Lawrence Lazarus:

In the coming ears, artificial intelligence will not simply change how we work It will likely erode work itself as the central organizing principle of modern society.

This is not a claim about mass unemployment or human obsolescence. It is about what happens when work gradually ceases to perform the quiet functions it has long served: occupying large populations, structuring daily life, anchoring identity, and stabilizing social and political institutions. As those functions weaken, the consequences go beyond the labor market. They spread outward, into family formation, social cohesion, political legitimacy, and how people experience purpose itself. The earliest signs of this shift are already visible.

… Different industries, regions, and roles will experience the phases of this shift at different speeds and in different sequences. Some may skip phases entirely; others may linger in one phase for years. The purpose here is not to map the future with precision but to render visible a pattern of erosion that has already begun, and to follow its logic toward a question we will eventually all have to answer.

[…]

At scale, this raises a question that economic policy alone cannot answer. When work no longer organizes daily life — when it no longer anchors identity or social contribution — what replaces it? This is the question toward which the coming years are moving — not suddenly, not uniformly, but persistently.

Who will answer it? Not economists: their tools measure output, not meaning. Not technologists: they built the displacement, not the replacement. Not politicians: they are still debating whether the disruption is real.

The question will fall to all of us: to families deciding how to raise children in a world without clear career paths, to communities trying to hold together without the rhythms of work, to individuals staring at open hours and wondering what they are for.

We will not answer it quickly. We may not answer it well. But we will have to live with the uncertainty while the old structures fade and the new ones have yet to take shape.

That is what it will mean to live through the drift.

Edward Feser:

[T]oo much contemporary art, as Roger Scruton notes in his book Beauty, reflects a “cult of nihilism” devoted to “acts of aesthetic iconoclasm” or “postmodernist desecration.” It is not concerned merely to identify the limits of reason or of traditional standards of beauty. Instead, it delights in what is irrational and ugly, engaging in subversion for its own sake. In this way it is often diabolical and leads us in a direction opposite to that of mysticism—not to a realm higher than human reason can reach, but to one that is lower or subrational.

Smith tries to assimilate the mystics to this irrationalist sensibility, claiming that their experiences are “intended to break the mind,” yielding a “decentering of rationality” and insights that are “something other than knowledge.” But this account is wrongheaded. To “break” a human being’s mind is to leave him not wiser, but insane or lobotomized. Since Smith thinks he has reasons for his position, reasons that are better than those his opponents can offer, he has hardly “decentered” rationality. He just exercises it badly, because he scorns the standards by which reasoning can be evaluated for cogency. And since he is making truth claims of various kinds—claims about art, mysticism, philosophy, and so on—he himself purports to have a kind of knowledge. Smith allows that his view may therefore sound incoherent, but he offers no solution to that problem other than gimmicks, such as use of the strikethrough when he speaks of the “knowledge” his position is supposed to give us.

A friend sent that review of James K.A. Smith’s book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark along the other day. I don’t read much FT these days but, I have to admit, it struck the same cord with me that it did with my friend. 

I have a pretty large soft spot for Smith. I started reading his stuff around 2014 and found him to be one of those breaths of fresh air, especially at that time. (I eventually pushed his book You Are What You Love on many many people. He also lead to my discovery of Comment Magazine, which continues to provide fresh air.) But somewhere along the way — probably around his departure from Comment — he started losing me. Not entirely, but largely, and some of Feser’s excerpted phrases from Smith reminded me of why.

Comment did just recently publish what I assume is the introduction to his new book. One thing I kept thinking when I read it was that Smith has been doing this “I’m a philosopher philosophizing about philosophy’s philosophical insufficiency” stuff for a long time. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a one-trick pony (which Smith is not), but it always seems like another new discovery in that “Now I know” fashion, and it’s often in the same heady, theatrically circular ways that I don’t find very helpful.

I remember talking to a self-described church planter in Portland, ME, I’m guessing around 2016. (Yup, another southerner here to evangelize the “unchurched” of New England.) He and his group were having a meet-and-greet of some kind and he was telling me what his ethos was or whatever. After a minute of listening, if even that, I said “That sounds a lot like Jamie Smith.” His eyes lit up, “Yes, I love Jamie Smith!” I have no memory of what he said or why it was so noticeable, and I didn’t have any negative connotations even in the back of my mind at that time, but reading those excerpted phrases reminded me of it. Smith does have a unique way of waxing lyrical.

“In the search for strength, beware fine writing,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in October 2001. He went on to mercilessly criticize John Updike, who “produced a description of what he saw [on September 11th] that would not differ from a description of a painting of what he saw.”

Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible. … There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth. All this is the testimony of a man who has words for everything and nothing but words.

I’m not so confident as to accuse Smith of the same thing, but this stuff does come to mind. And to the degree that he has leaned in that direction, that is probably the degree to which I have leaned away from Smith.*

At risk of taking these thoughts too far… I believe it is to Smith that I owe my first discovery of Jason Isbell. Take a few minutes to hear Isbell describe the writing process in this 2023 interview with CBS. I think Isbell is doing a good part of the thing that Smith wants to praise but isn’t doing. “Don’t wash the cast iron skillet” is an infinitely better sentence than “I find myself dreaming of a contemplative phenomenology…”

The best I can attempt to say is that Smith might be an example of what happens when you try too hard to say things about things that can’t be said. (And, ironically, can’t stop ‘splaining to people what “true faith” is.)

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t also say that The Front Porch Republic published (a little surprisingly, I think) a more charitable review. It still points at some of the same problems — and includes, in the reviewers words, only one “cheap shot” — but it had much nicer things to say about Smith’s book.

I’m probably somewhere between these two reviews, but closer to the first. I have still been quoting Smith from time to time and I still will. But I’m unlikely to find his new book on my shelves, not only because I can’t see myself going with Smith’s version “unknowing” but because, as even the charitable review acknowledges, I can’t think of one person I could or would want to share it with.

Still, You Are What You Love will always be a good book and Smith a thoughtful theologian.

—

*There is another good excerpt from Wieseltier’s piece that doesn’t fit well in this post but is worth quoting because a) it’s good, b) I think Smith himself would appreciate it, and c) I think it fits well, albeit snarkily, with the better parts of Smith’s aims. Namely, as the FPR reviewer put it, the complicated need for solitude, silence, and mystery.

No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony. Everybody was shocked by the attack, but not everybody was philosophically unprepared for it. For a thoughtful life is not premised on an experience of catastrophe, except for the exceedingly thoughtless. There are states of happiness that are not states of stupidity. We should not have to choose between being imbeciles and being mourners.

But mourners can be imbeciles, too. “[M]any of those people who died this past week,” Billy Graham instructed the prayer service at the National Cathedral on September 14, “are in heaven right now, and they wouldn’t want to come back. It’s so glorious and so wonderful.” This was Mohamed Atta’s eschatology, too. It is not consoling, it is insulting. We are not a country of children. Nothing that transpired on September 11 was wonderful, nothing. The only effect of these fantasies is to loosen the American grip on reality at precisely the moment that it needs to be tightened. If it makes sense to call on religion in times of trouble, it is not because religion abolishes spiritual pain, but because religion acknowledges spiritual pain. When all the political and military and economic and psychological and cultural analyses of the slaughter are exhausted, there remains the question of the justice of the world.Whether or not it has a religious answer, this is a religious question. About this question it is not easy to be brilliant. Silence is often a surer sign of mental progress than is articulateness. For some people, a house of worship is useful for such a reflection because it is God’s house; but there are those who repair to a house of worship because it is Job’s house, and therefore the natural setting for their objection to the order of things. Belief and unbelief are a disagreement, but they do not disagree about what is significant, and the vocabulary in which they conduct their disagreement is for certain purposes the only adequate vocabulary. And so Billy Graham’s degradation of that vocabulary should have sent all intelligent souls in perplexity running from the church. Of course the air outside the church is not exactly thick with lucidity: at Yankee Stadium last Sunday, at the conclusion of the greatest afternoon in the history of American pluralism, Oprah Winfrey imparted the superstition that “when you lose a loved one, you gain an angel whose name you know.” No, you do not.

Jonathan Kirshner:

The Peloponnesian War, [Thucydides’] magisterial opus on Athens’ doomed decades-long conflict with Sparta in the fifth century BC, includes the famous line, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

That well-known line comes from an important section of the text known as the Melian Dialogue, in which representatives of Athens browbeat emissaries from the island of Melos. After the Athenians fail to persuade the Melians to accept unconditional surrender, they kill all the island’s men and enslave its women and children. Thucydides’s Melos passage has long been cited as proof that little governs the world beyond strength and its exercise—and as evidence that the brilliant Athenian general, historian, and philosopher himself believed that. Generations of students of international relations have been assigned these decontextualized snippets from his vast work and instructed that this was indeed Thucydides’s lesson. Today, a cottage industry of commentators now celebrate (or bemoan) what is described as a Thucydidean turn in American foreign policy. In “How Trump Won Davos,” an essay published in January, the historian Niall Ferguson explicitly invoked the Melian Dialogue to tout the triumph of Trump as a realist in the mode of Thucydides and asserted that, at Melos, “the realists won an emphatic victory.”

But that understanding of both the dialogue and its author gets his meaning fundamentally backward. Thucydides repeatedly refers to, but never endorses, the idea that the strong have the freedom to do what they want: to the contrary, a careful reading of The Peloponnesian War suggests a rather different view. Among the principal lessons to learn from Thucydides is that the ambition of the strong can lead to their own undoing. Right after Thucydides reports the fateful words of the Athenian envoys and the subsequent destruction of Melos, he describes at great length the disastrous campaign Athens pursued in Sicily—an effort that eventually led to Athenian defeat and Spartan victory. In this light, the Melian Dialogue is not proof of the great virtue of strength in international relations but an illustration of pride before the fall.

The political scientist Graham Allison famously coined the term “Thucydides trap” to refer to the dynamic inherent in The Peloponnesian War, of how the tensions between a rising power and an existing power will invariably bubble over into conflict. The real Thucydides trap, however, is different. The crucial lesson of the book is notto sketch how Athens and Sparta found themselves sleepwalking into a war that neither side wanted or understood. As Thucydides elaborately elucidates, both went into the conflict with eyes wide open. Moreover, in his view, the start of that war was hardly a trap. Thucydides supported the commencement of hostilities and the careful strategy of Pericles, the Athenian leader who rallied the public behind his demand for war with Sparta. The true catastrophe, and the real trap, occurred many years later, when Athens abandoned Pericles’s prudence and became recklessly ambitious, most grimly demonstrated by the misguided bid to conquer Sicily.

[…]

The dialogue is less about the fate of Melos than it is about the condition of Athens, and the picture is not a pretty one. That becomes abundantly clear in the way the destruction of the island sets up what immediately follows, the ill-fated Athenian bid to take Sicily. Immediately after describing the annihilation of Melos, Thucydides continues: “The same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again to Sicily . . . if possible to conquer the island.” The Athens that operated at Melos is inseparable from the Athens that embarked on its fantastically and fatally misguided campaign to conquer the large and distant island of Sicily, the folly that would be a chief cause of its ultimate ruin. Thucydides thought the Sicilian campaign was the most important event in the war, and he devotes nearly a quarter of his magnum opus to a detailed depiction of it. One reason why the destruction of Melos (in contrast to, say, the extremely similar events in Scione) is an ideal place for extreme narrative deceleration is because it allows Thucydides to directly and explicitly link Athenian arrogance and hubris in Melos—well on display in the dialogue—with Athenian arrogance and hubris in Sicily, where that bill would come due: “They were beaten at all points altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily.”

It is reasonable to suggest that the Melians ought to have chosen surrender and survival, but in the debate they make the stronger (and more prescient) points. If the Athenians massacred those who were at their mercy, the Melians argued, a dangerous precedent might be set: “You are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.” On this point, and others, the Melians were spot on—and likely articulating a point that Thucydides wished to impart (and one that his initial readers would have immediately recognized). The classicist Hunter Rawlings has advanced the necessarily speculative but convincingly argued notion that the Melian Dialogue was intended to mirror what would have been elaborated as an “Athenian Dialogue” at the very end of the work, with the Athenians now in the shoes of the ill-fated Melians.

[…]

With the structure of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides shows that the Melians may have been vanquished on the battlefield, but they utterly routed the Athenians in the debate, leaving as their legacy enduring lessons about the limits of what brute force can accomplish.

Fascinating essay, and great conversation with Demetri Kofenas.

Kaitlyn Tiffany:

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, also pushed back on the idea that Common Core is the primary cause of mental-health problems among American kids. “This is a common trap that we fall into when trying to figure out what’s going on with those declines,” he told me. “We try to answer the question of ‘What one big thing can explain this?’ The answer, in my view, is that there isn’t one big thing.” This was generally the thesis of Etchells’s own book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (And How to Spend It Better), which came out the week before The Anxious Generation did, sold only a few thousand copies, and received hardly any attention at all.

Come September, the fight over that “one big thing” will be renewed. Which change that happened 15 years ago was the real source of so much misery for children? “You can’t run experiments on history,” Haidt said, so we’ll never be able to prove that smartphones and social media caused the steep decline in youth mental health. “We just have to say which hypothesis is more plausible,” he said—and he’s yet to hear one more plausible than his own.

When I met with Gray, he said that he has total confidence in his idea: “The evidence is really very overwhelming.” Later on, I tried to press the issue: Couldn’t there be some other factors in the mix? What if Common Core had been just one of many causes of the problem? “It would be nice” if there really weren’t any one big thing, he said, but he simply didn’t feel that this was the case. “So far, I haven’t heard of any other possibility that has the same plausibility.” He’d been studying the numbers and considering the alternatives, and he didn’t see how his theory could be wrong.

Definitely one of the more interesting critiques I’ve read, mostly for the schism-sketch between Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray. Gray’s hypothesis seems pretty unconvincing and much more stubbornly motivated to me, at least at face value. And Haidt has been, to my reading, pretty nuanced in handling the “multifactorial” angle.

I don’t have chapter and verse, but I’m fairly certain Haidt himself has said repeatedly that the biggest damage of cell phone use — and therefore the biggest part of the whole thing — is the “lost opportunity” for kids. (And that probably for adults as well.) And opportunity loss can cover anxiety at school (à la Gray), anxiety from social media and real-world dangers (à la Haidt), and even, to name a few more, the social anxiety of divorce, global warming, political indoctrination, and the lack of felt meaning and purpose in life (à la whoever you like).

Some notes I don’t feel like organizing:

• There will always be a category of “unnecessary suffering” for us humans — especially when it comes to kids. Which means that we will always need to ask, “What might we be doing wrong?” — especially when it comes to kids.
• Contra Gray, I have no idea how anyone could make the case for untrammeled internet freedom for kids. The internet is about as human-made as anything can get. I don’t deny some knowledge and communication benefits, but how scrolling and clicking about in it amounts to a gain of opportunity for a developing mind in a world that is not anthropocentric is beyond me.
• Not surprisingly, I want to take every chance I can to plug one of my favorite Arendtian notions within what she called “natality.” As her biographer put it, “Adults must not, she urged, forgo their responsibilities for children as children, they must not refuse to children a sheltered period for maturation, for being at home in the world.” (emphasis added)
• I’ve mentioned before the possible synergistic effect that phones might play, and how our limited but ever-overestimated ability to “study” culture will continue to complicate the correlation-causation debate. In that way, pocket-computers designed for addiction and control are certainly not the only thing preventing people from feeling at home in the world, but they may uniquely compound those things. And they may be one of the fastest growing and most ubiquitous factors contributing to such perpetual homesickness. As a combination of human assumption and human ignorance, they may also be something of an apotheosis.
• Again, the phones are designed more than anything else for addiction. They don’t have to be designed for addiction, but they are designed for addiction. And that means distraction. And you don’t need a conclusive study, nor do you need a doctorate in anthropology, nor do you need to read Jonathan Haidt in order to have the wisdom to say that these devices are robbing us of essential things and essential loves.
• Sven Birkerts:

Marcel Proust wrote somewhere that love begins with looking, and the idea is suggestive. But if that’s the case, the reverse might also be: that true looking begins with love. There’s the quote that I used to repeat like a mantra to writing students, from Flaubert: ‘Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.’ Again, the distinctions, the questions of priority. Is it that the looked-at thing becomes interesting, or that its intrinsic interest gradually emerges? Is the power in the negotiable thing or in the act of looking? If the latter, then the things of the world are already layered with significance, and looking is merely the action that discloses.

Joseph Lawler (in an essay that reminded me of something from Hannah Coulter below):

[This 7-Eleven] exemplifies a shortfall of American urban design, namely that the system of property ownership has created too much distance between the owners of a given plot of land and the families who live and work around it.

“That enormous amount of separation leads to tons of qualitative issues and really leads to a lot of commodification,” Ward Davis, a founding partner of an Arkansas real estate company focused on traditional-style development, told me in a phone interview.

The U.S. has separated landowners from neighborhoods through regulations and tax laws meant to make real estate markets accessible and liquid — that is, easily bought and sold among investors. These rules and regulations have worked for their intended purposes. They have successfully turned much of the built environment into commodities, which are easy for buyers and sellers to understand, price, and transact. They have made it possible for teachers in Ontario, policemen in Los Angeles, sheikhs in Dubai, and millions of others to finance the convenience stores, houses, hospitals, hotels, malls, and offices that Americans frequent every day. All kinds of people get access to a powerful investment vehicle, while builders get access to a vast pool of financing.

But there has been a cost. Commodities aren’t lovable.

All the qualities that give a place charm or loveliness are ones that are best stewarded by people who live there. Someone who owns the plot from afar, without even visiting, can never understand the subtle details that give it life. And the middleman property developer or manager just will never care.

No one will ever cherish a plot of land as much as someone who has a long-term ownership and residence interest in it. Yet more and more of the built environment we live in every day is owned by people far away who don’t even know they own it.

[…]

It is hard enough for a company building in suburban Virginia on behalf of Alaskans and global investors to care about the small details that give a place its character — even if that were a goal.

It typically isn’t, though. Landowners and developers like REITs and private equity firms rarely state that they aim to build charming or lovely places. They certainly can make the case that their product will be commercially successful. And they do often tout environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, goals, which can translate into measurable objectives set by activist groups related to emissions or diversity. But beauty isn’t usually part of the pitch.

In fact, the features that would make a development beautiful can be a negative from the perspective of an analyst at a REIT or private equity firm. Anything that is unique makes a development less like a commodity and more like a bespoke product. The more commoditized the property, the better, because it can be sold into more-liquid markets.

“When you start mixing uses in a building, it becomes a more dynamic calculation to determine whether or not that investment is a worthwhile investment,” said Andrew Malick, the founder of Malick Infill Development, based in San Diego. “The investment world … they’re just dumb in that sense.”

“Dumb” processes that break down investments into quantifiable attributes work well for actual commodities, like steel, oil, or wheat. They even work well for consumer goods. But it’s problematic for the built environment, because people have to live there, permanently. They cannot discard it when they grow tired of it.

The value of what is truly charming is highly specific to context. For example, a rowhouse on Captains Row has little value outside Alexandria, Virginia. On paper, it lacks key amenities and has relatively low square footage. It’s old, lacks parking, has small rooms, doesn’t have any modern bathrooms, and so forth. If it were suddenly transported to somewhere in Tysons Corner, it would probably be a teardown.

By contrast, the triple-net-leased 7-Eleven can easily be quantified to show its value to someone who will never visit it. What makes it valuable is the very fact that you don’t have to worry about any of the context. And the less you have to worry about it, the more valuable it is.

[…]

The federal government has put the thumb on the scale in favor of large-scale, short-term developments. In theory, it could even out the scale by also creating such a regulatory structure that would allow for smaller, infill projects.

Whether such a product is even conceivable is a major question. But a first step would be to recognize the ways the government now gives preference in the built world around us not to what is most suited to life lived with other people but to what is big, uniform, and impersonal.

From Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter:

Past the mailbox you have left the public behind. The lane dips down, crosses the creek on a bridge that Nathan had rebuilt not long before he died, and then curves gently upward and around the slope in a way I think is lovely. The lane is just a narrow sleeve passing through the trees and the undergrowth. The trees are fairly old, and you know you’re passing through one of the orders of the world. And then almost all of a sudden your eyesight widens sweetly out onto the upland, and you see that you’ve come into an order of another kind, a farm kindly kept, you may say, for a lifetime. You see the house in its shady yard, the barns and other buildings, and the broad, long ridge rising beyond.

What you won’t see, but what I see always, is the pattern of our life here that made and kept it as you see it now, all the licks and steps and rounds of work, all the comings and goings, all the days and years. A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it, walking over it, and it is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mostly lost, generation after generation, going back and back to the first Indians. And now the history of Nathan’s and my life here is fading away. When I am gone, it too will be mostly gone.

Sometimes I imagine another young couple, strong and full of desire, coming quietly into this old house that will be empty again of all that is of any use, and will be stale and silent and dingy with dust, and they will see it shining before them as Nathan and I saw it fifty-two years ago. And I say, “Welcome! Love each other. Love this place and use it well. Bless your hearts.”

That is the foretelling of my hope. The foretelling of my fear is that no such couple will ever come here again to live in this place and renew it and make their living from it. It could all end in fire, as everybody knows. And maybe the hand of God is in it, who can say? Maybe it won’t be a flood and a rainbow this time, but a mushroom cloud and then silence. Which will solve our problems for the time being.

But the cities are overflowing and stepping toward us too. Mr. Feltner used to say in his last years, “You see those old hillsides of mine? Some day they’ll be covered up with little huts.” Maybe so. Or maybe all our work and care will be bulldozed away to make room for something fancier, for Port William Estates or Sand Ripple Park or Sandhurst or The Meadows.

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

I think of Art Rowanberry, another one who went to the war and came home and never willingly left again, and I quote him to myself: “Something better! Everybody’s talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don’t matter if it ain’t nothing but a log pen.”

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thoughts and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, “Thy will be done,” and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

Viola Zhou:

Young people can’t seem to stop watching AI slop videos of cats talking and fruits cheating on each other. Older people are enjoying a different kind of AI-generated content, which provides them with much-needed comfort and companionship. 

Take Uncle Chang, a 67-year-old family friend who recently visited New York from Taiwan. As we chatted, the retired businessman showed me some YouTube videos that made him cry. In one, an AI-generated young blonde woman named Rose Bennett performs “Whiskey Was Louder Than Me,” a song about growing up with an alcoholic father after her mother passed away. In another, Rose sings “Brother Became My Father” together with her brother (also AI). Their AI father and the AI audience were in tears. 

The videos reminded Chang of his own childhood. His mother, too, had left him, after suffering from his father’s beating. He was eventually raised by his older sisters. “To me, it was ‘sisters became my mother,’” Chang said. “These songs tell such touching stories.” 

Chang’s experience reminded me of the “AI family” videos that are getting popular on Chinese social media. On TikTok-like platforms Douyin and Kuaishou, AI-generated chubby babies or handsome adult sons send daily blessings, tell viewers how much they miss them, and bring along virtual roses. Some AI influencers even take on the role of the elderly audience’s virtual lovers. 

[…]

Many economies are grappling with a fast-aging population and a shortage of caregivers. Seniors need not only food and healthcare but also entertainment and companionship. AI could expand the elderly care options, with products like AI robot dolls and smart speakers already being deployed for seniors in South Korea and the U.S.

Adam Wilson:

In the presence of food that is for sale, we tend to ask, “What do I want?”, “How much does it cost?” and “Can I afford it?” The locus of consideration is the self, the same one doing the asking and the answering. The same one we disparagingly call a consumer.

In the presence of free food, we tend to stuff our bellies and our pockets. We tend not to worry about where the food came from, how it became available to us, or what it means for us to eat it.

“I paid for it” and “I got it for free” result in the same market-specific condition we might call “freedom from relational responsibility.”

In the presence of food that is a gift, the wellbeing of others springs to mind: “Surely someone needs this more than I do.” In their gentle protestations, I hear people asking, “Am I worthy, or could I imagine myself so?”, “What is an appropriate portion size?”, “Are all the other neighbors being sustained?” and “How might I go about making sure that is the case?” This is the sound of gratitude creaking into motion by turning the human heart toward relationship. This is the sound of a consumer becoming a sustainer.

Elizabeth Oldfield:

I’m not ashamed to be bringing you children’s stories and folk tales and scriptural references as sources for what is seemingly a very grown up, technical, high powered set of questions. Rather the opposite. My hunch is that the older the tale and/or the more children like it, the more likely it has something to teach us. I know this lowers my intellectual credibility in many circles, but well, I’m way beyond caring about that.

Nick Catoggio:

Despite all the hype about new blood and “outsider” energy, Platnermania ended up incorporating elements of two of the most notorious Democratic campaign disasters of the past 20 years.

One is John Edwards’ presidential run in 2007, which saw Edwards mount a challenge from the left to frontrunners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The candidate spoke movingly on the trail about his wife’s breast cancer; meanwhile, he was secretly engaged in a long-running affair and had already fathered a child with his mistress.

Edwards recklessly placed his own ambition ahead of his party’s welfare, knowing that the skeletons in his closet could have wrecked Democrats’ chances at the presidency if they had tumbled out after he won the nomination. By letting progressives get excited about a candidacy that was all but certain to end in disgrace, he played the left for chumps. That’s Platner all over.

The other is Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, of course. For many months during that cycle, influential Democrats ignored the evidence of their own eyes and ears—and lots and lots of data—that the then-president had a liability that would render him unelectable. They downplayed it, rationalized it, and made excuses for it … until Biden’s catastrophic debate performance left no doubt that the party would lose unless it very belatedly removed him as nominee.

That too is Platner all over. The man had more red flags than China, yet not until something emerged to convince the left that his campaign was well and truly doomed did they very belatedly turn on him. They were okay with electing an unfit cretin to the Senate this year, just as they were okay with nominating an unfit, senescent eightysomething for another four-year term in the White House. What they weren’t okay with was losing.

Here’s the difference between Platner, Edwards, and Biden, though. Two were known quantities in politics, figures whom Democratic voters were familiar with and whom they might be forgiven for (foolishly) granting the benefit of the doubt as to their fitness. The third was a black box, reportedly deemed Senate material after a single brief conversation with a strategist, and whose views on policy could be fairly summarized as a noun, a verb, and “oligarchs” or “Israel.” How did someone like that earn the benefit of the doubt until Monday afternoon?

I’m going to be biting my tongue on a lot of “I told you sos” in the next week.

In April, I said that I largely agreed with Ben Rhodes’ piece on Graham Platner but wondered if he was actually describing a Platner candidacy or, well, a Rhodes candidacy. That was on day one of my Platner Research Project. I usually wait as long as possible before I look seriously at the names on an upcoming local ballot, sometimes right up to the last week. I think a) you give yourself a more sober chance to read about someone and b) you avoid a lot of the hype and buy-in trench digging as it inevitably occurs.

Yeah, I’d seen the signs everywhere in the neighborhood, but I paid zero attention to him. And boy did I miss some deep trenches.

In late April I started reading. And I started asking everyone I knew what they thought of Platner. Friends, neighbors, coworkers — I didn’t hide the fact that I was unconvinced but genuinely interested, and wanted to Believe. But even the most avid supporters were exactly zero convincing. It took only a few days to figure out: I could not join my neighbors in their lawn ornamentation.

(The single biggest red flag for me was actually reading the Reddit comments, particularly the “strictly professional,” “I dig it” comments about executed Israeli soldiers. The creepy shirtless-in-a-towel-mirror-selfie profile picture on some random social site/app was a close second when that came out. Some things are bigger deals than these, but not more telling.)

Like many, I too believe that Trump and the GOP must be stopped. But I refuse to stop asking and answering to the question, “At what cost?”

As an “unaffiliated registered voter” in Maine I get to choose which party primary to vote in. And when the primary rolled around, I grabbed a Democratic ballot and did what I could to see that G.P. got no ranking vote from me.

After weeks of conversation, the futility of that vote was not surprising.

Of all the folks on the Left I talked to, only two people said they didn’t particularly like Platner, and both of them quickly lost the desire to be open about that once Janet Mills dropped out of the race. All were adamant about the need to vote for him; most expressed full-hearted support for him; some enthusiastically attended town hall meetings.

(Despite my own concern that Platner might pull on some of the same “America first only” heartstrings we’ve seen tuned in recent years, I know of not one single Right-leaning person who was ever taken with Platner.)

But there was one person who really stuck out. I came home one day after my wife had walk-talked with a friend in the neighborhood. She told me, “You have to talk to E—. She’s so happy to hear that you don’t like Platner either.” Specifically, she was happy that I didn’t like Platner and that I had no hesitation to say so or hear so. My neighborhood friend is a self-described progressive and has now told me numerous times how disheartening it has been that none of her progressive friends and acquaintances would talk to her openly about how bad Platner was as a candidate. “Give him a chance.” “That was in the past.” “We have to win.” “The country is at stake.”

My friend needed someone to talk to. And myself being someone very short on People To Talk To for over a decade, I’m all sympathy. How could I not be? That’s exactly what happened to squishy (former) RINO’s like me ten years ago.

Hence the message above from my friend on Tuesday morning, who will (hopefully) no longer have to make that choice in November. No, not the choice between Collins, Platner, or a blank; the one between your conscience and your “friends.”

Clueless or careless, it is amazing that a party hell-bent on defeating Trumpism could so perfectly mimic Trumpism. Or nearly mimic it, anyway. As Catoggio points out, they are at least now backtracking: “The best I can do to find a silver lining in Democrats’ conduct is this: Unlike certain other parties, they were willing to belatedly draw some sort of line here.”

As many have pointed out for a while now, there is really only one functioning political party in the country. And this is another sign that, as utterly stupid as the Democratic Party often is, that remains true. Though, personally, I think that one of the reasons that Democrats aren’t more crazy than they are — that is, one thing that has kept them more sane — is Trumpism.

Though not sane enough, obviously.

I am not a progressive or even close to one. I also don’t give two shits about the GOP. I call that being free to think and free to speak.

And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully my neighbor friend will feel a little more free now as well.

Still. Someone on The Dispatch Podcast was talking about a Supreme Court decision recently and referenced the Mr. Belvedere Fan Club SNL skit with Tom Hanks where he’s forced to hold a vote on whether to kill Mr. Belvedere. Alright, Platner (hopefully) won’t be on the ballot, but it shouldn’t have been that close. The fact that it was is not a good sign.