In the Heat (Dreams)

 I’m sitting in an old wooden cabin near the coast. It’s hot here in the day; cold at night.

Nearby the coastal range flattens out into a stunning array of forests, estuaries, sand dunes and miles upon miles of scarcely populated beaches.

It’s one piece of paradise.

While the others are out on and in the water — kayaking, swimming, hiking — the dog and I are back here, finding the shade, napping, dreaming.

Well, she’s doing the dreaming, while I stare at an empty screen.

This is reminiscent of a former time when communication was less immediate and therefore more deliberate. We have no cell service here, which makes it feel more remote than it actually is.

No calls, no texts, no pings to break my concentration.

So why does that screen stay so empty — have I nothing to say? No, the opposite is true. I have too much to say about the state of our world, its wars and politics and economic disparities and environmental degradations. And much more.

But today may not be the day for that. As I sip ice water and watch the dog dream, my eye catches movements from a grey squirrel, a white butterfly, a hovering hummingbird. I think of a novel I started years back.

It’s about a man who ventures off on a boat at sunset, a world’s worth of worry on his mind, but nowhere particular to go.

He imagines big adventures, big loves, important discoveries, new worlds. In reality, he has none of those things. When it’s time to drop anchor for the night, however, just before dozing off, he stiffens for a moment and contemplates again what is beyond the realm of possibility, before finding all of those things in his dreams.

Are Manners Obsolete?

One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic is the increased use of robots in our society. Among their advantages, they don't need masks or social distancing and they don't take sick days, vacations or parental leave.

They also don't easily take offense when treated badly or need to be thanked for doing a good job. In fact they don’t require any emotional involvement whatsoever.

As robotized services including Alexa and Siri have become more embedded in our offices and households, a question that occurs to me is what long-term impact are they having on the way we communicate with each other.

It starts, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learn to ask Siri or Alexa to do something in a commanding voice, which then becomes anger if the robot cannot comply with their wishes quickly enough.

I wonder how a child growing up in such circumstances will treat his or her employees in the future?

When voice commands first became a thing, I found myself speaking in a respectful voice and often thanking Siri for her help. Siri never replied. The engineers who developed her apparently hadn't bothered to work "you're welcome" into her vocabulary.

Thus, my politeness fell on deaf ears.

And although this type of software is supposed to be intelligent, i.e., it learning from interacting with us, in my experience our robotic friends are in no way learning to be more polite.

As for humans, when we are not rewarded for being polite, we tend to become less so over time. Gradually, for example, I’ve learned to issue simple straight-out commands to my voiced units. There is no point in engaging in social niceties with an entity that doesn’t respond accordingly, is there? 

But what I am conditioning myself to become?

When it comes to the people who have designed the relevant software in this case, many of them value direct, logical and blunt sentences. Social skills simply are not at a premium during an intense Agile development cycle.

As our society populates the environment with robots, maybe the ultimate effect will be that nobody will have much of a reason to be nice anymore.

This would, of course, resemble our political culture, where it seems politeness and respect for others became utterly extinct some time ago. 

Indeed, being not nice is often a virtue in modern America. And those who cheer on the misogynist, racist, homophobic demagogues at political rallies? They resemble nothing so much as robots. 

The news summaries in an age like this might as well be compiled by robots as well, I guess, but in fact I’ve done the ones that follow in the old-fashioned way. So please enjoy them.

 (I first published an earlier version of this essay four years ago.) 

HEADLINES:

• Is Cyprus about to be dragged into a war between Israel and Hezbollah? (Al Jazeera)

• Global fossil fuel consumption and energy emissions hit all-time highs in 2023, even as fossil fuels' share of the global energy mix decreased slightly on the year, the industry's Statistical Review of World Energy report said. (Reuters)

• ‘What if there just is no solution?’ How we are all in denial about the climate crisis (Guardian)

• Kim Jong Un takes his relationship with Putin — and maybe his nuclear program — to a new level (NBC)

• Millions remain under heat advisories as wildfire death toll grows (Today)

• High temperatures will persist in the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (WP)

• Trump gets the final word at CNN debate after coin flip (CNN)

• In the '70s, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders faced body-shaming, misogyny and unequal pay, and a new Netflix docuseries released Thursday shows little has changed. HuffPost's Paige Skinner spoke to two former cheerleaders and one woman who tried out for the team twice about their experiences. [HuffPost]

• Does science back up the surgeon general's call for a warning label on social media? (NPR)

• A new Fox poll shows Biden up. Their primetime hosts didn’t mention it. (WP)

• Firestorm erupts over requiring women to sign up for military draft (The Hill)

• Making art is a uniquely human act, and one that provides a wellspring of health benefits (The Conversation)

• Washington Post CEO Plans a Mysterious ‘Third Newsroom.’ His Past Offers a Clue. (WSJ)

• Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists call for leadership change amid publisher scrutiny (CNN)

• Incoming Washington Post editor decides not to take job amid ethics concerns (NBC)

• In 1964, the Klan killed three activists and shocked the nation. Here’s why the murders matter today. (WP)

• Neo-Nazis Are All-In On AI (Wired)

• AI is replacing human tasks faster than you think (CNN)

• Why artists are becoming less scared of AI (Technology Review)

• Elmer’s Unveils New Super Sticky Glue Park (The Onion)

 

Old Green Box

Among the possessions I recently reclaimed from storage is a painted cardboard box. It’s pastel green and dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box in an effort to strengthen it.

Inside were many copies of stories I wrote for the Michigan Daily. There also was a copy of Life magazine with a story about student protestors, which included a photo of me being arrested.

It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests all over the country. This was one of the times I mixed my new role as a journalist with political activism, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up memorialized by Life magazine.

Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. The charges of trespassing on public property, to which I pled, carried no actual penalty beyond a day’s labor in a local park.

But I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as part of an an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been one big royal pain in the ass for the authorities.

They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and brought John Lennon to Ann Arbor to sing in his support.

One thing led to another for me and within a few years I was somewhat improbably editing pieces Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.

A few more years and I was a reporter at Rolling Stone.

At the bottom of the files in the box was my FBI file, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau kept track of me starting with that arrest in college and my work for an underground paper in Ann Arbor. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and throughout the years at Rolling Stone.

Including my stories on the FBI’s COINTELPRO illegalities.

Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI redacted files prior to releasing them under the FOIA, but there was nothing in there of any consequence. 

So that old cardboard box painted pastel green contains a lot of memories, too many really. I don’t have time to relive the past right now, so I closed it back up and put it away for another day.

(I first published a different version of this one two years ago.)

HEADLINES:

• Tropical Storm Alberto, first of the Atlantic hurricane season, forms over the Gulf of Mexico (CBS)

• Tropical Storm Alberto weakens over northeast Mexico after heavy rains killed 3 (AP)

• Iran signals a major boost in nuclear enrichment at key site (WP)

• Israel and Hezbollah Play a Risky Tit-for-Tat, Leaving Region on Edge (NYT)

• North Korea’s Kim declares ‘full support’ for Russian war in Ukraine (WP)

• Russia and North Korea sign partnership deal that appears to be the strongest since the Cold War (AP)

• Britain Election Winner’s First Problem: Fix a Stagnant Economy (NYT)

• Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos (New Yorker)

• Hundreds of visitors have died during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca amid scorching heat, according to press reports and foreign ministries. (Reuters)

• Scorching heat waves test a climate-changing world’s resilience (WP)

• How a Heat Dome Creates Dangerous, Record-Breaking Temperatures (WSJ)

• The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes (Quanta)

• Fusion Sparks an Energy Revolution (Wired)

• Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence (Bloomberg)

• Report: Every Place On Earth Has Wrong Amount Of Water (The Onion)

 

The Other Oppenheimer

 Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of our main priorities at the Center for Investigative Reporting was examining the health and safety implications of nuclear technology.

This resulted in a series of special reports including “Nuclear Nightmare,” “Operation Wigwam,” and “Nuclear California.”

As part of this work, we interviewed a number of scientists who had been associated in some way with the Manhattan Project, the secret government program during World War Two to invent the atomic bomb.

Two memorable figures among those I met were in San Francisco — John Gofman and Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

By the time I met him, Frank was an elderly, soft-spoken man. A colleague and I interviewed him in his office at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, an interactive museum with exhibits that encourage children (and the adults accompanying them) to experience first-hand the wonder and mystery of scientific exploration and discovery.

During our interview, Frank described his brother crouching in a bunker to witness the explosion of the first atomic bomb. At first he had felt elation at the success of the mission, Frank said, but then a terrible sense of regret.

“Oh God, what have we done?” he had said, according to Frank.

Frank explained that he had later founded the Exploratorium in part in order to compensate for that awful sense of regret. “We had proven that science could accomplish terrible things. I wanted children to be able to also realize that science can also accomplish wonderful things.”

HEADLINES:

• Record-breaking US heat wave scorches the Midwest as New York activates the National Guard (AP)

• Jeff Bezos breaks his silence about turmoil at The Washington Post (CNN)

• Steve Bannon’s Prison Time Will Be Far Worse Than He Expected (TNR)

• Justice Clarence Thomas casts cloud over lawsuits challenging diversity programs (Reuters)

• Biden to give legal status to 500,000 undocumented spouses (BBC)

• New York appeals court declines to hear Trump's challenge to gag order in hush money case (NBC)

• Legal immigration to America has rebounded (Economist)

• Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s lead adviser for its response to the COVID pandemic, shared his last ever exchange with then-President Donald Trump in his upcoming memoir. Trump reportedly made a bold prediction about the 2020 election that didn't come true. [HuffPost]

• Most Americans approve of DEI, according to Post-Ipsos poll (WP)

• Putin and Kim Jung Un will meet in North Korea, supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine (NPR)

• Thailand passes a landmark bill recognizing marriage equality (Reuters)

• Gavin Newsom wants to change the US constitution to stop gun violence – will he succeed? (Guardian)

• The Gun Lobby’s Hidden Hand in the 2nd Amendment Battle (NYT)

• Judge orders railway to pay a Washington tribe nearly $400 million (AP)

• Negro Leagues baseball was even greater than the record books can say (WP)

• How Vannevar Bush Engineered the 20th Century — His fingerprints were on the Manhattan Project, the World Wide Web, and more (IEEE Spectrum)

• US acknowledges Northwest dams have devastated the region’s Native tribes (AP)

• Willie Mays, San Francisco Giants legend and MLB all-time great, is dead (SFC)

• Why does AI hallucinate? (Technology Review)

• How A.I. Is Revolutionizing Drug Development (NYT)

• Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun (The Onion)

Final Days?

It’s difficult to imagine how much of modern American history would have been different were it not for the reporting of the Washington Post. The Watergate investigation alone reshaped our political history, as did scores of other big stories over the past six decades.

But now, all of that appears to be at risk. The new guys in charge, all of whom have been imported from the U.K., represent the sleazy side of tabloid junk — checkbook journalism, publishing lies, stealing documents, spying on people — which is a serious departure from the Ben Bradley era.

When it comes to ethics, I’m hardly a goodie-two-shoes, but these new guys are the Fleet Street equivalent of the National Enquirer and its tactics recently on display in Trump’s hush money scandal.

Some Post reporters are rebelling, speaking out and doing accountability reporting about their bosses. By doing so, they are putting their own jobs at risk. We should expect no less of true journalists, but it is noteworthy that this is happening at a time when jobs in journalism are hard to get and even harder to keep.

Meanwhile, the Post has lost half its audience in recent years and appears to be on the verge of collapse.

It’s difficult to imagine how modern American history would be different were it not for the reporting of the Washington Post going forward, but unfortunately we may be about to find out.

HEADLINES:

• Netanyahu disbands his war Cabinet (NBC)

• Surgeon General Calls for Warning Labels on Social Media Platforms (NYT)

• How immigrants are helping keep job growth hot while inflation cools (CNBC)

• Washington Post reporters probe their own bosses amid newsroom uproar (Axios)

• Washington Post CEO Will Lewis’ status ‘increasingly untenable’ as newsgathering controversies mount (CNN)

• New 'Washington Post' chiefs can’t shake their past in London (NPR)

• Meet the voters who will have an enormous sway in picking the next president (WP)

• The war in Gaza is wiping out entire Palestinian families, one branch at a time (AP)

• Campaigning kicked off in France for a snap parliamentary election which opinion polls suggest the far-right National Rally will win, with President Emmanuel Macron's centrist alliance coming third, behind a leftwing ticket. (Reuters)

• Sequencing a baby’s genetic code can catch conditions not spotted by traditional screening, early results from studies in North Carolina and New York show. (WP)

• Banks Are Finally Realizing What Climate Change Will Do to Housing (Wired)

• A water war is looming between Mexico and the US. Neither side will win (CNN)

• U.S. faces "serious threat" of terror attack, expert and former CIA chief warn (Axios)

• Are animals conscious? How new research is changing minds (BBC)

• The Cause That Turned Idealists Into Authoritarian Zealots (Atlantic)

• AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think (Wired)

• Can A.I. Answer the Needs of Smaller Businesses? Some Push to Find Out. (NYT)

• Newest U.S. Aid Mission Just Single PowerBar Labeled ‘For Gaza’ Thrown Into Ocean (The Onion)

 

No Life is Simple

(This essay is from 12 years ago.)

If they were all added up. I wonder how many people I've interviewed in my career. How many people's stories I've collected and how many quotes I've selected.

You'd think it would all boil down to a formula, but it doesn't. Everyone is different; everyone's story is unique.

These days (circa 2012) I do a few interviews in person each week, a few others by phone, and a few others by email. I interview self-published authors for an ebook distributor, starting with a phone interview, followed by a Q&A in email.

That way there's no need to take notes or use a recorder, nor are there any worries about misquoting someone.

Still, even when the structure of an interview falls into a familiar pattern, because you are having a similar conversation to others about similar topics or ideas, the unique ways people see the world and tell their stories reshapes even familiar territory into new terrain.

That's one reason I like being a journalist. Being exposed to multiple perspectives on all kinds of things helps keep me from falling into a rut of unexamined thinking, or descending into the echo chamber of group-think.

At least I hope it does.

It might seem to some that the interviews I used to do of famous and prominent people for bigger publications like Rolling Stone or Salon about weighty topics were more important than my current short blog profiles of startups or ebook authors.

But I don't see it that way. A person's story is their story, whether they are powerful or unknown, whether the narrative seems complex or relatively simple.

And there's nothing simple about any life. 

Father's Day

 

How Age Matters

In practically every conversation I have with my contemporaries, the issue of age comes up. It’s unavoidable. — the lines on our faces, the color of our hair (assuming we still have some) and the shuffle in our step won’t let us forget about it.

But most elderly people I know don’t complain about their age; time has brought its benefits, including more free time, a relaxed pace and a better perspective on the past.

We can more easily let go of the mistakes and grudges of the past and there seems little point in holding on to resentments. I never hear any of my friends talk about wanting revenge, for example.

These are among the reasons it is especially strange for people of our vintage to see how the age of the major party presidential candidates is discussed as if there is some sort of equivalency between the two of them. Biological age is one thing but here I am talking about emotional age.

Biden may have only a couple calendar years on Trump but he is far more mature emotionally. As Jill Biden says, he makes a good president “not in spite of his age but because of it.” Along with Biden’s age comes emotional intelligence and wisdom. 

By contrast, consider Trump.  Psychology Today published an in-depth psychological  assessment of Trump back in 2017 that remains fundamentally true today. It concluded that his emotional age at that point as essentially that of a four-year-old, to wit:

“The core Trump dissonance is that he’s an elderly man who possesses the outward appearance and trappings of adulthood—and who occupies the public role we most strongly associate with adulthood—but who is on the inside predominantly infantile.

“(H)e exhibits a characteristic inability to see much beyond his own ego preoccupations. He appears to have no real friendships, habitually belittles those he sees as weak while denying any weakness of his own, and is perennially insecure, desperate to bolster his ratings, numbers, and stats by bending the facts to assuage his fears; he has little demonstrated capacity to joyfully laugh at himself (or laugh at all), and has professed to being uninterested in self-reflection and insight; the only problem he seems genuinely interested in (and truly capable of) solving is the chronic threat of his own waning relevance, and his guiding moral principle is that whatever works to make him ‘win’ is the right thing to do.

“In truth, we don’t know what about Trump’s life experience has prevented him from achieving maturity. Yet that developmental failure appears—ironically or tragically, depending on your sensibilities—to be at the core of both his unique attraction and the singular danger he poses.”

Again, at the time of the article, Trump’s emotional age was reckoned to be roughly four.

And I reckon he’s regressed since then.

HEADLINES:

• Biden and Trump campaigns agreed to mic muting, podiums among rules for upcoming CNN debate (CNN) 

• Psychological Science Says Trump Is a Four-Year-Old (Psychology Today)

• In Pivotal West Michigan, Voters Are Exhausted and Underwhelmed (NYT)

• Putin demands more Ukrainian land to end war; Kyiv rejects 'ultimatum' (Reuters)

• Leaked documents reveal patient safety issues at Amazon’s One Medical (WP)

• Eight Israeli soldiers killed in southern Gaza, military says (Guardian)

• Gazans describe life in tents as ‘hell’ as summer’s heat arrives (WP)

• U.S. sanctions Israeli group that attacked Gaza aid trucks (Reuters)

• Former CDC director predicts bird flu pandemic (The Hill)

• How Baptists and the G.O.P. Took Different Paths on I.V.F. (NYT)

• How “The Real World” Created Modern Reality TV (New Yorker)

• Brits are dominating American journalism — and British journalism, too (WP)

• Winging rightward all the way across Europe (Reuters)

• Silent Men film asks why so many still struggle to open up (BBC)

• How ruinous floods put Vermont at the forefront of the climate battle (WP)

• OpenAI expands lobbying team to influence regulation (Financial Times)

• Apple joins the race to find an AI icon that makes sense (TechCrunch)

• Clearview AI Used Your Face. Now You May Get a Stake in the Company.(NYT)

• God Frustrated After Realizing Gates Of Heaven Too Narrow To Fit Couch