital technology is that software’s limits are the limits of the screen itself. Code cannot insulate your house; no algorithm has ever laid a water pipe; the internet has not built a single mile of high-speed rail. What our current stagnation shows, collectively, is that the improvements in material human life that matter the most - abundance in warmth, in calories, in clean water, in physical safety, in hours of freedom from labor - were all achieved by technologies that operated on atoms: steel, concrete, copper wire, chlorine, penicillin. The digital revolution produced real and genuine gains within its own domain, but it never breached that membrane between the virtual and the physical, and LLMs show no signs of doing so either.

Claude Code has genuinely transformed how programmers write software, which is great, but also largely beside the point: the biggest technological lessons of the 21st century are about the limits of code.

You have not heard any of the many, many excitable AI maximalists in the media address this reality, the bits vs atoms barrier, because they have no response that can preserve their intense attachment to the idea that the world is about to change forever. So they resolutely ignore this basic reality: most of the world is not computers. Most of your life is dependent on technologies other than computers. Inconveniently, we also have few arenas of human endeavor that are seeing rapid development other than in computing.

And so the grander promises (curing cancer, cracking fusion, colonizing Mars, achieving material abundance through AI-directed science) function less as predictions than as a kind of promissory theology, perpetually redeemable in a future that recedes as you approach it. The actual connection between a model that autocompletes code and a cure for pancreatic cancer is speculative in the most precise sense: the sense of having no demonstrated mechanism. AI has produced real if modest contributions to protein folding and drug candidate screening. These are genuinely good things. But the leap from “AlphaFold is sometimes useful to structural biologists” to “we are on the threshold of defeating disease” is not an inference supported by evidence but rather a narrative that a certain kind of mind finds emotionally necessary. And when you look at the pattern of these promises historically - fusion has been twenty years away for seventy years, the paperless office was supposed to arrive with the PC, every home will soon have a large 3D printer that will provide them with the plastic goods they once bought at Walmart - the most responsible explanation is not that the breakthrough is imminent but that each generation of technologists, confronting the gap between what their tools can do and what they wish they could do, fills that gap with imagination and calls it the future.

Dee mentions Ray Kurzweil and calls him prescient.

Ray Kurzweil was prescient about many things, and one of them is this: the merger has started. He predicted the outer layers of our neocortex would be wired to the cloud by the 2030s, extending human thought the way the last round of neocortical expansion produced us. But think carefully about what consumer technology alone already does. (And that’s just CONSUMER technology.) We have built ourselves a second nervous system.

“We have built ourselves a second nervous system”! This is the kind of sentence that sounds like revelation and means, on inspection, that you can look things up very quickly on your phone. We have indeed built ourselves a very fast library. That library has caused a lot of unhappiness, but certainly it’s a remarkable technological achievement. That achievement did not, however, eliminate tuberculosis.

And while we’re talking about Kurzweil and nervous systems, we should take time to point out his fundamental misapprehension of that system. Kurzweil has always had one goal, above all others: to avoid death. As a means to achieve this ambitious project, he has repeatedly invoked the desire to “upload” his consciousness to a computer. But this is folly: there is no consciousness that is distinct from the brain that houses it. Consciousness is brain, is tissue, is cells, is wetware. There is no discrete program that is the self that can be extracted from the brain and deposited into a conveniently durable chassis. To imagine a consciousness that can be housed on a floppy disc is to participate in a dualist fantasy of the kind that should have died out hundreds of years ago. Kurzweil has had this pointed out to him many times, but his desire to live forever apparently overwhelms his more rational faculties. The fantasy wins.

Dee dismisses “techno-pessimists” as people trying to stop something that has already happened. (Jasmine Sun goes with “AI populists,” a term I find a little inscrutable.) Perhaps I am a techno-pessimist, but if so, it’s only because I’ve been alive for most of the dispiriting past 50 years. “We were promised flying cars,” goes the cliche. But flying cars are at least possible; it’s just that they’re hideously inefficient and offer no advantage over our current boring-but-effective combination of cars and airplanes. We also were told to dream of time travel and faster-than-light travel, both of which are forever forbidden by elementary physics, and of colonizing distant worlds, which is forever forbidden by more factors than I can list. As Kim Stanley Robinson and others have pointed out, that last bit is essential, because if we recognize that we only have one world to live in, we might become better stewards of it. And that’s why I’m a techno-pessimist in general. Though I’m frequently accused of hoeing this particular row because I like disillusioning other people, I am instead trying to make this reality clear: we cannot sit back and wait for technological progress to save us. The only solutions to our problems - the problems of hunger, of poverty, of injustice, of disillusionment, of alienation - are political solutions. I understand feeling totally defeated by that idea, given what politics is like on this planet. But it’s all we have. We start to build the political structures that can enable humanity to take care of all of us or we drown. There is no fate but what we make.

Whatever you think of my motives, I will not stop pointing out that we are still here, still in this boring muck, still circling the parking lot at Target looking for a space. And until and unless the usual suspects can produce actual evidence of something happening right now, the skeptic’s work is not over. They promise AI will cure all disease; AI has not cured a single disease. Ezra Klein routinely throws around 20% economic growth as a baseline for the AI age; these few years with LLMs have produced the same anemic ~2% growth as we’ve been used to in this, the digital century. And I still say, wake me up when that changes. My techno-pessimism is a pessimism grounded in a fact derived from the historical record: that civilizational-scale technological transformation is extraordinarily rare, that it happened once in a rapidly-receding extraordinary century, and that we have been living in its long shadow ever since. And now some mistake that shadow for the sun.