In my artistic practice, I often return to making personal narratives eulogizing the body as offerings. In the 1990s I created elegiac videos commemorating and mourning those lost to AIDS. It was important to make the body sacred again. When I became physically disabled in 1996, my work then celebrated maligned bodies.

      I find hope in taking action, especially with other like-minded artists. No different than political street protests throughout my lifetime, i.e., the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Gay Liberation marches in New York, and No Kings rallies today.

      After last fall’s elections, I was afraid. I’m 73 years old, paraplegic and queer. I feared for my community and reached out to friends to participate in a new project asserting our corporeal agency. I needed to feel safe. Joining me were cisgendered and trans folks, queer and straight, with varying abilities. . . .

      I know exactly when that moment arrived for me.

      My parents lived on Long Island, and my dad was working near the World Trade Center in Manhattan (decades before 9/11). I had embarked upon kid-raising in New Jersey and was teaching at NYU.

      But my dad and I would meet once a week at a modest indoor tennis court in what is still known as the “Meatpacking District”—our foursome completed by my good friend Jim, who actually lived in Manhattan, and one of Jim’s friends.

      My dad was really good at sports. I wasn’t (though, through sheer doggedness, much later in life I managed some short triathlons). But with my dad in his 60s and me in my 30s, tennis doubles sort of worked.

      Then one day, as a ball headed his way, my dad crumpled to the ground.

This is an excerpt from Ian Leslie’s Substack, where he lists—based on the ideas of Andrej Karpathy, a founder of OpenAI—four other “failure modes” shared by AI and humans.

      A machine learning model gets trained on human data—photographs; Reddit forums; Amazon reviews; books and music and so on. We’re already at the stage where the big models have hoovered so much of this data into their maws that finding fresh sources to train on is hard.

AI models have no problem producing data, however, so the obvious answer is to train on data from other models. Indeed, this is inevitable, as the internet becomes swamped by LLM-generated text and images.
      But there’s a problem with this. Model-generated data tends to be more predictable and less diverse than human data, as it imposes statistical patterns on the infinite variety of human outputs. Over time, this creates a feedback loop. Each new iteration of the model inherits the biases and errors of the previous one, but with less variety and signal.

      Eventually, the model converges towards—or collapses into—the generic and repetitive. It loses accuracy, nuance, creativity until only a thin and colorless monoculture remains. This is “model collapse.”
      Damn those machines, erasing the incorrigible plurality of human minds! …

      There were no inflatables.

      On Halloween, back when we were kids, maybe our parents found some old white sheets and cut out eye holes and drew a scary smile with magic marker and we were ghosts. Maybe some of the kids wore makeshift eye patches and blackened a tooth here and there and they were ghouls. Some of us had applied temporary tattoos of skeletons on our forearms and we were . . . whatever we were.

      We did, maybe, a little trick-or-treating, off by ourselves, parent-less, knocking on doors of neighbors we knew, hoping for some Rice Krispie treats. But we actually preferred the tricks. . . .

I found myself irritated and dumbfounded that out of all the fulsome discussion of the film, except for a line at the end of the always incisive Richard Brody’s review in TheNew Yorker, and, yesterday, Carl Wilson at the end of his Slate review, it was being taken as solely a picture about a personal crisis, when at the time, in 1982, the Nebraska album seemed so plainly a matter of a person addressing himself to a social and political crisis, and trying to paint a picture of a nation whose cords were fraying, or being ripped up and out as a social and political project.

      So here, from the moment, is how it looked then. . , how it looked to me:

      . . . Nebraska (CBS)—recorded last January in Springsteen’s New Jersey living room with acoustic guitar and harmonica, with a bit of synthesizer and an occasional backing vocal added later—is the most complete and probably the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s USA has yet elicited, from any artist or any politician. . . .

This is an excerpt from Greil Marcus’ Substack. We encourage you to read the entire piece.

      The other morning, it was 2:50 a.m. The night before that, 3:35. One time last week, didn’t make it past 2. Last night, gratefully made it all the way to almost 4 a.m. before, of course, waking up.

      I have insomnia, and, you know, I am not alone.

      Up to 60 percent of people our age have some symptoms of insomnia. That could manifest itself by more than occasionally not being able to fall asleep or not being able to stay asleep or just waking too early. Almost a third of us get less sleep than is recommended. Around a quarter of us have enough symptoms, or a sufficient frequency of symptoms or severe enough symptoms, to meet the criteria for the chronic condition of insomnia disorder.

      Like many of us, it was not always that way for me. . . .

….The biggie will apparently be when computers, in their ever-increasing wisdom, themselves figure out how to design and program computers that are significantly smarter than are computers designed and programed by mere suck-at-chess, barely-able-to-sustain-iambic-pentameter humans. Then the snowball will expand as it rolls—exponentially.

Gosh!

      Whoa!

But also: Oy vey!

      And we might be tempted to add: Incomprehensible!

But I might have a wee bit to contribute to the ongoing struggle to comprehend.

      For I maintain, such a dramatic leap in astuteness is not unprecedented. This ain’t humankind’s first “intelligence explosion” . . .

      Nick and Annie have moved to a continuing care retirement community. Bob and Alicia are on the waiting list of another retirement home. Joyce has moved closer to kids and grandkids in Colorado. Louisa and Teddy, who are on several waiting lists for continuing care places, have moved into a 55+ community. A number of other couples we know have downsized to homes or townhomes or apartments with just one level, no steps and no maintenance obligations.

      Our plan? Our plan is that we don’t have any plan. . . .

      . . . October is my month of remembrance and reflection: my wedding anniversary, my parents' wedding anniversary, my last World Series with Daddy. In the film “Field of Dreams,” Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) declares "baseball has marked the time" and I couldn't agree more.

      Quite often, the supreme Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur occurs in October. We gather with family, reflect on the year just past, and retell the stories of Yom Kippur from childhood. With pleasure I recall the World Series games played in the daytime when a transistor radio provided my friends and me the briefest but oh-so-satisfying connection with baseball in the midst of the depressing liturgy of sins and atonement.

      The ultimate World Series and Yom Kippur story is from 1965 when star Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax (along with his manager and all the Jewish people in Los Angeles) prayed for rain so the first game of the World Series would not occur on Yom Kippur, when the Jewish Koufax would decline to pitch. . . .

      The Sicilian town of Taormina is remarkably beautiful, clinging to a cliff above the sparkling Ionian Sea. It is also quite inaccessible—the only way to get there is up a dizzyingly corkscrewing road, navigating an endless number of switchbacks.

      And yet: on a recent trip there, we found the tight, winding streets of this seemingly remote place filled with … tour groups. Blame the second season of “The White Lotus,” which was filmed here. Or just blame packaged mass tourism. 

      Endless groups of 20 or 30 people, their blue-tooth lanyards hanging from their necks, straggled through the Porta Messina, following the leader, the one at the front of the gaggle with the flag or the umbrella. . . .

By April 22, 1967 Aretha Franklin’s single “I Never Loved a Man” was number 9 on Billboard‘s Hot 100, shortly to sell a million-plus copies. Defying conventional record-business wisdom (let a hit song run its course), Jerry Wexler [co-owner of Atlantic Records, who produced Aretha Franklin] let fly with “Respect” on April 13th. By June 3rd, it was Aretha’s first number 1 and her second million-seller in four months.

According to Wexler, when he played Aretha’s “Respect” for its writer, “Otis [Redding] broke out into this wide smile and said, ‘The girl has taken that song from me. Ain’t no longer my song. From now on, it belongs to her.’ Then he asked me to play it again, and a third time. The smile never left his face.”

“Respect” could hardly have meshed more closely with the times. . . .

(This is an excerpt from Tony Scherman’s excellent Substack: Among the Musical, which is full of similarly marvelous insights and stories about the music of our generation.)

…...Despite all the changes in journalism I have seen in my historical research and encountered in my lifetime I am being surprised once again by how journalism is being transformed right now, in front of our eyes.  

We are now being forced to navigate our way through yet another new news world. And my relationship to journalism is changing once again.

Yes, my first news stop in the morning remains the New York Times—as it has been since my parents were required to buy me a (discounted) subscription in sixth grade.

But I now choose to encounter The Times exclusively on the magic phone I carry in my pocket. Even the newyorktimes.com website now seems a bit hoary, old-fashioned. And, on the rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of the actual emaciated remnants of The Times’ old incarnation as a stack of newsprint, it is usually at the house of someone even older than I, and it seems an artifact of days gone by—like a Roman coin or a 1960s Buick. . . .

      In these dire times of erasure and annihilation, Eli Clare and Angelo Madsen, two queer trans artists, have released powerful works of affirmation.

      A genderqueer person living with cerebral palsy, Eli Clare (https://eliclare.com ) uses writing as a bully pulpit against trans and disability oppression. His newest book, “Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming” (Duke University Press), interweaves creative nonfiction prose, poetry, memoir, history and advocacy. Painful flashbacks of childhood abuse are mixed in with erudite critiques of classifications and nomenclature and dreamscapes filled with gorgeous environmental metaphors.

      Resiliency and healing are central concerns. Tender meditations on stumbling strides and crawling across forest floors are used as invitations to others to break normative strictures and “scoot, slide and crawl” with him. Timid teenage poems are reconceived to become examples of empowerment. Intergenerational trauma is examined, not to forgive, but to break the chain of “survivor turned perpetuator.” . . .

. . . The challenge now will be to expand and sustain all forms of peaceful protest if our democracy is to have a fighting chance of survival.

      David Frum, in The Atlantic, noted that Trump’s “overall approval numbers have dropped to the very low 40s; his economic management, to the mid-30s. Grocery prices are up, and electricity prices are rising even faster.”

      The president, in other words, is racing the clock to crush opposition. That makes him exceedingly dangerous, but also vulnerable.

      Organizers of the resistance can’t stop with nationwide protests on Oct. 18. The path forward will demand planning, discipline and commitment beyond what we’ve seen to date.

      Neither organizers nor participants, however, need to reinvent the wheel. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, provides plenty of enduring lessons of effective protest even as the Trump Administration scrambles to obliterate the history of this period from Smithsonian museums and National Parks. . . .

Government shutdowns are bad. They inflict pain on the economy, on those who rely upon public services, and on those who provide those services. They reduce state capacity.

But only Trump and his budget chief Russ Vought are brave enough to ask: what if shutdowns aren’t painful enough? How can we make things worse? How can we use this as an opportunity to target our political enemies? Never mind if it illegally strips away valuable public services that we all rely on.

The central ethos of a personalist regime is that government should be run via the logic of loyalty rather than law. We are seeing this play out with the shutdown. . . .

(An excerpt from the Substack of Don Moynihan, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.)

Many of us in our generation are discouraged, frustrated and frequently feel hopeless about what’s going on. Or worse, we are disengaged, believing what’s going on doesn’t directly affect us. Many of us are generally comfortable, financially, professionally and psychologically, and so all the outrages don’t seem to cut as deeply. We are not undocumented, living on the edge, an at-risk minority, constantly fearful of what’s next.

And then again, many of us, at our ages, are occasionally just plain tired of it all and just plain tired.

So, who wants to go to another demonstration, call another legislator, plan a campaign or march when there’s laundry to be done, lawns to be mowed, errands to be run? Or just TV to be watched. . . .

Click for the introduction to this series:

“The Roots of the Hippie Idea.”

     In 1959, a large majority of the kids who would become the hippie generation could be found staring at a new and exciting presence in their family’s living room: a television set. And, in 1959, seven of the ten most watched television programs in the United States were about cowboys.

      Which was odd, since in reality cowboy work—mostly sitting on the back of a horse and watching or moving herds of cattle—was dirty, boring, underpaid work.

      But a romantic view of the cowboy, as a brave, gun-toting individualistic outdoorsman, had taken hold in a country increasingly populated by paper-pushing indoors men and mostly still-stuck-at-home indoors women, in a country eating balanced meals of hamburgers, mashed potatoes and frozen peas.. . .

      Ever since the heart attack, I have been carrying around with me a small metal canister filled with nitroglycerin tablets. It’s in case I have an episode of angina. The canister is attached to my keychain, and it is always with me, although I’ve never used the nitro for angina and, hopefully, never will have to.
      But while traveling, I don’t take my keys and thus there’s no attached canister. So I bring another canister, a loose one dropped into my pocket, to have the nitro with me at all times.
      And I did, on this trip, have it with me until the morning at the new hotel in the new town where I couldn’t find the new canister. I looked everywhere – in all my pockets, in the backpack, in the suitcase, on the floor of the hotel room, in all the drawers of the hotel room.No canister.
      Someone I know has carried around tablets of nitroglycerin for more than 40 years – and never used a single one. I didn’t expect to use it either, but I wanted the assurance of knowing it was with me. . . .

      Greetings from Portland, Oregon, my home since 1983.
      We were out of town at the Sisters Folk Festival, a sort of Woodstock for boomers, when Trump made his announcement about commandeering the Oregon National Guard to maintain law and order in Portland, which he has variously described as a “war zone,” “war ravaged” and “burning to the ground.” There were rumors (which turned out to be false) at the festival that tanks were rolling into Portland. Concerned and alarmed, we called our son, who also lives in Portland and has his fingers on all things political.
      “What’s going on in Portland?” we asked.
      With an exasperated sigh, he said, “Well, the brunch lines are really getting out of control.” . . .

. . . I was fascinated to learn that [Richard] Rorty was (or at least had been) a philosopher, and I read his older book, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” which is definitely a real philosophy book.

It’s a philosophy book with the thesis, I would say, that it’s not really a great idea to spend your time doing real philosophy. . . .

I vividly remember a 2016 Vox article hailing the fact that Hillary Clinton used the phrase “systemic racism” in a major speech, which Victoria Massie correctly pegged as a major departure from how Democrats normally talk about these things. I understand the systemic racism concept, but I don’t really like it. I think most people who have a negative affect toward it would want to try to argue that it’s not true or that it doesn’t make sense. But I have a more Rortian view. It’s a way of looking at the world, perhaps no more or less valid than any other, but you should ask yourself if this concept is helpful. What work does it do? The work it’s supposed to do, pretty clearly, is facilitate better outcomes for African Americans. But I don’t think it succeeds in its goal. . . .