Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Two weeks ago, Sydney Sweeney was on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter. The accompanying profile was full of glamorous photos, as is the custom. In the story that ran under and around those images, Sweeney talked about how frustrating it has been for her to watch nepotism babies breezily enter an industry she fought to be in, and how Hollywood doesn’t encourage loyalty, and how she still feels somewhat financially insecure. This, as you can imagine, created swift and immediate backlash—against Sweeney.

Dave Karpf on the problems with “longterm-ism”

Longtermist philosopher William MacAskill has a book coming out soon, and he’s been on quite the media blitz. You can read an adapted excerpt here, in the New York Times, or read his Time Magazine cover story, or his Foreign Affairs article or listen to Ezra Klein interview him, or read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s in-depth profile in the New Yorker. But Dave Karpf, a professor from George Washington University, says: “There’s something deeply troubling about Longtermism. I don’t mind it as a philosophical thought-experiment, but it has adopted the trappings of a social movement (one that is remarkably popular with rich technologists like Elon Musk), and we ought to ask some hard questions about who is promoting it and what it ultimately aims to achieve.

Continue reading “The Money Is In All The Wrong Places”

From Heather Havrilesky’s excellent newsletter “Ask Molly,” some thoughts on writing:

“One of the best qualities a writer can have is the conviction that not every thought that passes through her head is interesting or useful or entertaining or worthwhile. This is also a quality that makes it very difficult to write. If you return to the same default of questioning the value of your words… well, you have to be writing a lot of words to publish any of them. First drafts of useless bullshit tend to pile up on your desktop.”

“When your writing seems magnificent, you feel almost supernatural. When your writing seems pointless, you feel like a farm worker whose sleeves got caught in the threshing machine one day. Your hands are mangled and you can’t do your job and you definitely blame yourself, even though the social worker making wellness visits keeps insisting otherwise. She’s very nice and her zucchini bread is delicious but she doesn’t understand you. You have a head full of manual tasks and a heart full of harvests. Corn is ripening and then turning brown inside your limbs. There’s a full moon inside your skull, pressing on your forehead. But all you can do is sit in one place, staring at your hands.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The Liberty Inn, the last hourly rate hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, bills its rooms as the “most sexiest” in the city, and according to the New York Times, for nearly 50 years it has “provided sanctuary for bouts of afternoon passion, clandestine affairs and lunchtime quickies.” So when it was reported that it had been put on the market with hopes of fetching about $25 million, Alex Vadukul decided to check in, to bear witness to a kinky vestige of old New York before it was gone.

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

“Effective altruism,” which used to be a loose, Internet-enabled affiliation of the like-minded, is now a broadly influential faction, especially in Silicon Valley, and controls philanthropic resources worth about $30 billion. Though William MacAskill is only one of the movement’s principal leaders, “his conspicuous integrity and easygoing charisma have made him a natural candidate for head boy,” says the New Yorker.

Continue reading “For Sale: The ‘Sexiest’ Hourly Rate Hotel in Manhattan”

This year for our backcountry camping trip we went to Spider Lake (the one in Massassauga Provincial Park, west of Highway 400 just south of Parry Sound, not the several other Spider Lakes I found when I tried to search Google). We went in through Three-Legged Lake, after checking in at the park office — which is across the road at Oastler Lake, and a ways north of the put in. It was a beautiful sunny day, and without much wind at all, we made pretty good time paddling to the far west side of Three-Legged Lake, where the portage is. Or rather, we *would* have made good time if we had been going the right way. Which we weren’t, as it turns out.

Becky and I were in one canoe, following a couple of strangers who seemed to know where they were going. But Marc and Kris had the map in their canoe and they said we had to turn left. So we did, and as we were paddling past some cottages, a woman shouted out: “Are you going into the park?” Yes, we said — Spider Lake. “It’s the other way!” she yells, pointing in exactly the opposite direction. “Don’t worry, it happens to lots of people!” We waved and then turned around and headed back the way we came, only to have a kid at a different cottage yell “Are you going to Spider Lake?” Yes, we said. “It’s that way,” he yelled, pointing to the northwest. Very helpful crowd on Three-Legged Lake! And apparently quite used to people who don’t know where they are going 😂

At the portage, we got out the canoe cart, since we brought two old and heavy canoes this year, instead of renting nice light Kevlar ones which we could carry over our heads. It was only a short portage, maybe 350 metres, although there was a fair bit of up and down and tree roots etc. to get the cart over, and a wooden gangplank across a swamp that had a bunch of soft and broken boards. On the portage, we ran into a young woman and her husband and three kids — one a baby, maybe six months old, and two who looked to be about five and seven maybe. They also had two dogs, a setter and what looked like a Samoyed.

Continue reading “A backcountry camping trip to Spider Lake”

Obviously this is a huge and problematic topic, and I’m not pretending that I have the definitive answer by any means, but I’ve been thinking about assisted suicide and Canada’s laws allowing it — although they use the much more palatable term “medical assistance in dying” or MAID. I know that there are those who argue that allowing people to choose to die encourages some (including the disabled, and the chronically depressed or mentally ill) to end their lives earlier than they perhaps should (Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and a number of other countries byalso allow physician-assisted suicide)

That said, however, as someone who has watched a loved one (my father) waste away slowly from a terrible illness with little to no chance of recovering to have a normal life (lung and throat cancer), I believe that offering MAD is the most humane thing we can do in a lot of circumstances. I was reminded of this after a memorial for an old friend who was also diagnosed with stage four cancer, and given little to no chance of survival.

Rather than go through the pain and suffering associated with chemotherapy, this friend decided to choose their own ending. Their children talked at the memorial about how touching and special it was to be able to spend one last evening with their father, having dinner, watching old movies, and talking about the good times, before saying goodbye for the last time. It sounded like a pretty wonderful end to a life well lived.

Could this friend have survived and lived longer? Perhaps. It’s impossible to say. But what would his quality of life have been? Is it worth it to live longer, if you are in pain all the time, can’t eat or drinks, etc? I don’t think so. And I wish the option had been available when my father died, so that we could have had a last meal and watched movies and talked about the good old days. That sounds like a pretty good way to go, to me at least.

Facebook unveiled a new experiment: a conversational AI named BlenderBot 3, which the company says can “can search the internet to talk about nearly any topic.” So Josh Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab decided to ask BlenderBot who is to blame for the death of the news business:

From a great piece by Dave Karpf on the problem with Facebook:

“The trouble with Facebook is, more broadly, the trouble with the entirety of Silicon Valley and its particular version of techno-capitalism. You could imagine a profitable company that does what Facebook is actually good for. Create a free social network with a newsfeed optimized for personal life updates and conversations within your extended social graph. Pare things back, revert it to the place where people keep in touch and organize dinner parties. Sell advertisements against the page views. There’s money in such a company.

But it’s not a trillion-dollar company. Its founder doesn’t buy a mansion and then buy all the houses on adjacent lots to ensure privacy. Its early investors don’t carve out entire career paths on the basis of having been an early-investor-in-Facebook. It’s ultimately a small-money company. And Silicon Valley doesn’t do small-money companies.”

Okay, we live in a world. That world contains us and all the things we see. Of what are these things comprised? Matter! physicists say. Fantastic! And what is matter made of? Atoms, physicists say, but not as enthusiastic because they sense where this is heading. And what are atoms and their sub-atomic particles made of? the world asks. The actual stuff of life?

Here physicists are silent. Not because they don’t know—not exactly—but because the answer is too weird to be believed. At the sub-atomic level, particles become waves of energy and those waves of energy can sense when they’re trying to be measured. It’s true. Physicists talk about how the reading comes back all strange and mangled and just at spot of their attempted measurement.

Also: sub-atomic particles exist in two places at once. This is even weirder. This one particle is here, and also there, and at the same time. How can one thing be in two places at once? And what is the implication of that? Especially when that one thing is the literal building block of all life?

Paul Kix’s intro to this piece by Adam Frank, a physicist, in Aeon magazine