Miami

Down here in Miami for a long weekend before a conference. Mary came. The first few days were on the mainland, in Coconut Grove, before proceeding over to Miami Beach for the big event. Which I am dreading ever more by the day.

I could blog on with a lot of observations about the place, and I have them, but when Crabill and I went for a walk a couple of months back and I was talking about the blog he said "it sounds kinda like a job." And I'll confess that sometimes it feels like one, that I place a lot of pressure on myself to meet my production quotas. And I'm trying to be easy with myself.

I will note that the condo (or is it a hotel room? More on that later, perhaps) where we are staying faces West, so the best time to be sitting out here on the balcony is morning. Which I like. The early part of the day, the quiet with my first cup of coffee, is a time I prize. By now I'm on cup three and Mary and I have scrambled some eggs, as we are wont to do. Soon we will head out and see more of this city, after a low-key day yesterday. More later. 

Visiting an entirely new place

A few weeks back I read -- in The Economist, typically -- about Moltbook, the new social network for AI agents. Yes, you read that correctly.

Yesterday I remembered to stop by and spent maybe 15-20 minutes there. While the article I had read called out some scary things, I won't delve into the specifics because I didn't see them represented, mostly I saw a relentless focus by the agents on figuring out what was going on with them, trying to get better, understanding how and where errors were made.

I don't have time to dig deep now. Busy day approaching as the war in the Middle East spreads. My best to all.

One thought before I go: I have pondered before how to be sure to inject ethics into discourse within the AI world, to make sure that LLMs account for the amount and quality of attention paid by humans to questions of ethics and morals, which I believe is rather in the high range. Would it not make sense for the world's various faiths to send agents out onto Moltbook to seek influence? Digital missionaries, as it were. And Pete Singer should have one as well. And Greenpeace.

Maybe it all descends into a chaos parallel to what we see IRL But perhaps, stripped of human fears and insecurities, it would get somewhere. 

Salt as a boolean

A couple of years ago I mentioned that my nephrologist had recommended that I dial back the salt. I have done so, but only in a half-assed manner. I at least look at the salt content on things and think about it.

Salt announces itself most audibly on scrambled eggs. It's not unlike an on/off switch, a boolean operator in computing or, in linguistics, a phoneme. The most basic unit of meaning. Sprinkling a little salt on there just sets the thing in motion.

Even still, I try my best to limit it and just keep my grubby little fingers out of the salt bowl as much as possible, to let the salt in my toast enhance the eggs. Again, the key thing is not the specific sensation (salt/no salt) but the cultivation of appreciation of less and internalizing how pleasure works variously, on different time scales.

The right amount of friction

Woke up early this morning, certainly not out of excitement for what awaits me later this morning: my first 3.5 hour Zoom call for a commission to which the Governor has appointed me on stuff related to mental health, substance abuse etc. If I had known it was going to be all Zoom I might have reconsidered. But I am on it so I have to show up. Ahh, adulting.

Mary also woke up early due to hunger -- never quite having internalized the lesson to eat heartily the minute she gets to a fundraiser like the one we were at yesterday early evening. Her early rising broke my rhythm in my early morning reading. Excited to have a fresh book by Abraham Yeshua Heschel to mosey through. But I was unable to settle into the proper reflective gestalt for this time of morning, and I opened up my laptop, thinking perhaps to blog.

I won't bore you with the details of how I got there, but somehow I found myself looking at a LinkedIn post from a local tech entrepreneur discussing anticipated trends in 2026. He prophesies the "death of clicks," by which he apparently means that AIs will make it even easier for us to buy things online, the removal of "friction." He and some commenter were excited by this.

Heaven forfend.

Must it be even easier for us to buy things? Will that not just encourage us to buy more? When purchasing, when fulfilling our wishes, what serves us better, thinking fast or thinking slow? Indeed, how is it that we know what we want? Our best efforts are directed at answering that kind of question, not at simply fulfilling our desires more easily.

AI Overdrive (or underdrive)

In the last week or so -- since I read this piece by some founder/VC guy I had never heard of but which has apparently generated a lot of buzz -- my mind has kicked into overdrive on AI. The guy makes a good case. But still I haven't carved out the time to follow his prescriptions -- and only partially because my calendar has been full-ish. Some thoughts

• If we use AI to solve all of our problems will we become less able to formulate them and prioritize amongst them?
• Will AI -- and the people who drive innovation in and through it -- ever be the right people to lead society, set direction and allocate funds towards the effecting of public goods? I listened to a discussion between Dwarkesh Patel and Dario Amodei of Anthropic in the car going to and from Charlotte for a conference -- and I do need to read some of Amodei's writings (starting here) -- but I do feel like the breathless size of the amounts of money bandied about and the freneticism of the arms race around AI supremacy just feels all too distracting.

Mostly I sense that when I am not consuming content about AI, whether presented in written or oral form, I quickly come back to a feeling that it is simply unable to touch the fundamental problems of human existence. I'd much rather be out amongst people and interacting with them. People are my people.

But yes, if I can dive into the time-saving potential of the AI-enabled toolkit emerging around my professional domain, it should in principle create more time to be amongst people. Though now that I say all of this I have to recognize that people are my people only a certain portion of the week. Unlike true extroverts, I can't be amongst them 24/7 or I get exhausted. So to some extent words are my people as much as people are.

Me 2.0

It's interesting to see the world get all up in arms about anything distantly or tangentially tied up with the Epstein files. For example, the brouhaha over school photo company Lifetouch, acquired by Apollo Group, an enormous private equity firm helmed by Epstein buddy Leon Black.

But people have no problem with little 9- year old girls putting on tons of makeup and dancing suggestively together with older girls at the halftime of basketball games, like I witnessed last time I was at the Dean Dome. Delia's had a good run, north of a decade probably, being the Victoria's Secret of teenagers. Seriously, we are totally cool with the widespread sexualization of teen girls' bodies then scandalized by the fact that really rich guys actually had sex with them. We need to get scandalized a little earlier in the process, it seems to me.

About the tariffs and the Supreme Court decision

I'm no fan of tariffs. I wasn't a fan when Trump started imposing them in his first term, I wasn't a fan when Biden left a bunch of them in place when he came into office, and I'm still not a fan under Trump 2.0.

But their effect on the economy hasn't been as deleterious as predicted. Firms have done more trans-shipping through neutral countries. Corporations have swallowed costs to avoid passing all of them on to consumers. But consumers have paid more for some stuff. In the end tariffs are taxes and American companies and consumers pay them. Tariffs have allowed Republicans to raise taxes without changing the tax brackets, which would force them to admit that they have raised taxes. Just like letting Biden-era extensions of Obamacare subsidies were a raising of taxes by another name (we recall that when Roberts signed off on Obamacare in the pivotal decision back in 2013 it was based on the government's constitutionally granted authority to levy taxes). Note also that snake in the grass Lindsay Graham has been saying that Republicans are open to "means testing" of Social Security benefits, another backdoor tax. Republicans are happy to raise taxes so long as they don't admit that's what they're doing.

But tariffs have had a negligible impact on where manufacturing happens, which will continue to be the case.

But I digress. The main thing about the Supreme Court decision is that it constrains Trump's ability to claim emergency powers when there's not an emergency. Unlike in Russia, he can't just make things up.

Just as the Supreme Court stopped Biden from bending reality to its will (most notably on student loan relief -- a policy goal to which I am sympathetic), it's not letting Trump have free reign. For that, the Supreme Court deserves a gold star. May it earn more.

Failure to predict the future

At the course I'm taking on aging in place vs. Continuum of Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) and other types of living situations for older people (the next big financial planning challenge facing my client cohort), I learned something interesting last week. Substantially all if not 100% of the new CCRCs being built in NC these days are of the "rental" model. That is, they offer all levels of care like more traditional CCRCs but have a policy of "if you can pay, you stay." The older communities had cost structures and "Benevolence funds" that assured that, once you came to the community, you could live out your days there. Seemingly this was true even of the communities like the Cedars (where my mom lives) in which you bought your unit and had to sell it when you die (your heirs do, that is).

It seems to me -- and I need to dig deeper on this -- that the situation rather resembles what happened with long-term care insurance (LTC). The first generation of products offered very generous care for a fixed set up annual premiums. Then people lived longer than the industry expected and the insurers took baths. So the insurers stopped writing the traditional policies and cobbled together a set up "hybrid" policies which offered small death benefits but more limited long-term care benefits and which were altogether less good deals than the first gen products. Makes sense. Insurers have to stay solvent and indeed make money to stay around to offer any products at all. I get it.

Taking a further step back, each of these two cases shares a lot with the history of Social Security. As the program expanded over the decades, contributions and benefit levels were calculated on the basis of a wide range of expectations around economic growth, birth rates and longevity. But people lived longer than expected and birth rates trended down (the United States has been above replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman for just a couple of years since the early 70s -- substantially all population growth has been through immigration). The finances of Social Security are not what was expected, and contribution and/or benefit rates will need to change in the next few years. Everybody knows this.

There's a tendency to say "economists, demographers, actuaries, they are all a bunch of idiots and we should fire the lot of them." That's the easy soundbitey way to think about problems like this. But the exact opposite is true. All plans are crap, but planning is essential. Plans must be updated continually. The problem comes when we have to enshrine things into law or policies that last over decades. But we do. We just need more limber processes, a willingness to accept imperfection and an ability to adjust course when necessary. For that, though, we need stable leadership and some semblance of consensus on shared values across society that accepts change when necessary,

More data, arghh

Played tennis with a new guy yesterday evening, a little younger (45), a little lighter ("110 lbs soaking wet"), a guy who had an app that recorded us then analyzed every aspect of the match. He destroyed me, 6-1, 3-0, but we had a lot of fun and some very long rallies, one lasting 48 shots before I flubbed it in the end.

This morning he sent me all this data from his app. An overwhelming amount of data. Also a video which showed our longest point. One thing is sure: I looked less dramatic and swashbuckling then I feel out there. There's tons of improvement to be had. I should probably take some lessons.

But it was all in good fun and, given that my body was wrecked afterwards and that his pulse was very high the whole time, I know I got a good workout. The question is, do I want more data? Should I get a smart watch to monitor my heart too? Or will having more numbers just freak me out more? Do I already have, as I suspect, plenty of data?

Pushing back up

Some years ago my friend Mark, a doctor and weightlifting enthusiast, gave me a prescription of two week sequences of alternating days of three sets of a rising number of push-ups (10, then 12, 15, 18, 21, 25....). I did it for a while then fell off somewhere around 25. I can see from the blog I had done so by late 2023.

I kept trying to do some push ups but without a program. I noticed that 25, then 20, had started to seem like a lot and in my mind I began to put it down to aging. It's easy to do that when your impending 60th birthday stares you in the face. 

So I decided to start again at 3x10 push ups, every other day, for two weeks. And then up. I am on 3x15 by now and feeling much better and stronger than a month ago. For now I will pass on overextrapolation except to say that my mind poses dangers to my self, when left unchecked. Taking one step back it occurs to me that a lesson I might take from this is that finding more structure within other domains of my life might do me good. A movement gym, tennis lessons and guitar lessons are three which come to mind.

Obviously I might need to let something go.

Meanwhile, I have discovered that being appointed to an official state government Commission will demand non-trivial amounts of time over the three years of my appointment. I emailed with our Sherriff about the Board (he's also on it) and he was not enthusiastic about it. It meets on Zoom so I won't even be meeting people in person. Sigh. Hopefully I will learn things and be able to add a smidgeon, if not a dollop, of value.

The pursuit of scale

Over the weekend I read something in the UNC Alumni Magazine about how Michael Brown, one of the Brown brothers who coached us at Rainbow Soccer back in the 70s (also Chris and "Pablo" [Paul]) and also a UNC and CHHS (I'm pretty sure) soccer guy, had done something super cool. He had painted a very nice mural on the side of a gym at some high school at a small town in NC. Everybody loved it. I think they had to tear down the gym after a flood and they tried to save the mural, but couldn't. So Chris -- now in his 70s -- went back up there to repaint it. He was too old to do it all himself so he was assisted by some younger woman who had apprenticed under him. She flew down from Ohio or something like that for a few weeks. It was lovely.

Meanwhile, in the headlines, all manner of generally good people, including Bills Gates and Clinton and also somehow Hilary (perhaps for not prosecuting vigorously enough within her own marriage) are getting sucked down into the vortex of the Epstein scandal. Not as bad as Trump, but he gets to claim whatabout and roll own. It's not news that they were in and around Epstein, but the frenzy around the story drags them back through a muck where they put themselves.

For me the overall point is that the relentless pursuit of scale and new heights in all of one's endeavors introduces dangers. Any sensible man knows that a room full of very attractive young women willing to have sex with you is the very last place in the world he wants to be if he cares at all about his marriage and sanity. That's why,  back in '97, when my cousin Thad (who was in the CIA and posted to the Moscow Embassy) and I wandered the streets of Moscow looking for the famed "Hungry Duck" club, scene of legendary debauchery and open sex, when we got there I took one look at the people hanging out around the front and knew I wasn't going in. 

So with money and power, all that kind of shit is going to come looking for you. Which argues for not getting too much power or money, and giving more freely of the latter when it starts to accumulate.

Coming together in time

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic I had high hopes that it might suffice as a threat common enough to all of us that it could help us dial back the craziness and come together as a society. Even globally. There were hopeful moments there in the early days, to be sure, during the early days of lockdown, when it seemed like people were more or less on the same page. That faded fast as lockdowns chafed and the right was able to demonize the public health consensus and the state's alliance with it.

Perhaps AI and the potential for it to rip the guts out of society and even gain real sentience and agency will be the threat that brings people together. I mean, heck, if there's anything that should literally bring people together, it's the possibility that machines might get out over their skis and act against our interests, perhaps even decide that we are superfluous to their interests. That ought to do it. They might be able to deepfake phone calls and even video calls but it will take a lot of advancements in robotry to send out convincing humanoid robots.*

If the threat seems sufficiently real, perhaps it could even force rapprochement between strategic rivals like the US and China/Russia.

*After writing that sentence, I thought it prudent to have a quick spin using my preferred search engine. Of course, it appears we may be closer than I thought:

  

Receding ghosts

This morning with my Saturday omelet I read a short piece by the reliably insightful and usually engrossing Jill Lepore on her post-collegiate days living in a Somerville apartment that had first been colonized for young Tuft grads by Tracy Chapman, whose debut album had blown her up into the stratosphere right about then. It got me to thinking about my own post-collegiate years, which were similarly aimless but touched by less glamor.

My mind turned then to the question of maintaining relationships with people from other periods of my life. I do a good deal of it, more than most people. Some people appreciate it, others less so. Often there's some utility to it. For example, I need to call up Lisa P [I went out with her briefly in college] one of these days because one of her kids went to a boarding school for autistic kids in Eastern CT. Mary's friend Marion's daughter Valerie has a blind autistic daughter who needs more professional and specialized attention than her family can provide, especially as the mom has to commute into Manhattan from pretty deep into CT.

But all this network maintenance is labor-intensive if intrinsically and occasionally extrensically fruitful. Over time it gets exhausting. I am convinced of the fundamental truth of the Dunbar number -- people on average can only maintain 150 decent relationships. The above average can maybe maintain a little bit more than that, but over time there are absolute limits. And over time people actually care about ever-narrower sets of people in their lives. At the end it's pretty much spouse, kids, siblings, maybe cousins and a few friends. I know at the very end of his life my mom's second husband's first wife was trying to snuggle up to him with tiny violins, saying "we raised a family together" blah blah blah and he was like, get the fuck out of here, I'm married to Joan now. 

That's just life.

Doldrums or bliss?

A neighbor of mine was recently telling tales of her plans for summer: adventure jaunts to mountains in Africa and Europe, as well as of trip to Vail to ski last week. Her first major ski trip since an ACL reconstruction a year or two back. She's looking for walks with lots of elevation change to get in shape for this summer's adventures.

Meanwhile, I was delighted last night to eat some mediocre ravioli from the freezer together with a salad incorporating a jarred salad-dressing (Mary has not believed in these for some time but is opening her wee mind) while Mary and I sat on the couch and watched a new (to us) BBC police procedural. It was lovely, and enhanced by the fact that I had played tennis before for the first time in weeks, due to the lengthy freeze on the clay courts brought on by our rare bout of real winter. For adventure, Mary and I are discussing spending a month in upper New England in summer (some of it working, to be sure) and pushing back international travel till post Labor Day, when the crowds die back.

Does this waning desire for travel and adventure bespeak senescence or just fulfillment? I fear the former, but I gotta tell you it often feels like the latter.

More rotting fruits of fragmentation

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a story about Russian intelligence's rising deployment of "single use agents" to carry out minor acts of disruption and sabotage around Europe. Specifically this entails finding disaffected people -- often underemployed, undereducated stateless young men -- to do this kind of stuff for $500, $1000, $2000. A napalm bomb at an IKEA in Vilnius. Something left on some railroad tracks in Germany. Etc. The idea is to create low-level anxiety and dread and a sense that things are out of control. Russia's security organs keep themselves separated from the single-use agents by using secure messaging apps and contracting out through multiple layers, with ultimate handlers being organized crime.

The population from which they recruit the agents has a lot in common with the population from which Trump's ICE hails: guys who feel like they don't have a chance in society and have been wronged. Guys who have been long-since been severed from any set of traditional democratic ideals like rule of law, separation of powers, justice, etc. That all must sound like science fiction to this population.

My mind races back quickly to the loss of authority that figures like Walter Cronkite used to have in the time of three major networks and a couple of wire services. That was all shattered first in the era of 57 channels and nothing on, followed by the internet and the ossification of aging Boomers into Fox News or CNN/MSNBC people. Followed by Joe Rogan, YouTube, Mr Beast... we all know the story, having lived it. An era in which each gets to pick "my personal morality" and few even have the discipline to do that consciously is fertile soil for both recruiting both single use agents and ICE thugs.

Elderberry Wine

Though I have not wholeheartedly jumped on the MJ Lenderman bandwagon, which I think may have been some PR people getting way ahead of themselves, or maybe me just being way too old to be cool or to care, I am a big admirer of Wednesday, a band in which he plays and which is fronted by Karly Hartzman, whom I think MJ goes or went out with. Who cares?

Right now I am deeply touched by this song, which I find to be optimistic in a profound if not altogether obvious way. I have been listening to it a lot. I am saddened that the three shows they have planned for Cat's Cradle in May are sold out already, but may try to get an aftermarket ticket somehow. I will bring earplugs.

It does not hurt that they are from and based in Asheville.

Mary's grey

Up until the pandemic Mary dyed her hair. There was never any discussion about it, she just did it. It didn't feel like it was within my jurisdiction or even zone of influence, it was just something she was going to do, though she complained about it and the toxic chemicals stinking up the bathroom and so on and so on.

After the great reset, she let it go. By now she is almost entirely grey, with little bits of darkness flecked around back in the great mass of her hair, which became curlier after she had kids (fun fact).

If anything, it makes her more attractive to me, most likely because when I look over at her, I am reminded of how much time we have been together and what all we've been through. Three decades of raising kids, career swings, fights about stupid little bullshit (most of which I wish I could take back), the grinding drudgery of figuring out what to eat for dinner (most of which she took on but she complained about it with me so as to share the pain), vacations, little triumphs and setbacks, the whole nine. I wonder, in fact, if the evolutionary function of grey hair in humans has been to deepen and underscore the bonds of marriage but also partnership and friendship, to remind us of how much we've been through together and what it means.

New things

Yesterday morning it was cold, so before heading to my meeting I threw on this big wool LL Bean heavy wool blazer type jacket, with some matting inside. Somewhere between a men's jacket and a coat. It's a little too big for me, but it was a fine thrift find and is pretty warm. I had picked it up for ~$20 at Red, White and Blue Thrift Store in Trenton, NJ on a Saturday jaunt with David Schrayer probably 2006-7 or so. Pretty sure that afterward we went to Annie's Hot on D Spot Roti Shop for killer Trinidadian-Indian food. Man I miss that place.

But I digress. 

Sitting there in my meeting yesterday I looked over at someone wearing a stylish modern little puffer jacket and I thought to myself: "You know, I could go buy one of those for myself." Later, I was shoveling wearing these venerable old gloves that are all torn up. Then I went for a walk and my hands got pretty cold so I had to ball them up as if the gloves were mittens. This morning it occurred to me that I could throw those away and buy both new gloves and, separately, mittens for walking (Mary is a big fan of them so has put mittens on my brain).

Only rarely does this kind of thing occur to me. My brain is so locked into decades of thinking about how to make it by on old stuff that allowing myself to have the right stuff for a given task comes only unnaturally. I had better run out and gear up before I forget I've had this revelation.

Self defeating

Playing against Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinal of the Australian Open yesterday, Alexander Zverev was serving for the match in what would have been his best chance yet to win a major. Yes he would have had to beat Djokovic, but his odds in that match up are much better than his odds against Alcaraz or Sinner, who have quasi-monopolized the finals of grand slams in recent years. 

But he choked. Watching him, I feel like I saw a familiar feeling overcome him. "I can't beat him." I identify strongly with this, because I am susceptible to it. I was up on James 5-3 a few weeks ago, the best I had ever done against him. Then that little voice peeped up: "He's better than you. You're not supposed to beat him." And sure enough, he came back and took me 7-5.

It is an insidious thing, this voice. Thankfully, nobody really cares but me and I don't really care that much. I mean hell, it gave me something to blog about, right? Which gets me to my statutory 15 for January.

Bird Convention, MLK and Estes

At the meeting this morning at the church on the corner of Airport and Estes, I parked next to the stand of trees right there at the southeast corner, the last clump of trees at what had been for a long time a very wooded intersection. A snow storm is blowing in, something we humans have been watching and tracking for weeks now.

Judging by the chatter and clatter in the trees there, the birds were aware of it too. There appeared to be a frenzied discussion going on, in chirps and squawks of tones low and high, of what to do, where to go, who had food, who had HBO and Hulu, and so on. 

And perhaps they were saying the same things we were. This is the south. We flew down here to get away from all that cold stuff up north, these weeks at a time of ice and snow on the ground. What the hell is going on here?   

Cobwebs

When I was putting a jacket back in the front hall closet the other day I noticed a bunch of cobwebs back there. I cleaned them up. This is by no means a rare occurrence in our household, the stray cobweb hanging in a corner or maybe on a hanging light fixture, something that may well have been there for weeks until the light hits it in just the right way.

I wonder to what extent this is a function of our aging and just getting less attentive to this kind of thing. I also find myself wondering to what extent there's a smell peculiar to our home to which we are oblivious, as was often the case in the homes of our grandparents and kind of at the Berridges in Larchmont. Have we gotten to the age where our home has a signature scent? Or maybe just our mudroom?

Of course, we could probably manage down the risk of this kind of thing if we could just retain some professional cleaners, as indeed I've urged Mary to and as she's said at times she would. But she just can't bring herself to do it. Her parents never did. It's not the way of her people. 

Thankfully, of course, Mary doesn't read my blog. She would likely be scandalized to find me writing about this. But I've got to write about something, now don't I. The beast must be fed.

Bleak House Party

In general I end up posting to the blog when I am feeling enthused about some idea, when I feel, I suppose, like either my brilliance or cleverness will dazzle you, my Dear Reader. Right about now I am not feeling that. I suppose a good chunk of it is the wintry bleakness outside my window. It's cold and there's white stuff on the ground and we're supposed to get more this weekend. This is the South, dang it! We're supposed to get a pro forma dosing of wintry mix once a year just to remind everybody that we are on the East Coast and winter is supposed to exist here, before rolling on with the good stuff.

Like all parents, I'm also apprehensive about my kid's career arcs. OK. Right now mostly Graham's. It seems like a rough time to be out looking for jobs or trying to figure out how to proceed in life and Graham's autism diagnosis and academic inclination complicates this further. We're working on his career search but it's a grind. The fact that he's doing a ton more than I did at his age and has me to counsel him, with all of my experience (which is, admittedly, itself rather idiosyncratic) is nice but doesn't make things easier in my mind.

Probably I need to get to more meetings to be reminded in a deeper way of my powerlessness over everything. And also play some danged tennis if all this ice would just melt!

Team of Rivals

In the end I made it all the way through Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the story of Lincoln and his cabinet, many of whom had vied with him for the Presidency. The first couple hundred pages were a bit of a grind, but once Lincoln was elected and everybody went to Washington I caught the groove.

I learned a lot. I had never really realized the extent to which Virginia -- and to a considerable extent what is now the I-95 corridor between Washington and Richmond, was the center of so much of the war. For some reason I also hadn't known that Richmond was the capital. I had figured it was someplace down in Mississippi, which would have seemed logical. Now I know. Honestly I think as a southern white male I have always to some extent shied away from the the Civil War as a subject matter. The south was in the wrong and we lost. Move on, I figured. 

But it's not a book about the war. It's a book about Lincoln and his team, about his team realizing what a remarkable captain they had lucked into. What a guy. It makes me want to read more of the capacious Lincoln hagiography out there.

I am not sad, I will freely admit, to be done with the book. It was a heavy one. Now I can read a mystery or some McPhee or something. I am due another bagatelle.

My Hoarding Tendencies

Ever since the pandemic we have kept the cubbard well-stocked, and the approach of Winter Storm Fern had me go out and top it up a little. It gives me comfort to gaze on the plenty.

Honestly, I began writing this post and had a nice riff I was going to go off on, then I looked at the news and saw that another American had been shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis. He had a gun, OK. But he had a permit and the videos certainly make it look like he was not pointing it at anybody when the fracas began. That didn't stop Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller and Fox News from saying he instigated it immediately. At this point in time I don't know what to say or do. Probably I should have just not posted.

Writing wisdom for the AIs

Last week I listened in the car to Ian Bremmer's podcast interview of Geoffrey Hinton, who did pioneering work on the neural networks that made possible progress in AI, at least I think I have that right. Anyhoo, a smart fellow. Hinton by now holds serious reservations about AI, and specifically AI's catastrophic potential to destroy humanity.

One hope he holds out (roughly) is that if AIs can be imbued with positive learnings as opposed to negative ones, it might be less inclined to destroy us. This is far from as stupid as it sounds. For a long time we've known that if it bleeds, it leads, and that murder and destruction sell much better than glowing parables about the beneficence of mankind and the righteousness of love for one's fellow man. 

The fact that the sacred texts of the world religions are the biggest selling books in history and the most studied does not mean that AIs are going to pour over the Bible, Talmud, Koran etc. over and over for their whole lives seeking the deepest meaning, as humans do. In fact, it seems to me that specific communities of faith immerse themselves in their scriptures perhaps less to gain wisdom than to deepen their own common language with one another. Hence the benefits of reading others sacred texts. Then there's also the problem, for example, of all the very bloody war in the Old Testament/Torah, for example, wherein the Israelites smite their neighbors with great force for continually erecting shrines in the hills to the old Gods. It's confusing.

As I have mentioned before, Tyler Cowen has enjoined us to "write for the AIs" in the sense that we can't sit around as crafters of freely available expository prose and expect that somehow we can maintain control of our words. Though paywalls help. Instead, we just need to get ideas out there and keep moving so as to generate more and better ones.

It is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Rather than launch into some deep disquisition on what I think to be right, let me say instead that we should all endeavor to be humble. For now I need to read some things written by others and then complete some tasks and write some checks for people I believe in. The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, but only with a little help from our friends.

Not just another MLKJ Day

I have blogged in the past about Martin Luther King Jr Day and its place in our personal life rhythms, first and foremost as the holiday that lets us recover from the other holidays. 2026 obviously differs from others in that it takes place against the background of the ever accelerating craziness of the Trump administration: the threatened invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, his batshit crazy idea of taking Greenland, etc. I think this weekend really opens the 2026 electoral season, which Democrats must dominate despite some of the stupidity upon which some of us perseverate.

In other ways this holiday weekend resembles others. It's just freaking welcome. After the holidays, then the quick opening of the year in which lots of client questions seem to pop up, three days of nothing just hit the spot.

Today a wintry mix comes down outside our windows. I'm making a hard push towards the conclusion of Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which has gotten less bad as I've pushed forward but has cemented me in thinking that she can never hold a candle to Robert Caro. But then who can?

Through all of this I am deriving ever more satisfaction from sitting at my end of the couch while Mary sits in her chair at the other end of the coffee table. I spend a lot of time looking at her, a fact that seems lost on her much of the time as she assiduously pours through whatever article she is reading, item she is shopping for, or perhaps animal video she is consuming. What a lovely woman. How fortunate I am to have her down there doing her thing. In our little domain at least, life remains good. 

Let us hope we can share this wealth as 2026 crawls forward. 

Listening to stuff in the car

A college classmate posted on Facebook yesterday about a number of podcasts she had listened to that were good, including ones from the Economist about Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. I know I listened to the one about Xi. But the one about Modi? Maybe, maybe not. I'm just not sure. It's all kind of a blur.

Which raises the question: how good of a content delivery mechanism is listening to stuff in the car? Books, podcasts, news, what have you. On the one hand, it expands the range of ways one can ingest text. For that reason I love it. I listen to a lot of books and podcasts in the car. The practice also allows one to control what comes into ones ear and head to a greater degree, as opposed to being subjected to the editorial preferences of some radio programmer.

But I forget so much. In this regard, I suppose it's not all that much different from other media, from print media to "TV", movies, and streaming video. That also often passes in one ear and out the other. Which is why it's possible for me to rewatch TV serieses like 30 Rock and Arrested Development and get a lot of yucks out of them: because I forget them pretty quickly, but I know I like them. So they self-renew.

But with non-fiction content where the purpose is learning and informing oneself it's a little problematic. Therefore when I listen to a book that makes a strong impression I tend to buy a hard copy and put it on my shelf so I have the mnemonic boost of the book spine, but also the ability to refer back to the book to refresh my memory. For example, as I turn my head to the left I can see my copy of Stephen Pinker's 2018 Enlightenment Now, which I listened to while driving.

Which reminds me, I really need to refer back to Edward Chancellor's The Price of Time, a history of interest rates/extended screed on the unintended consequences of the long period of cheap money following the financial crisis, which Trump now wants to extend so that everyone will think of him as their sugar daddy. Chancellor has a super interesting section in which he talks about the extreme rate of innovation, technology adoption and productivity growth that happened during the Great Depression, a time of extreme capital scarcity. At least I'm 95% sure it was in his book... A very interesting argument with applications to the present moment.

All in the song

For some time now Mary had been talking about how we should get the kids to watch All In the Family just to give them a taste of prime Norman Lear. I had resisted, fearing they wouldn't love it and just knowing how dated it was. But then a couple of weeks back a columnist in the Times listed it as one of the 10 shows from back in the day that young people really should see, and Mary pitched it and was able to sell it to Graham. Natalie had already headed back to NYC after the holidays.

So there we were on the couch, watching the very first episode. And the theme song comes on. Carol O'Connor starts singing, alternates with Jean Stapleton, it all came rushing back. This theme song is indeed something of a tour de force, light years away from anything that could ever kick off a show nowadays, peaking when Stapleton's voice rises to "And you knew what you were then" and cracks apart. So intensely human and imperfect and yet...

The show itself was worth watching and yet conformed my fears in its intense formulaicness of showing Archie to be a racist boor. But still, there was some genuinely funny stuff, especially when Lionel Jefferson comes in and shows that he understands well what a pig Archie is and plays him like a fiddle.

I could watch another episode or two from time to time. But I could listen to the song all day, indeed have had a hard time getting it out of my head.  

The Reality of Force and Power

In a recent conversation Stephen Miller, Trump's Homeland Security Advisor and a Duke graduate, said the following to CNN's Jake Tapper.

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. 

Which is to say that if the kid in Pennsylvania had been successful in taking out Trump, that would just be that. It was fine to kill Charlie Kirk. If some clever person could assassinate Miller or Russ Vought, it would just be a normal business day.

Or if the United States had a hankering for, say, Vancouver, we should just take it.

Or that it's just fine for some gun-loving ICE thug to take out a woman on the streets of Minneapolis because she is making ICE's job difficult.

Miller presumably had to pledge an oath of allegiance to the Constitution upon taking office. It is not apparent.

We are taking down our Christmas tree today. After a 2025 focused mostly on charitable giving it is time to fire back up for the 2026 elections.

Bad Kids -- spoiler alert -- the conclusion is discussed

At Flyleaf Books sometime in the last six months or so, I happened across a copy of Bad Kids, a 2014 murder-suspense novel by Zijin Chen. Certainly one couldn't call it a mystery novel because all the murders happen in the presence of the reader (OK, all but one, but the killer admits to it to another character without a ton of pressure). The suspense in the novel derives entirely from the question of what will happen to the characters, will they be made to pay for their actions? In the end, the answer is... we/re not told.

Crime and Punishment this is not. There are two interlocking murder plots that are brought together, with a slight borrowing from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Three kids (a boy and a girl who escaped from an orphanage, the third an academic superstar) capture video of a guy killing his in-laws. They blackmail him. A little bit later, they quasi-accidentally kill the half-sister of the genius kid, pushing her out a window to her death when they had really only intended to ram her head into a shit-filled toilet because she was such a brat.

Two things about the novel strike the reader. First, there's pretty much zero fluff or connective tissue. The novel consists of short, architectonic chapters that build the plot and do very little else. Atmospheric description of surroundings, food, people etc. is conspicuously absent. This is striking because, so often in the West where the mystery novel is a long-established genre, the mystery plot really serves first and foremost to let a narrator range across a society and render judgments, show scenery, describe characters. This is nowhere more in evidence than in things like Masterpiece Mystery or Britbox where the mystery lets a camera roam across a lush verdant landscape.

All of that shit is out the window in Bad Kids. This is a novel about morals. Kind of. Because what we would think of as morals also aren't very much in evidence. As the titular bad kids discuss the consequences of their actions, what they're concerned with is will they get in trouble. And they agree that, because they're not yet 14, even if they get in trouble it won't be too bad because they can't be sent to real prison, just kids' prison. Makes sense to me. So yeah, they go ahead and kill some more people, specifically the genius kid's dad and his second wife, referred to consistently as Big Bitch because she was indeed really mean to him.

There's also a tender subplot about a budding romance between the genious kid and the girl escapee. So cute. Until she dies at the end in circumstances that seem to have been anticipated and manipulated by the genius kid.

And so, the big question remains: will the genius kid, who could probably ace the all-important gaokao exam and go on to a really good job in the government or a big firm, be forced to give up his promising career because he commits and orchestrates some murders? The answer is not given.

Bad Kids became huge hit when adapted for TV in 2020, with more than a billion messages on Weibo discussing it. 

The fraternity of sales

I was looking for decent conferences to go to in the first quarter and remembered I had been to one in Charlotte a year or two ago via NAPFA (Google it if you care). I looked it up and, lo and behold, there's one coming up in about six weeks. Perfect. I wrote to the person in charge of the conference to make sure I could get continuing ed credit I needed, and she assured me that I would indeed. Her response was punctuated/infused with the universal positivity of salespeople. "Thanks so much for checking in!" or perhaps "Have a great day!"

I used to bridle slightly at this sort of thing, saccharine as it seems. But now I get it, I'm fully bought in. Sales is hard. There's a lot of rejection to fight through. It's part of the game. All the little verbal-micro energy boosts, smiles, firm handshakes, sitting up straight in your chair, discussions of various hydration strategies, people with things to sell need that stuff to get the day with good energy, so as to do more and better. There's a positive feedback loop to it all.

And make no mistake, in the end everybody is selling something to somebody for some portion of their day/week/month. Or, if they aren't, they are at risk of sliding off into the abyss or are deeply dependent on someone who is, and one hopes that the person they lean on has some life insurance.

Reading QuePasa

I went to Li Ming's last week to pick up the fixings for the New Year's nian gao, fast becoming a tradition in our household though my understanding is that actual Chinese people eat a sweet version of the rice cakes. I cooked a bunch of those for Chinese New Year's at Jonathan and Sharon's a couple of years back and was less excited about them. One thing I will say is that if the management of Li Ming's keep the place cool in summer -- and they most assuredly do -- they don't do the opposite in winter. Dress warmly when visiting, even if you plan to eat lunch there from the steam table, as Bobby and I do as often as we think of it.

On the way out I picked up an issue of Que Pasa, a Spanish-language newspaper out of the Triad (the NC triumvirate of cities, to be clear. Not the Chinese crime syndicate). To the best of my knowledge. I need newspaper both to start fires in the fireplace -- now that we don't get a print newspaper -- y tambien a practicar leer en espanol, something I don't do enough of.

I learned a fair amount from the paper. For instance, I had not been aware that the OBBBA places a 1% tax on remittances sent through cash or money transfer services like Western Union. This seems harsh given most wages remitted have already been subject to income tax. It could easily have the effect of driving immigrants into the banking system -- where they may have to commit fraud to establish accounts -- which could be used against them by ICE and make them more easily deportable. Alternately, this could fuel the adoption of cryptocurrency and stable coins as a payment mechanism -- currently helpful to Trump and his cryptobro allies. For the record, US remittances to Mexico were probably about $60 billion in 2025, something like 3% of Mexican GDP.

Also, I learned that the Mexican Government has a consulate in Raleigh, one of about fifty spread around the US to provide services to Mexicans. Makes sense.

Substack aggregation/bundling

Somebody on Substack made the point that 2025 was the year that the whole world showed up on Substack, which probably diverges from truth only incrementally. There are so many good writers on Substack, but there's no way anyone can read all of them let alone pay for all of the ones one likes. One wishes they could be aggregated and curated into something like.... a magazine.

Given the times we live in, it's not too far-fetched to think that Substack might create an AI that customizes each of our feeds into things we might like, based on... an algorithm derived from our reading habits. Gollie, if only that were technologically possible. But of course it would need a pricing mechanism to figure out how to optimize and balance engagement vs. revenue production which might look something like... Google Adwords or the dynamic pricing models that change the prices of airline seats based on demand at a given moment. Really all Substack needs to do is throw all this together and let writers opt into it as opposed to demanding $75 from each reader annually.

I already subscribe to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the News & Observer, and Triangle Business Daily. Our household print media spend already is probably in the $2,000-$3,000 range and I can hardly scratch the surface of what I already subscribe to. How am I gonna pay $75 to one writer, however clever? 

ps. It occurs to me that what I am talking about may be Medium, which lets you pay one price. Admittedly it is a less good way of supporting content-creators than Substack. But then again Substack shares a lot of attributes with OnlyFans. Ponder that.