Nothing to do with Books

Wrong couple divorced after computer error by law firm

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From BBC:

A staff member at Vardag’s accidentally opened the file of a couple referred to in court papers as Mr and Mrs Williams, when trying to apply for a final divorce order for a different client.

Vardag’s applied three days later to rescind the order but judge Sir Andrew McFarlane dismissed the application.

The firm’s head Ayesha Vardag said the judge’s decision effectively meant “the computer says no, you’re divorced”.

Court papers say that Mrs Williams applied for divorce in January 2023 following 21 years of marriage.

The mistake was made by solicitors acting for Mrs Williams on 3 October last year on an online divorce portal operated by HM Courts and Tribunals Service.

In his summary, Judge McFarlane noted that “with its now customary speed”, the system granted the order just 21 minutes later.

Vardag’s did not discover the error until 5 October, thinking the order had been made for another client, but then promptly applied for it to be rescinded.

The husband became aware of the situation only on 11 October, the same day Vardag’s wrote to his solicitors to explain the situation, court papers say.

In the summary, Judge McFarlane, president of the High Court’s Family Division, said the issue arose against the background of “ongoing contested financial remedy proceedings”.

Ms Vardag has been nicknamed the “diva of divorce”, with her firm based in London, as well as offices in Cambridge and Manchester.

The firm describes itself on its website as specialising in “high net worth and ultra high net worth family cases”.

Lawyers for Mrs Williams argued that as the order had been made by mistake it should simply be “set aside”, describing the error as someone at the firm simply “clicking the wrong button”.

Mr Williams’ legal representatives argued a final order of divorce is a “once-and-for-all” order, which cannot be set aside by the consent of the parties and may only be rescinded by the court if found to be either void or voidable.

Judge McFarlane rejected the wife’s arguments that the order should be set aside, finding it was not “rendered voidable” by her lack of consent as her solicitors were “generally authorised to act for her and the court was entitled to accept the application for the final order made by them as being validly made on her behalf”.

He went on to say that even if the order was voidable, there was “a strong public policy interest in respecting the certainty and finality that flows from a final divorce order and maintaining the status quo that it has established”.

Link to the rest at BBC

Recalcitrant judge and a likely-dismissed law staff member.

No mention of an attorney who directed the fired staffer to enter the order.

Interesting that Mrs. Williams is contending that the the mistaken order should be set aside while her husband is saying the divorce is final. Something is happening behind the scenes.

Vardag’s “high net worth and ultra high net worth family cases” appear to be their own little world.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “You know, the rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway is said to have responded, “Yes. They’ve got more money.”

Here is more about the Diva of Divorce.

Museums are becoming more expensive

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From The Economist:

“It’s almost a moral duty that museums should be free,” said Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). That was in 2002, when a ticket to moma cost $12 (around $19 in today’s prices). In October moma started charging $30, the latest in a series of price rises.

moma is not the only museum raising the cost of admission. The Metropolitan Museum in New York ended its longstanding “pay what you will” policy for out-of-town visitors in 2018 and raised general admission for them to $30 in 2022. Last summer the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum all followed suit, bumping a standard ticket from $25 to $30.

Museum staff complain of climbing costs and a case of “long covid”. In America only a third of museums have met or surpassed pre-pandemic visitor numbers. Higher energy and labour costs have pushed up ticket prices in Europe, too. In January the Berlin State Museums, the Louvre and the Vatican Museums, which include the Sistine Chapel, raised the price of general-admission tickets by 20%, 29% and 17%, respectively. Prices have remained stable only in Asia and the Middle East, where museums are younger and state funding is especially generous.

Ticket fees may seem high, particularly in destination cities where tourists are not likely to be dissuaded by spending a few more dollars. But “whatever museums charge, it is not covering their operating costs,” says Javier Jimenez, a director at Lord Cultural Resources, a consulting firm. The Association of Art Museum Directors reported in 2018 that ticket sales accounted on average for just 7% of total revenue at American art museums. Memberships contributed another 7%. The remainder of budgets usually come from endowments, charitable donations, grants and retail operations.

European museums are less reliant on admissions fees, because they are often heavily subsidised by governments. This can make it awkward to ask taxpayers to buy a pricey ticket and in effect pay twice. Many institutions choose to offer reductions for the young, pensioners and locals.

All national institutions in Britain offer free admission, as do most state-run museums in China. (Exceptions are made for special exhibitions.) In America some 30% are free, including big public museums like those of the Smithsonian Institution and private ones such as the Getty Centre in Los Angeles. Some observers have repeated Mr Lowry’s call for museums, especially the most well-endowed, to stop charging for admission entirely.

Ballooning prices go against museums’ goal of sharing art with a more diverse public. They could also accelerate the already steep decline in the share of Americans attending museums and galleries: between 2017 and 2022 it shrunk by 26%.

Declining public interest, particularly among young people, is a challenge for institutions that rely heavily on public support. Those who choose not to visit a museum today may be the people who vote against government subsidies or refuse to write personal cheques as patrons in a few years. Those who spend time inside museums’ galleries are more likely to grasp their richness and want to invest their own riches in them.

Yet significantly reducing costs may not actually do much to attract new audiences either. In both America and Europe, people say that price is just one of several factors when it comes to deciding what to do with their leisure time. 

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG’s first job out of college was right across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago, then (and hopefully now), one of the great art museums of the world.

When he didn’t have a business lunch or a tight deadline, PG would go over to explore nooks and crannies in the Art Institute with few visitors as well as the impressive large pieces that reliably brought crowds into the building on most days.

As he recalls, he gave the museum a relatively small amount of money to acquire the right to visit any place in the Art Institute at any time the building was open.

PG was saddened by the OP and the admission fees charged to those who are less than well-off.

History Goes to War in the Holy Land

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From The Wall Street Journal:

The dogs of the neighborhood perk up to greet me at Benny Morris’s front gate in this middle-of-nowhere town in central Israel. The great historian, shaggy-haired, in T-shirt, open flannel and socks, has recently returned home from the U.K., where the barking did not cease.

He was there to debate a hard-line anti-Israel scholar and speak at the London School of Economics, where some students tried and failed to shut down his lecture with droning, preplanned slogans. “You’re actually quite boring,” Mr. Morris, 75, told them, at which point he was called a racist, doubtless in the expectation that he, a liberal, would be cowed by the slur. He wasn’t. “I’d rather be a racist than a bore,” he replied.

Mr. Morris was once the toast of the campuses. “I was sort of a symbol on the left,” he says on his back porch. “I don’t want to say ‘icon.’ ” If he won’t, I will. Mr. Morris was foremost among the “New Historians” who shook Israel in the 1980s and seemed to triumph in the 1990s with their revisionist accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict. His 1988 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49,” was a landmark in Israel’s self-criticism and understanding. That same year, Mr. Morris spent 19 days in Israeli military prison for refusing to serve on reserve duty in the West Bank.

How did he go from there to the shouting match at LSE? To many on the left, Mr. Morris says, “I seem to have turned anti-Palestinian in the year 2000,” when Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton offered a two-state solution and Yasser Arafat rejected it. “I thought this was a terrible decision by the Palestinians, and I wrote that.” When the Palestinians, in response to the offer of peace and statehood, then launched a wave of terrorism and suicide bombings unlike any before it, Mr. Morris disapproved of that, too. “I began to write journalism against the Palestinians, their decisions and policies,” he says, “and this was considered treachery.”

Mr. Morris was suddenly out of step “because people always forgive the Palestinians, who don’t take responsibility,” he says. “It’s accepted that they are the victim and therefore can do whatever they like.” Mr. Morris doesn’t contest the claim of victimhood but sees it on both sides. “Righteous Victims” is the title of his 1999 history of the conflict.

Israel is viewed as “all-powerful vis-à-vis the Palestinians,” he says. “But as we see it, we are surrounded by the Muslim world, organized in some way by Iran, and the West is turning its back on us. So we see ourselves as the underdog.” Try that on a college campus. “Now, the Palestinians are the underdog, and the underdog is always right, even if it does the wrong things,” he says, “like Oct. 7.”

The West hasn’t reckoned with Oct. 7. Not the massacre itself, which is at once too hard to fathom and too easy to condemn, but the broad support for it among Palestinians. “They were joyous in the West Bank and Gaza Strip when 1,200 Jews were killed and 250 were taken hostage,” Mr. Morris says. Palestinian support for the atrocities has remained constant, at over 70%, in opinion polls.

Mr. Morris tries to see it from their point of view: “700,000 Palestinians had become refugees as a result of Israel and its victory in ’48. They’d been living under occupation since ’67. I understand their desire for revenge and to see Israel disappear or very badly hurt.”

But that’s too easy. “In addition to those history-based grievances, there is Muslim antisemitism, terrorism and a level of barbarism, which for Israelis felt like more than revenge for bad things we’ve done,” he says. “It was a sick ideology and sick people carrying out murder and rape in the name of that ideology.”

Mr. Morris stresses the costs of that Palestinian decision. “There was never destruction like what has happened in Gaza over the past five months in any of Israel’s wars.” In 1967, “Israel conquered the West Bank with almost no houses being destroyed,” he says, “and the same applies in ’56 in the Gaza Strip, and the same applies in ’48. Israel didn’t have the firepower to cause such devastation. This is totally new.”

He doubts the scale of the suffering will move Palestinian nationalists. “Probably they’ll look back to Oct. 7 as a sort of minor victory over Zionism and disregard the casualties which they paid as a result,” he says. That’s the historical pattern.

“Not only has each of their big decisions made life worse for their people, but they ensure that each time the idea of a two-state solution is proposed, less of Palestine is offered to them,” Mr. Morris says. “In 1937, Palestinians were supposed to get 70% of Palestine or more.” The Zionists were willing to work with the plan, but the Arabs rejected it and chose violence. “Then, in 1947, the Palestinians were supposed to get 45% of Palestine,” with much of Israel’s more than 50% comprising desert. The Zionists accepted the partition, and, again, the Palestinians chose violence.

“And then in the Barak-Clinton things,” in 2000, “the Palestinians were supposed to get 21%, 22% of Palestine.” Instead they launched the second intifada. “Next time,” Mr. Morris predicts, “they’ll probably get 15%. Each time they’re given less of Palestine as a result of being defeated in their efforts to get all of Palestine.”

Mr. Morris says 1947 was the best chance for peace, but the Arabs instead tried to block and then crush the new Jewish state. Though they came to see the war as the nakba, or catastrophe, and as the final stage of a Zionist invasion, at the time “they thought they were going to win,” Mr. Morris says. “They have a problem explaining to themselves why they lost the war with twice as many Arabs as Jews—100 times as many if you include the Arab states.”

One day, Mr. Morris admits, the Palestinian strategy could work. “Somebody coming from Mars would say, ‘The Arabs have the numbers. They have the potential for much greater economic and military power, so they’re going to win here if they persist in their resistance.’ ”

Mr. Morris lets that hang in the air. “And yet, one never knows,” he says. “Unusual things happen here. Peace might also break out, which would be even more unusual.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG reminds one and all to be courteous in their comments. Israel/Arab questions are hotly debated on many different places online for those unable to be courteous on TPV.

Understanding humanoid robots

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From TechCrunch:

Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms, two legs, a head — the whole shebang.

Karel Čapek’s play, R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti), was a hit. It was translated into dozens of languages and played across Europe and North America. The work’s lasting legacy, however, was its introduction of the word “robot.” The meaning of the term has evolved a good bit in the intervening century, as Čapek’s robots were more organic than machine.

Decades of science fiction have, however, ensured that the public image of robots hasn’t strayed too far from its origins. For many, the humanoid form is still the platonic robot ideal — it’s just that the state of technology hasn’t caught up to that vision. Earlier this week, Nvidia held its own on-stage robot parade at its GTC developer conference, as CEO Jensen Huang was flanked by images of a half-dozen humanoids.

While the notion of the concept of the general-purpose humanoid has, in essence, been around longer than the word “robot,” until recently, the realization of the concept has seemed wholly out of grasp. We’re very much not there yet, but for the first time, the concept has appeared over the horizon.

What is a “general-purpose humanoid?”

Before we dive any deeper, let’s get two key definitions out of the way. When we talk about “general-purpose humanoids,” the fact is that both terms mean different things to different people. In conversations, most people take a Justice Potter “I know it when I see it” approach to both in conversation.

For the sake of this article, I’m going to define a general-purpose robot as one that can quickly pick up skills and essentially do any task a human can do. One of the big sticking points here is that multi-purpose robots don’t suddenly go general-purpose overnight.

Because it’s a gradual process, it’s difficult to say precisely when a system has crossed that threshold. There’s a temptation to go down a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole with that latter bit, but for the sake of keeping this article under book length, I’m going to go ahead and move on to the other term.

I received a bit of (largely good-natured) flack when I referred to Reflex Robotics’ system as a humanoid. People pointed out the plainly obvious fact that the robot doesn’t have legs. Putting aside for a moment that not all humans have legs, I’m fine calling the system a “humanoid” or more specifically a “wheeled humanoid.” In my estimation, it resembles the human form closely enough to fit the bill.

A while back, someone at Agility took issue when I called Digit “arguably a humanoid,” suggesting that there was nothing arguable about it. What’s clear is that robot isn’t as faithful an attempt to recreate the human form as some of the competition. I will admit, however, that I may be somewhat biased having tracked the robot’s evolution from its precursor Cassie, which more closely resembled a headless ostrich (listen, we all went through an awkward period).

Another element I tend to consider is the degree to which the humanlike form is used to perform humanlike tasks. This element isn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s an important part of the spirit of humanoid robots. After all, proponents of the form factor will quickly point out the fact that we’ve built our worlds around humans, so it makes sense to build humanlike robots to work in that world.

Adaptability is another key point used to defend the deployment of bipedal humanoids. Robots have had factory jobs for decades now, and the vast majority of them are single-purpose. That is to say, they were built to do a single thing very well a lot of times. This is why automation has been so well-suited for manufacturing — there’s a lot of uniformity and repetition, particularly in the world of assembly lines.

Brownfield vs. Greenfield

The terms “greenfield” and “brownfield” have been in common usage for several decades across various disciplines. The former is the older of two, describing undeveloped land (quite literally, a green field). Developed to contrast the earlier term, brownfield refers to development on existing sites. In the world of warehouses, it’s the difference between building something from scratch or working with something that’s already there.

There are pros and cons of both. Brownfields are generally more time and cost-effective, as they don’t require starting from scratch, while greenfields afford to opportunity to built a site entirely to spec. Given infinite resources, most corporations will opt for a greenfield. Imagine the performance of a space built ground-up with automated systems in mind. That’s a pipedream for most organizers, so when it comes time to automate, a majority of companies seek out brownfield solutions — doubly so when they’re first dipping their toes into the robotic waters.

Given that most warehouses are brownfield, it ought come as no surprise that the same can be said for the robots designed for these spaces. Humanoids fit neatly into this category — in fact, in a number of respects, they are among the brownest of brownfield solutions. This gets back to the earlier point about building humanoid robots for their environments. You can safely assume that most brownfield factories were designed with human workers in mind. That often comes with elements like stairs, which present an obstacle for wheeled robots. How large that obstacle ultimately is depends on a lot of factors, including layout and workflow.

Baby Steps

Call me a wet blanket, but I’m a big fan of setting realistic expectations. I’ve been doing this job for a long time and have survived my share of hype cycles. There’s an extent to which they can be useful, in terms of building investor and customer interest, but it’s entirely too easy to fall prey to overpromises. This includes both stated promises around future functionality and demo videos.

I wrote about the latter last month in a post cheekily titled, “How to fake a robotics demo for fun and profit.” There are a number of ways to do this, including hidden teleoperation and creative editing. I’ve heard whispers that some firms are speeding up videos, without disclosing the information. In fact, that’s the origin of humanoid firm 1X’s name — all of their demos are run in 1X speed.

Most in the space agree that disclosure is important — even necessary — on such products, but there aren’t strict standards in place. One could argue that you’re wading into a legal gray area if such videos play a role in convincing investors to plunk down large sums of money. At the very least, they set wildly unrealistic expectations among the public — particularly those who are inclined to take truth-stretching executives’ words as gospel.

That can only serve to harm those who are putting in the hard work while operating in reality with the rest of us. It’s easy to see how hope quickly diminishes when systems fail to live up to those expectations.

The timeline to real-world deployment contains two primary constraints. The first is mechatronic: i.e. what the hardware is capable of. The second is software and artificial intelligence. Without getting into a philosophical debate around what qualifies as artificial general intelligence (AGI) in robots, one thing we can certainly say is that progress has — and will continue to be gradual.

As Huang noted at GTC the other week, “If we specified AGI to be something very specific, a set of tests where a software program can do very well — or maybe 8% better than most people — I believe we will get there within five years.” That’s on the optimistic end of the timeline I’ve heard from most experts in the field. A range of five to 10 years seems common.

Before hitting anything resembling AGI, humanoids will start as single-purpose systems, much like their more traditional counterparts. Pilots are designed to prove out that these systems can do one thing well at scale before moving onto the next. Most people are looking at tote moving for that lowest-hanging fruit. Of course, your average Kiva/Locus AMR can move totes around all day, but those systems lack the mobile manipulators required to move payloads on and off themselves. That’s where robot arms and end effectors come in, whether or not they happen to be attached to something that looks human.

. . . .

Two legs to stand on

At this point, the clearest path to AGI should look familiar to anyone with a smartphone. Boston Dynamics’ Spot deployment provides a clear real-world example of how the app store model can work with industrial robots. While there’s a lot of compelling work being done in the world of robot learning, we’re a ways off from systems that can figure out new tasks and correct mistakes on the fly at scale. If only robotics manufacturers could leverage third-party developers in a manner similar to phonemakers.

Interest in the category has increased substantially in recent months, but speaking personally, the needle hasn’t moved too much in either direction for me since late last year. We’ve seen some absolutely killer demos, and generative AI presents a promising future. OpenAI is certainly hedging its bets, first investing in 1X and — more recently — Figure.

A lot of smart people have faith in the form factor and plenty of others remain skeptical. One thing I’m confident saying, however, is that whether or not future factories will be populated with humanoid robots on a meaningful scale, all of this work will amount to something. Even the most skeptical roboticists I’ve spoken to on the subject have pointed to the NASA model, where the race to land humans on the mood led to the invention of products we use on Earth to this day.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

PG notes that the robot below is using OpenAI, a general-purpose AI program.

https://youtube.com/shorts/nmHzvQr3kYE?si=Q2KjwJXLINEtyiVe

Gun violence killed them. Now, their voices will lobby Congress to do more using AI

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From National Public Radio

“It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing,” Joaquin Oliver’s voice echoed across the U.S. Capitol grounds Wednesday. “Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have continued to happen since.”

On Feb. 14, 2018, Oliver started another day as a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. By the end, he was one of 17 people murdered at the school in a mass shooting that sparked a worldwide, youth-led movement on gun violence.

Now, people can hear his voice again.

Oliver’s audio is one of six messages generated by artificial intelligence meant to resemble different voices of individuals killed by guns in incidents over the past decade. It’s part of an initiative led by March For Our Lives, the gun control organization borne out of the Parkland shooting, and Change The Ref, a group started by Oliver’s parents, vocal advocates Manny and Patricia Oliver.

The messages will appear on the Shotline, a new online platform that the groups created, where users can individually send the AI-generated audio directly to the offices of members of Congress, demanding further action on gun violence prevention. The initiative was announced in front of the Capitol Wednesday, the sixth anniversary of the Parkland shooting.

Link to the rest at National Public Radio

PG says this is over the top, beyond the pale, etc.

Tackling the TikTok Threat

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From The Wall Street Journal:

The House on Wednesday is expected to vote on a bill that would give popular social-media app TikTok an ultimatum: Break up with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or break up with the U.S. It didn’t need to come to this, but Beijing and TikTok’s Chinese-owner ByteDance left Washington with no choice.

Congress has spent years debating how to mitigate the national-security risks of TikTok’s Chinese ownership that have grown with the site’s popularity. About 150 million Americans use TikTok, and the app is a top source of news and search for Generation Z.

Donald Trump tried in 2020 to force ByteDance to divest TikTok, but his executive order was blocked in court, partly because the President lacked clear authority from Congress. Legislation by Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher and Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi aims to overcome the legal obstacles.

Their bill would ban TikTok from app stores and web-hosting services in the U.S. if the company doesn’t divest from ByteDance. It also establishes a process by which the President can prohibit other social-media apps that are “controlled by a foreign adversary.” The bill is narrowly tailored while giving the President tools to combat future threats.

Banning TikTok should be a last resort, but ByteDance and Beijing have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted. Reams of evidence show how the Chinese government can use the platform for cyber-espionage and political influence campaigns in the U.S.

Numerous reports have found that posts about Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang province, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protests, Tibet and other politically sensitive content in China are suppressed on TikTok. A December study by the Network Contagion Research Institute found significant disparities between hashtags on Instagram and TikTok. The site also appears to amplify content that sows discord and ignorance in America. Pro-Hamas videos trend more than pro-Israel ones. Videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to America” went viral on TikTok last autumn.

How has TikTok responded to allegations that its algorithms are controlled by the Chinese government? In January it restricted researcher access to its hashtag data to make it harder to study. “Some individuals and organizations have misused the Center’s search function to draw inaccurate conclusions, so we are changing some of the features to ensure it is used for its intended purpose,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

Yet TikTok can’t explain why posts that are divisive in America go viral, while those that are sensitive for the CCP get few views. TikTok tried to ameliorate concerns about CCP wizards behind the screen with its Project Texas, which houses American user data on Oracle servers and gives the U.S. software company access to its algorithms.

But TikTok’s algorithms are still controlled by ByteDance engineers in China. The Journal reported in January that TikTok executives have said internally that they sometimes need to share protected U.S. data with ByteDance to train the algorithms and keep problematic content off the site. Like protests for democracy in Hong Kong?

TikTok’s other major security risk is cyber-espionage. The app vacuums up sensitive American user information, including searches, browsing histories and locations. This data can and does flow back to China. “Everything is seen in China,” a TikTok official said in a leaked internal recording reported by Buzzfeed.

ByteDance employees tried to uncover internal leakers by spying on American journalists. After this surveillance was reported, ByteDance blamed “misconduct of certain individuals” who were no longer employed. But there’s nothing to stop CCP puppets in ByteDance back-offices from spying on Americans.

Meta ignited a firestorm several years ago when it was found to have given British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica access to user personal data. Political campaigns used the data to target ads. TikTok’s privacy risks and malign political influence are more disturbing since it answers to Beijing.

Xi Jinping has eviscerated any distinction between the government and private companies. ByteDance employs hundreds of employees who previously worked at state-owned media outlets. A former head of engineering in ByteDance’s U.S. offices has alleged that the Communist Party “had a special office or unit” in the company “sometimes referred to as the ‘Committee.’”

. . . .

In any case, the House bill doesn’t restrict First Amendment rights. It regulates national security. It also has ample precedent since U.S. law restricts foreign ownership of broadcast stations. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States forced the Chinese owners of Grindr, the gay dating app, to give up control of the company.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

PG thinks the WSJ opinion writers are going more than a bit overboard in their fears and, particularly, their “solution” to the problem they’ve overthought.

China is going to continue to engage in Communist behavior regardless of what happens with TikTok. If, “everything is seen in China,” then China is spending a huge amount of human time looking at TikTok videos.

“TikTok can’t explain why posts that are divisive in America go viral.”

Posts that are divisive in America frequently go viral without any help from foreign nations. It’s a feature of democratic societies, not a bug.

People disagree on political issues face-to-face, by snail mail, by email, via newspaper editorial pages and, especially, online. Look at what was printed in old-fashioned newspapers run by William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer when there were far fewer sources of news available to regular folk than is the case today.

When a case containing dismembered human remains surfaced in New York’s East River in June of 1897, the publisher of the New York Journal–a young, devil-may-care millionaire named William Randolph Hearst–decided that his newspaper would “scoop” the city’s police department by solving this heinous crime. Pulling out all the stops, Hearst launched more than a journalistic murder investigation; his newspaper’s active intervention in the city’s daily life, especially its underside, marked the birth of the Yellow Press.

Most notable among Hearst’s competitors was New York City’s The World, owned and managed by a European Jewish immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer. These two papers and others exploited the scandal, corruption, and crime among the city’s most influential citizens, and its most desperate inhabitants

PG claims no deep expertise about what goes on in the uncountable number of online discussion groups, but suspects there are copious numbers of people from all sorts of places who subscribe to the belief that Joe Biden is being controlled by alien invaders, just like Donald Trump was before him.

Museums have a hoarding problem

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From The Economist:

BENEATH THE gothic main hall of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a labyrinth of curiosities. Only a tiny fraction of the museum’s collection is on display—around 40,000 objects out of some 80m. Much is consigned to the dim, crowded basement. Here is a tortoise once owned by Charles Darwin; there are hundreds of jars of giant fish and thousands of rare shells.

“We’ve outgrown this space,” says Clare Valentine, head of NHM’s life-sciences collection. (In addition to the basement, the NHM also relies on storerooms in undisclosed sites.) Many museums have a hoarding problem. The British Museum exhibits just 1% of its treasures; the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, only 0.007%. In storage treasures are usually protected, but the old vaults are dangerously full.

One solution is to move house. The NHM is undertaking the world’s biggest relocation of a collection, as 28m objects are shifted to a new centre in Reading. If you think packing up crockery and old photographs is tricky, imagine moving taxidermy: the bears, giraffes and lions require fibreglass moulds to protect their fur, as well as bespoke wooden frames. On arrival, they will be frozen for three days before being transferred into pristine, sanitised rooms. Ms Valentine reckons the whole move will take seven years.

The British Museum has already shifted some of its large sculptures and mosaics to a new storage centre, also in Reading. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum and Ashmolean Museum have been ferrying objects to fresh buildings, too. In France curators at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris are grumbling over a plan to move their collection to Dijon. Across the Atlantic, the MIT Museum is in the final stages of shifting 1.5m objects.

Moving may be stressful, but it can also afford the chance to rediscover, reassess and reorganise possessions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York admitted that its curator of Islamic art had never seen its collection of Persian rugs because they are trapped at the back of a storeroom.

And if no one knows what items are there, it can take a while to notice if some go missing. Last year it was revealed that a light-fingered curator had stolen up to 2,000 objects from the British Museum and sold some of them on eBay. Wales’s seven national museums are missing 2,000 artefacts; the Imperial War Museum in London more than 500.

Some institutions might never miss the odd coin or pottery fragment. Catalogues of goods are outdated and incomplete even at the most august museums. Teams employed to fill inventories are dwindling: the number of staff at the NHM has almost doubled in the past 50 years, but the proportion caring for and researching collections has dropped from 55% to 15%. With the current staff, the NHM reckons it would take 172 years to catalogue everything. But a new team, brought in for the move, will create a detailed database to register the relocated objects.

Modern buildings will shrink to-do lists in other ways. At one museum in Britain, a curator spends half their time checking that objects have not been infested with bugs. New facilities, by comparison, are climate-controlled and have quarantine zones to protect artifacts from pests.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Archiving

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PG decided to see if recent performance issues on TPV could be improved by archiving a lot of old posts.

The archiving process has affected posts from about a year ago or older. In the past, PG has archived more ancient portions of TPV, but not cut the number of active and accessible posts to the extent he has on this occasions.

Feel free to share your experiences with responsiveness and speed on TPV, pro or con.

PG expects that visitors to the blog will be able to distinguish between speed on the blog end of things from speed impacted by a slow internet connection.

Are the myths of Pandora and Prometheus a parable for AI?

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From The Economist:

In Greek mythology Prometheus, a Titan, stole fire from Mount Olympus to give to humans, whom he created. That did not go down well with Zeus, king of the gods. He sentenced Prometheus to the daily torture of having his regenerating liver eaten by an eagle. For mankind, Zeus devised a different punishment. He created Pandora and gave her a jar, which he warned her not to open. When her curiosity got the better of her and Pandora lifted the top, all manner of evil was released into the world. Only hope remained trapped under the lid.

A new production from the San Francisco Ballet reimagines the myth for modern California. “Mere Mortals”, which premièred on January 26th for a limited run, is stylistically and sonically unique. Pandora’s story is an allegory for technological progress, explains Tamara Rojo, the ballet’s artistic director. She commissioned the piece with artificial intelligence (ai) in mind. “It is the perfect story to tell when we’re talking about the moral questions that we should be asking ourselves while developing these new technologies,” says Ms Rojo. Is ai a destructive force that humans have unleashed, an empowering tool offering them godlike power or both?

When she arrived in San Francisco from the English National Ballet in 2022, Ms Rojo’s goal was to tell stories relevant to the Bay Area and to California. It does not get more relevant than ai. Just west of the opera house is Hayes Valley, a small neighbourhood nicknamed “Cerebral Valley” after all of the ai techies who have moved there.

The result is an ancient story steeped in futurism. Ballet traditionalists may at first be taken aback. Signs outside the theatre warn guests that dry ice and strobe lights will be used during the performance. The dancers wear black, skin-tight, leathery costumes. The curtain opens on a stage filled with fog, red light and shadows. An electronic hum emanates from the orchestra pit. Throughout the production, the musicians play alongside an electronic score composed by Sam Shepherd, a British producer and dj also known as Floating Points.

The production does more than just hint at the progress and peril that ai offers mankind. ai has been used to help put on the show. Several large screens set behind the dancers display abstract images—crackling blue sparkles, a red sun, earthly landscapes depicted in celestial pastels—that set the tone for the performance. Hamill Industries, a creative studio based in Barcelona, made some of them using Stable Diffusion, an ai model that generates images from text descriptions and other prompts. The result is visually overwhelming—but that is the point. There is a tension between the dozens of bodies on stage and the images playing behind them, as if the humans are competing with the ai-generated art for the audience’s attention.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Bad Back

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PG has a bad back yesterday and it is still is bothering him today.

He wrote this post yesterday, but didn’t get it published until today. He’ll make a few posts this evening, then will take his spine to bed.

He’ll be back (!) tomorrow.

Secure Communications for Non-Spies

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Nothing to do with books, but definitely a device that will draw lots of attention in public places. Nothing discrete or pocket-friendly about the Skyted. PG suspects a blue-tooth headset like the one below would be a better selection for anyone who was not concerned with elbow-to-elbow phone bank seating, lip-reading competitors or enemy spies.

PG has had several versions of this headset. It’s not the smallest, but fits in a shirt pocket and has the best sound of any he’s tried on both ends of a call.

The design of the Skyted reminded PG a little of the first cell phone he tried.

No, this is not Mrs. PG or any other person PG knew before he met the future Mrs. PG, simply the first photo he found that showed this phone for the clumsy lump this was. Making a discrete call was impossible. Making a call while driving was virtually impossible.

PG rejected the thick brick for the cell phone shown above, a Motorola “bag phone.” It worked very nicely when PG was using it in his car, which was 100% of the time.

Better than the brick for all purposes other than walking through Manhattan talking to people. Better than a brick while you were walking through Manhattan not talking and carrying a brief case.

Actually, the bag could do double-duty as a briefcase if you didn’t have too many papers and didn’t mind a little folding and scrunching.

Laws, Rules and Principles

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From Oxford Royale:

1. Clarke’s Third Law

Clarke’s Third Law is short and sweet: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Arthur C. Clarke, who coined the law, was a science fiction writer who is probably best known for writing the novel and co-writing the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You can’t do much of use with Clarke’s Third Law – it doesn’t help you predict anything, for instance – but it seems to resonate with people as expressing an identifiable truth all the same. That’s the case both for scientists and for writers; Clarke himself was both. For writers of science fiction, it acts as something of a warning: go too far with the technologies you invent, and you might as well be writing a fantasy novel. But for scientists and inventors, it’s an exciting promise: work hard, and you get to be a magician.

. . . .

3. Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

There are several different variations of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, named after different people (Ian Betteridge is a technology journalist), but the principle is the same: if a headline is phrased as a question, the answer is ‘no’. There are plenty of websites that collect examples of Betteridge’s Law in action, . . . which include classics of the art form such as “Could Pokemon Go swing the November election?” and “Is it time to start taking Eurovision seriously?”

Betteridge’s Law works because if journalists are confident in what they’re writing, the headline doesn’t end up as a question. It’s only when they’re not sure of their claims, or when the headline is a hypothesis set up simply to be knocked back down again, that it ends up being phrased as a question – and so can usually be ignored.

. . . .

5. Cunningham’s Law

The first law on this list that concerns interactions on the internet, Cunningham’s Law states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to post a question – but to post the wrong answer.

The idea is that people online are often unsympathetic to questions, especially questions they consider stupid. After all, there’s a reason that sites like Let Me Google That for You exist, so that you can passive-aggressively direct your friends to the thing they should have googled for themselves in the first place.
But at the same time, the internet contains an army of people who are out there to correct any possible mistake they see. There’s the man who has made 47,000 Wikipedia edits to correct the phrase “comprised of” (which he views as an error) to “composed of”, or the man who tried to correct the cycling of an Olympic cyclist. So saying something mistaken – or even that other people perceive to be mistaken – is a great way to get responses fast.

Link to the rest at Oxford Royale

PG notes that the OP contains lots of links that will take you into mini-universes of extraneousness.

Not Worse, Not Notably Better

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The action figures based on Mrs. PG and her spouse have been taken off the market for fear of attracting false advertising claims. No quick bounce-back action happening at Casa PG.

However, tomorrow is another day.

Urgent Care

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Mrs. PG had a quick trip to Urgent Care today.

For those unfamiliar with US medical terminology, Intensive Care is when someone is likely to require the facilities of a hospital. You can walk into an Emergency Room to receive Intensive Care or whatever on your own, but a great many ER patients arrive in ambulances. Some are delivered by firefighters, police or concerned family members.

Calling to make an appointment with a physician to meet in the physician’s office usually results in Care, but PG is not familiar with any sort of adjective that is frequently used to particularize the nature of the Care other than plain-vanilla Medical Care.

During the last few decades, an intermediate-level medical facility has arisen in between Intensive Care/ER and a visit to a doctor’s office in many places. This level is called Urgent Care.

You can just show up at an Urgent Care facility without making an appointment like with an Emergency Room. While a hospital may be nearby, it is not attached to the Urgent Care offices. People who are bleeding dramatically or are otherwise putting on a flashy show are most likely taken to an Emergency Room.

Urgent Care is usually in-the-door and out-of-the-door within a couple of hours. Urgent Care usually provides more onsite surgical procedures onsite than a typical doctor’s office does.

At Urgent Care today, after being poked and prodded and answering a lot of questions, Mrs. PG was diagnosed with a mild case of pneumonia. She returned home with a couple of prescriptions and has been resting comfortably and doing a little work since then.

Therefore, PG didn’t have time to create more than this over-written explanatory post for TPV today.

Sorry you feel that way: why passive aggression took over the world

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From The Economist:

Aaron was winding up a work call as his partner Jim waited at the dinner table. “I’ll just be a minute or two here,” Aaron whispered, cupping his phone. “No probs,” Jim whispered back.

Minutes passed and Aaron was still pacing around the apartment with the phone to his ear. Turning to Jim, he pointed to the phone with a roll of the eyes, mouthing the word “Sorry”. Jim waved away the apology with a good-natured shake of the head.

Five minutes later, Aaron was on the call, but seemed to have zoned Jim out. He spoke volubly, dusting his talk with the jargon of “leverage”, “buy-ins” and “scalability” that he knew Jim, a musician, hated with a passion. The carbonara Jim had made began to congeal.

Eventually, he turned around and was surprised to see Jim staring dejectedly into the middle distance. In an undertone, he told his colleague he had dinner waiting. Half an hour had passed.

Aaron hurried to the table, telling Jim a little too excitedly how delicious the pasta looked. “Help yourself,” Jim replied, a thunderous expression on his face.

“Oh God,” said Aaron, “You’re upset!”

“Yeah, funny that,” Jim replied, “Lost my appetite too.” He left the table.

Aaron shouted his apologies but all he heard was the slam of the door.

The following morning Aaron related the incident to me from the couch in my consulting room. It struck me as an object lesson in the arts of passive aggression, one of those behavioural tendencies which, like chronic overwork or narcissistic displays, has become a defining symptom of the modern world.

Passive aggression is the surreptitious, indirect and often insidious means by which we express antagonism or noncompliance while ensuring the plausible deniability of any such intentions
Passive aggression is the surreptitious, indirect and often insidious means by which we express antagonism or noncompliance while ensuring the plausible deniability of any such intentions. It can breed quickly: Aaron’s passive aggression provoked a peevish response from Jim. Though it may be practised at home, passive aggression flourishes in the workplace, where more direct expressions of frustration and resentment are considered unprofessional.

We can all think of examples: the resentful time-server who, when asked about an overdue report by his line manager, mumbles that “in the mass of your requests, it got forgotten” – not accidentally, the passive voice is usually passive aggression’s preferred verbal form. The colleague who is reliably generous with “compliments” such as “Your presentation was surprisingly good.” The boss who wonders at hometime whether his employee might want to stay a little late for the call with California.

In these instances, hostile or obstructive behaviour is at once performed and disavowed, so that the offender can assure you that he or she certainly didn’t intend whatever irritation you may now feel. It leaves you feeling, perhaps, that you’re the one with the problem. Strikingly, passive aggression is a strategy that can be adopted by both the boss class and its minions.

This strategy provides the perfect cover for myriad behaviours: procrastination or forgetfulness, often to knowingly destructive effect, accompanied by excuses that border on accusations (“I think I did tell you when you asked me that I’ve been very stressed lately”); antipathy that is skilfully projected onto its object by way of insincerity (“I’m sorry if you took exception to what I said”); as well as a constant yet barely perceptible attitude of resentment.

Such habits are exacerbated by the rise in remote working. Modes of communication like email and Slack easily amplify our suspicions of others’ secret hostility. Hastily written messages don’t lend themselves to nuances of inflection. What might sound playful or helpful when spoken in person may well read as sarcastic or resentful when read on a screen. No wonder, therefore, that passive aggression has thrived as we see less of our colleagues.

The unsurpassed model for passive aggression is the titular protagonist of Herman Melville’s celebrated story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). Bartleby is the cadaverous, “pitiably respectable” young man who takes up a post as a copyist in a legal firm headed by the unnamed narrator, an attorney of sunny disposition.

After a brief stint of executing his copying tasks with exaggerated speed and efficiency, Bartleby abruptly responds to the attorney’s request to examine a paper with the now famous refrain, “I would prefer not to” – after which he downs tools entirely but refuses to leave the office, spending the nights there as well as days. Somehow, by obdurately retreating into silence and inactivity, Bartleby manages to dismantle the entire firm.

Bartleby’s riposte may be the most crystalline expression of passive aggression ever coined. He doesn’t outright refuse to examine the document. To a boss, refusal is unlikely ever to be welcome, but it’s at least intelligible, precisely because it signals an active stance.

We can all think of examples: the resentful time-server who, when asked about an overdue report by his line manager, mumbles that “in the mass of your requests, it got forgotten”
“I would prefer not to,” in contrast, is an absence of stance. It demands nothing, refuses nothing and so disables in advance any possible comeback. “You will not?” the narrator asks him in response, apparently seeking to coax from his employee an explicit expression of defiance that would justify sanction. “I would prefer not,” corrects Bartleby, as though clarifying for his employer that he is merely describing his inclination rather than making any statement of intent.

In its extreme non-commitment, Bartleby’s refrain throws some light on how more ordinary forms of passive aggression work, raising the conundrum of how we can possibly argue with or object to an attitude that refuses to reveal itself.

. . . .

I teach at a university and I remember a colleague in another institution telling me about a junior lecturer raising the issue of administrative workloads in one such meeting. The unnamed targets of her intervention were two or three professors especially adept at evading the large admin load with which all other colleagues were burdened. “I think it’s very important”, she said with a tight smile, “that admin is evenly distributed across the department so that we all have time to do our research.” (Note once again the preference for the passive voice.)

“Well,” responded one of the offending professors with a much broader smile, “I know I for one am very grateful to colleagues who make up for publishing less with more admin.” He said this knowing full well that junior colleagues were prevented from publishing more because of their bureaucratic burdens. The dishonest attack was presented as a warm expression of collegial gratitude – and the junior lecturer, in spite of her full awareness of what he was doing, was reduced to silence.

Passive aggression is one of those psychological terms, like “narcissistic”, “paranoid” and “bipolar”, whose casual popular use has gradually drained it of precision. Its deployment in modern psychiatry hasn’t tended to help matters.

The psychiatric history of the term is confused. Since 1952, when the first edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM), the bible of modern psychiatric practice, was published, the idea of passive aggression as a discrete personality disorder has oscillated in and out of favour.

What might sound playful or helpful when spoken in person, may well read as sarcastic or resentful when read on a screen. No wonder, therefore, that passive aggression has thrived as we see less of our colleagues
Christopher Lane, a historian of psychology, has shown that the authors of the first edition of the DSM lifted the criteria for the diagnosis of a passive-aggressive personality type from a 1945 report of Colonel William Menninger, an army psychiatrist, who lamented the proliferating avoidance of military duties by American soldiers employing “passive measures such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency and passive obstructionism” in the face of “routine military stress”. Think of the hapless soldiers and pilots of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”, whose entirely rational aversion to dangerous military operations is taken as a symptom of mental illness.

Menninger’s list of traits was wrenched out of its context and pasted verbatim into the DSM’s diagnostic code, where it was quickly invoked in such wildly different contexts as marital therapy and adolescent delinquency. When behavioural traits are generalised, they cease to be seen as reactions to particular contexts – say, the fear of being killed on the battlefield – and instead are regarded, as Lane puts it, as “biological and neurological malfunctions”, the product of maladapted personalities.

The problem with pathologising human traits such as stubbornness, inefficiency and procrastination – to which were added, in the third edition of the DSM, dawdling and forgetfulness – is that they surely apply in some degree to all of us. (These traits, along with the entire diagnosis, were later removed.) But this insight is hard to hold onto when we’re so busy accusing others of mental disorders, a tendency which social media have exacerbated.

In a culture in which complex human traits become fodder for simplistic moral judgments, passive aggression is always going to be a problem of another, maladjusted individual. But perhaps it makes more sense to think of it as a dynamic within relationships, a current that passes between friends, colleagues, couples and families rather than a quality of particular personalities. One consequence of thinking about it this way is that we are made to recognise passive aggression is lurking in all of us.

Aaron and I had barely begun to reflect on what had happened the previous evening before he launched into an anxious flurry of self-justification.

“I mean, what does he want from me? He knows how important this deal is! Apparently I’m supposed to break off an important call because his tummy’s rumbling?!”

Aaron paused. His tone, tentative and defensive until now, suddenly became distinctly harsh: “Besides, he doesn’t complain about the money I bring in with a deal like this. We couldn’t afford the flat if we were both playing sax in tiny jazz venues!”

I remarked how resentful he sounded. Was that then what the incident was really about?

“Oh come on,” Aaron protested. “That’s not fair, that’s not what I meant! You sound like Jim now.” Aaron wasn’t entirely off the mark here. The art of psychotherapy involves confronting the patient with difficult truths. Though its conscious intent is to be empathetic and non-judgmental, the combination of deliberate pushback and measured tone can easily resemble passive aggression.

Aaron paused and continued. “Jim’s always saying I resent him because I earn so much more…”

“And?”

There was a pregnant pause before Aaron took an audibly sharp intake of breath. “Look,” he said, “when I think about it there was this, this fleeting moment last night. I really had intended to end that call in a couple of minutes, but I caught this sight of him of this…good little boy waiting patiently for Daddy and…I had this thought, I mean, I’m really not proud to say this, but it just came into my head, ‘Yeah, that’s right, you sit and twiddle your thumbs while I do the important stuff.’”

. . . .

“So you really were angry enough to want to remind him who’s in control,” I said.
By now he sounded upset. “I don’t know where it comes from in me…And now it occurs to me I was enjoying that power over him. Christ. That is so awful.”

Why was Aaron’s recognition of a seam of anger and resentment bubbling under the surface of his relationship so shameful? Aaron’s mother had more than once told him, with some satisfaction, of how she’d brought his toddler tantrums under control by leaving the room every time they started.

What happens to anger and aggression when they’re outlawed and denied any outlet for expression? Psychoanalysis understands aggression as a drive, an internal force that is constantly exerting pressure on our minds and bodies to discharge itself. According to a narrow definition, this might mean shouting or squaring off or even a physical blow. But it would be better to characterise aggression as any form of self-assertion, whether in word or deed. We cannot, for example, insist to a parent, teacher or boss on our right to speak without summoning up some aggressive energy.

The problem for Aaron was that he had long been phobic of explicit acts of aggression, whether in himself or anyone else. Direct confrontation with older siblings at home, or bullies at school, would make him stammer and shake helplessly.

But a fear of directly expressing oneself does not put the aggressive drive out of service. Psychoanalysis posits that a drive is quite different from a biological instinct. The latter is innately programmed and largely invariant. Predation in animals, for example, involves the stronger animal overpowering the weaker. If the lion doesn’t catch the antelope, it doesn’t then seek to persuade the antelope that its interests are best served by being torn apart and eaten.

The drive is altogether more wily and flexible. If it can’t find satisfaction through the direct route, it will find an indirect one through which it can assert itself while evading detection. Aaron couldn’t bring himself to tell Jim about his resentment; in fact, he was frightened of acknowledging it even to himself. But his mind devised a way of bypassing his conscious intent and giving expression to his anger towards Jim.

Aggression can disguise itself in many ways, but undoubtedly the most effective in societies governed by intricate behavioural codes is to appear as its opposite.

Aaron offered Jim not a single cross word or angry gesture. On the contrary, he apologised for keeping him waiting. The consistent defence of the passive aggressive person, frequently accompanied by wide eyes, open mouth and outstretched arms, palms up, seems apposite here: “What? I didn’t do anything!

As society has elevated the status of victims past and present, it is unsurprising that passive aggression has become one of the dominant social dynamics of our age
”The implication of this startled protestation of innocence is that if I wasn’t doing anything, I can’t possibly be accused of hostility. This apparently logical defence highlights the oxymoronic nature of the term passive aggression. A defence like this relies on a binary understanding: one is either mild or furious, friendly or hostile – or passive or aggressive. It assumes that “doing” happens only actively, forgetting the powerful consequences, so vividly manifested by Bartleby, of doing nothing. This is where the concept of the drive proves so useful, for it accounts for how we act in ways that we’re not fully aware of, if at all.

Lest we imagine passive aggression as something done by a calculating perpetrator to an innocent victim, it is worth looking at Jim’s role in the incident. At no point during Aaron’s epic call did Jim remind him of his presence or tell him that if he didn’t get off the phone he’d start dinner without him. Passive aggression is almost always a language unconsciously shared between unspoken adversaries. Instead of having stand-up rows which each sought to win, Aaron and Jim seemed to fight for the status of more worthy and ill-treated victim, the winner being whoever extracted more guilt from the other. As society has elevated the status of victims past and present, it is unsurprising that passive aggression has become one of the dominant social dynamics of our age.

From Thomas Hobbes onwards, a number of modern thinkers have seen the restraint of aggression as the basis of a functioning society. In “Civilisation and Its Discontents”, Sigmund Freud characterised passive aggression as part of the irresolvable tragedy of the human condition – the voracious will of the individual and the conformist demands of society are ultimately irreconcilable. On the eve of the second world war and just a few years after “Civilisation and Its Discontents” was published, the German sociologist Norbert Elias documented in “The Civilising Process” (1939) how the spread of manners across Europe over many centuries went hand in hand with the establishment of the modern state, suppressing the excesses of violence and sexual flagrancy in society.

Not all thinkers welcomed the repression of violence. Friedrich Nietzsche, who published “On the Genealogy of Morality” in 1887, just as Freud was conducting his first forays into psychotherapy, regarded morality as the ultimate form of passive aggression – a ruse employed by the weak, resentful masses to restrain the will of their stronger, creative superiors.

But the question we might ask of all these thinkers is why they think we’re instinctively inclined to be aggressive. The psychoanalytic answer is that there is nothing we fear more than feeling helpless – and this fear stalks us far more often than we might think. Aggression is a salve against feelings of helplessness, a way of assuring ourselves we are masters, rather than hapless victims, of the world around us. Aaron was phobic about direct confrontation because of a deep-rooted, unconscious conviction that it would lead to his rejection. Even the professor’s self-satisfied barb against his junior colleagues was provoked by the fear that his position in the hierarchy was under threat.

The great advantage of passive aggression is not only that it allows us simultaneously to exercise and to deny our aggression but that it weaponises our vulnerability. Instead of exposing our feelings of insecurity, passivity becomes a sneaky way of asserting ourselves. Perhaps we should call it aggressive passivity instead.

If we think of passive aggression less as a pathology in others and more as a common expression of fear of dependency, latent in us as well as family and colleagues, we might respond to it more humanely.

Can any of us claim never to have disguised a criticism as a compliment or “forgotten” to fulfil a request from someone we were secretly angry with? We do this not because we are power-crazed and manipulative, but because we retain a childlike fear of our own aggression and the terrible consequences it might entail for us.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Medical Report

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PG woke up this morning with a very sore throat and a nasty cough.

A lot of water vapor pumped into PG’s lair has improved things somewhat, but blogging while coughing is probably not the ideal combination for clear thinking or rapid recovery.

From Facit AI

Light Blogging

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PG and Mrs. PG will be taking a short trip out of town, returning tomorrow, Monday.

Blogging will be a bit light for the next couple of days.

All Dolled Up

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From The American Scholar:

“Since the beginning of time—since the first little girl ever existed—there have been dolls.” So proclaims Helen Mirren in the opening scene of Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster, Barbie. “But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls,” she says—that is, until Barbie came along. “Yes,” Mirren says, “Barbie changed everything.”

Twenty-seven years after Ruth Handler brought that iconic blonde into the world, another woman found herself fed up with baby dolls and Barbies. Pleasant Rowland, a newscaster turned educational product developer, thought girls deserved dolls that nurtured their interests beyond fashion and motherhood. In 1986, she created American Girl: a line of meticulously researched dolls, clothes, accessories, and books inspired by pivotal moments in American history. The brand was a hit. In its first four years, Rowland’s Pleasant Company turned a profit of $30 million.

American Girl is as much a phenomenon today as it was in the ’80s—and not just among children. Adult collectors, cosplayers, and meme creators abound. The dolls crop up in pop culture juggernauts from Saturday Night Live to The Last of Us. It’s no secret why: according to Mary Mahoney and Allison Horrocks, authors of Dolls of Our Lives, Rowland’s “genius lay in articulating a vision of girlhood she could shape through her company, a vision that would influence how girls saw themselves, the kind of play that helped them create themselves and memories along the way.”

Mahoney and Horrocks are historians whose childhood love for American Girl brought them together in graduate school. Dolls of Our Lives began in 2019 as a podcast originally titled American Girls, and the two were floored by the response it received. “Lots of listeners who didn’t grow up to pursue history as a career wanted to be part of this burgeoning community,” they write. “What bound us together was the fact that these stories still seemed to have a lot to teach us.”

As Mahoney and Horrocks tell it, American Girl’s runaway success was grounded not only in its innovative combination of dolls and tie-in educational products, but also in its commitment to take young girls seriously. Inspired by a childhood visit to Colonial Williamsburg, Rowland recognized the appeal and power of placing girls in an imagined version of the past. She and her team of designers created nine-year-old characters at once relatable and aspirational, beginning with Kirsten (a hard-working 19th-century Swedish immigrant adjusting to her new home in Minnesota), Samantha (a bookish Victorian orphan with a gift for public speaking), and Molly (a World War II–era Scottish American who tries constantly to reinvent herself). These initial dolls and their successors represent an ideal sort of girlhood, facing hardships large and small with just the right amount of loyalty and courage.

As American Girl’s revenues increased, so did its output. By the ’90s, it had become a “full-blown lifestyle brand.” Pleasant Company released cookbooks, craft books, and other supplements to its historical character lines, plus contemporary growing-up guides like the much-beloved The Care and Keeping of You, a sort of Puberty 101 for pre-adolescent girls. (It was recently revamped to be more inclusive.) American Girl magazine launched in 1992, a “space [for girls] to talk about the anxieties and triumphs of growing up in their own words … without making them the subject of a joke or shaming them.” In 1995, the company introduced a doll line called “Girl of Today,” allowing girls to select a doll that looked like them (or, in many cases, a friend or sister they longed to have). “She’s just like you, you’re a part of history, too!” declared one catalogue snippet.

For women of a certain age, the print catalogue has become the stuff of legend. “The only thing better than owning something from American Girl was dreaming about buying something from the American Girl catalogue,” write Mahoney and Horrocks. Doll owners and their hopeful counterparts drooled over the catalogue’s expensive offerings and tantalizing descriptions, some even pushing their parents to read from it “as if it were a Dickens novel.”

Link to the rest at The American Scholar

For any male visitors who might be tempted to make sexist comments about females and dolls, PG notes:

On Bei Dao’s Visual Art

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From The Paris Review:

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

Four years after his stroke, Bei Dao’s Chinese language abilities had improved dramatically, and a new medical assessment showed a recovery of over 80 percent. He continued his painting practice, though, and started to write poetry again. In 2018, a year before he turned seventy, Bei Dao had his first-ever painting exhibition at the Galerie Paris Horizon, located just north of the Centre Pompidou. In the essay he wrote for the exhibition, he contrasts the oil-based pointillism of an artist like Seurat with the watery ink dots of the East, where the tones and textures of the so-called five shades of ink in traditional Chinese painting must be naturally integrated with the brush and the rice paper to form a single whole. And as the water evaporates, the ink colors change, creating unexpected effects.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

What to do when you go blank during a public speaking engagement

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From Medium:

Ever faced the dreaded combination of stage fright and an unexpected challenge?
Well, I have, and let me tell you, it involved a sneeze attack and a surprise speech.
As the head girl of my high school, I thought public speaking was a breeze – until one day in 9th grade.

The Speech Ambush:

Just the day before a school assembly, I was handed a speech to memorize. Simple, right? Not when you’re battling a sudden dust allergy.
Cue uncontrollable sneezing – not the ideal prep for a speech. I popped anti-allergy pills like candy, but my nose had other plans.
It turned into a warm waterfall, and reading the speech made it worse. I became a master at reading through a runny nose.

Sleepless Night Drama:

Mugging up a speech was never my cup of tea, especially with a leaky nose. Despite high-dose medication, sleep eluded me.As the dawn approached, an exhaustion set in. Sleep-deprived, sniffly, and with puffy eyes, I had a choice, give the speech or face the wrath of my teachers. Duty called, and so did my need for sleep.

On Stage:

Mic in hand, half-asleep, I began with confidence. But halfway through, I blanked out. Panic? Yes. The audience staring? Definitely. What did I do? I confessed. “None of this was my idea; blame the internet!”as I confidently said,further continuing the speech I deviated from the script, shared my perspective on Women’s Day, and finished the speech my way. Applause ensued.

. . . .

Our political science teacher came to my rescue, my unexpected hero, praising my brilliance. As they argued, I made a swift exit, vowing never to memorize a speech again.

Link to the rest at Medium

PG has given quite a number of speeches of various types.

  • In college, he had many classes which required him to interpret various types of literature, including everything from folk tales to Shakespeare to lengthy poems by Vachel Lindsay.
  • He has spoken to quite a number of judges and juries, attempting to further the cause of clients admirable and disreputable.
  • He has delivered more than a few church sermons.
  • He has spoken to groups fellow attorneys from Hawaii to Beverly Hills to Chicago to Manhattan to London about how to use technology to improve the management and operations of their offices.

Allow PG to make a few suggestions about dealing with the unexpected when giving a speech:

  • Don’t memorize if you can get around doing so by hook or by crook.
  • If you have to memorize, slip a copy of what you’re supposed to memorize into a pocket or some other easy-to-reach place on your person, so you can refresh your recollection or read a bit until your memory kicks into gear.
  • An outline of your presentation is a much better idea than having a verbatim written speech. This gives you the option to let bright thoughts to pop up off your head or, if you will be speaking following other speakers, comment on some of the things they have said.
  • If you have the option of using a PowerPoint for your speech (with a large monitor or projector so your audience can properly view it), your PowerPoint can substitute for an outline. Please don’t read from your PowerPoint, however. You can sometimes use a printed version of a PowerPoint as an outline of your presentation.

If you are not familiar with Vachel Lindsay’s poetry, he was a popular performer of some of his best-known works in the late 19th and early 20th centures. Below, you’ll hear him recite (perform is a better description) his most famous epic poem, The Congo.

PG warns one and all that Lindsay, who died in 1931, reflected the times during which he lived in his attitudes and writing about African-Americans.

Skip the performance if exceedingly out of date and offensive attitudes towards descendants of African slaves may offend or upset you.