“All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law. Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found. In new research published today in Science, our team of experts in whale song, linguistics and developmental psychology analysed eight years’ of song recordings from humpback whales in New Caledonia. Led by Inbal Arnon from the Hebrew University, Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews, and Simon Kirby from the University of Edinburgh, We used techniques inspired by the way human infants learn language to analyse humpback whale song. We discovered that the same Zipfian pattern universally found across human languages also occurs in whale song. This complex signalling system, like human language, is culturally learned by each individual from others.” (Mark Quintin/The Conversation)
“I think of Trumpian policy, first and foremost, as elevating cultural policy above all else. Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture. After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before. Our top achievements remain impressive. But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape? The culture of government and public service? Interest in our religious organizations? The quality of local government in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions. We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture. Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant. OK, so how might you fix the culture of America? You want to tell everyone that America comes first. That America should be more masculine and less soft. That we need to build. That we should ‘own the libs.’ I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get. So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question ‘does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?’ Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import. Simply pass or announce or promise such policies … These are your investments in changing the culture. And do it with as many issues as possible, as quickly as possible (reread Ezra on this). Think of it as akin to the early Jordan Peterson cranking out all those videos. Flood the zone. That is how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world. You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an ‘intellectual’ agenda, but it is). Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today. Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up ‘owning’ far more of the culture than you suspected was possible. Yes policy will be a mess, but as they say ‘man kann nicht alles haben.’” (Tyler Cowan/Marginal Revolution)
“The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new. In Umbria, the landscape is mist and the hills are often in shadow, the luminous inner life is a long let-out breath, but as the train trundles into the province of Siena, the light sharpens like a scalpel, and the shadows disappear. The usual bustle at the station. Then, a stone’s throw from the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo—which erupts in July with the running of the horses in the Palio—the Pinacoteca Nazionale is housed in two adjacent palazzos. On four floors, it holds the most important collection of Sienese paintings in the world. The core of the collection was assembled by two abbots, Giuseppe Ciaccheri and Luigi de Angelis, painting by painting, between 1750 and 1810. They knew, somehow, that these unfashionable, strange, mystical, transfixing pictures, which hovered between Byzantine art and abstraction, painted in the margins of the history of art, many salvaged from triptychs and altarpieces that had been sold, dismantled, or lost, were worth saving.” (Cynthia Zarin/The Paris Review)
“In December, the New Republic’s Greg Sargent made the case that countering Republicans’ propaganda advantage and reaching politically disengaged voters through new media should be a top priority for the new chair, and asked leading candidates what they proposed to do about it … In Sargent’s view … the candidate with the ‘the clearest vision of how to fix the party’s informational/media problems’ wasn’t Martin but Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, who scored a number of high-profile endorsements in the race but ultimately finished second. Wikler, Sargent noted, had been alarmed last spring by data showing that while President Joe Biden, then still running for reelection, had a clear lead among consumers of traditional news outlets, Trump led among those who get their news from Google and YouTube or don’t follow it at all. Wikler told Sargent that Democrats need to venture into right-wing media spaces more, by which he meant Fox News but also nonpolitical podcasts and YouTube streams, and pledged to train armies of communicators to take the Democrats’ message into these settings. And he said that the party should invest in building out an ‘independent, progressive media ecosystem,’ then seek to elevate it by breaking news and doing key interviews within it, much as Republicans do on Fox. A left-leaning media ecosystem separate from the mainstream media already exists, as Maddy Crowell reported for CJR’s Election Issue last summer. Crowell wrote about MeidasTouch—a new media network that ‘describes itself as doing ‘pro-democracy’ journalism, and provides commentary on national politics seemingly calculated to appeal to those for whom Rachel Maddow is too subtle’—which started producing videos in 2020, in the early days of the pandemic; around the same time, Crowell notes, ‘they were joined by an orchestra of other new left-leaning digital ventures—different from one another in approach, but all claiming to have arisen out of a shared discontent: with the country facing the prospect of a second Trump presidency, something about the traditional mechanisms for delivering information to the American electorate was broken.’” (Jon Allsop/CJR)
“U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime ambitions of ushering in an artificial intelligence boom have only been supercharged by the emergence of Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s new AI model, which torpedoed markets last week and wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from AI chipmaker Nvidia’s market cap. But the DeepSeek disruption has also underscored the deep uncertainty over just how much energy will be necessary to power Trump’s big AI push. The hulking data centers that underpin the technology are notoriously energy-hungry, prompting some predictions of explosive electricity demand in the coming years. The sudden emergence of DeepSeek’s new model, DeepSeek-R1, which the company says is built more efficiently than its U.S. competitors, reveals just how hazy that demand outlook actually is in the long run—adding yet another complication to the ongoing U.S.-China tech race. ‘We’re really at the beginning of this journey with AI,’ said Tanya Das, the director of AI and energy technology policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). Das compared the current moment to the internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when fears arose that the internet would crush the energy grid. That, of course, never really happened. It’s ‘completely unclear where we’re going to land,’ said Das, who served at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. ‘It’s unclear how much more efficient the chips are going to get and the algorithms and the software are going to get.’ Trump, for his part, is moving full speed ahead. His AI aspirations stretch back to his first presidency, when he unrolled a national AI strategy and established the National AI Initiative Office. Four years later, he has again made AI a centerpiece of his presidential agenda, including by using an emergency declaration to rapidly approve the construction of new AI power stations and vowing to fast-track power plants for AI data centers. In a sign of the administration’s all-in approach, Trump’s new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, cited AI as one of the agency’s top five priorities.” (Christina Lu/FP)
“Gen X’s ultimate goal was to open up a big tent. Everyone was welcome. Everyone made money, and the Democratic Party saw the cash flowing. They cozied up to folks like Khosla, Ellison, and Bezos, and presumably, everyone was happy—the Clintons were in bed with SV way before anyone else. The UK even based its entire image—'Cool Britannia'—on mashups of Sony VAIO ads and the Spice Girls so they could take advantage of the growing technocratic intelligentsia. But was technology being built for technology’s sake? No one gave you a million dollars for writing a new device driver for Linux, nor did you get a Lambo for setting up Sotheby’s first auction site. Someone, somewhere got a Lambo eventually, but the benefits of being a technologist were limited to bragging rights and a nice salary in the late 1990s. If you grew up after the Dot-Com boom and before the AI boom, how did you make that Lambo money? Crypto. You weaponized your nerdiness. Fast forward to 2009. The mobile web was finally taking off, and the concept of digital gold—a concept rooted in Gen X anti-establishment tendencies—finally worked thanks to a hodgepodge of algorithms taken wholesale from other projects written by a developer and security author from Florida named Dave Kleiman. Kleiman has never been identified as the creator of Bitcoin, but many OGs—including co-coder Jeff Garzik—have created a trail that points to Kleiman. What Kleiman did was make it clear that anyone could create a cryptocurrency. This meant that all you had to do to make some money was launch a coin—Doge, Ethereum, Polkadot—and sell it for pennies. Bitcoin’s rise, in turn, showed the post-dot-com generation that they could get rich quickly by paying lip service to decentralization while coding subpar projects. The vagaries of the current crypto market are unimportant. Instead, an entire cohort of bros emerged, believing they were owed the world—or at least 5 BTC. And because they were generating real money with their digital cash, they assumed they were geniuses. This shift transformed the average startup kid—someone dedicated to elegant technical solutions—into the crypto bro, someone more interested in buying a Rolex. This is not to say that startup folks were angels, but because the crypto bros were incentivized by millions in cash, they were far more dangerous.” (John Biggs/Keeping Going)
“Speaking of crypto, Trump tapped another South African-born multimillionaire with a racist worldview, Musk’s friend David Sacks, to be the ‘Czar of AI and Crypto,’ which is what a President who cares about the everyday challenges of American workers would naturally prioritize. Peter Thiel, the racist billionaire friend of Musk and Sacks, and who also spent his childhood in South Africa, didn’t acquire a role. Most likely, he was content to groom his former mentee J.D. Vance, another multimillionaire, to be Vice President. One would hope the most wealthy, privileged, and influential men on earth would use their newfound access to political power to help the majority of Americans who are suffering from crippling health care debt, lowered life expectancy, stagnant wages, declining public education, and weekly mass shootings. Sadly, no. Musk and Ramaswamy revealed that instead, they want to exercise their unelected power to end remote work; fire federal employees; cut pediatric cancer research; slash humanitarian aid; privatize the mail to enrich other millionaires; end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in education; eliminate the Internal Revenue Service; and dismantle the Federal Reserve. They did, however, express an interest in increasing defense spending. After all, billionaires hate government spending except when it’s in the form of subsidies for their own companies, such as Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla. None of this should be surprising. America’s descent into a broligarchy was an inevitable, steady, and calculated takeover of the country’s wealth, Supreme Court, political parties, and presidency by a cabal of selfish billionaires seeking tax cuts, deregulation, and unfettered power.” (Wajahat Ali/The Progressive)
“Donald Trump loves talking tough on trade. He’s full of swagger as he threatens to wield the power of tariffs against friend and foe alike to reclaim the American primacy that he feels other politicians are too weak to assert. In 2018, Trump tweeted, ‘When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore—we win big. It’s easy!’ Toward the end of last year, a senior Trump official told a Financial Times reporter, ‘Our strategy on tariffs will be to shoot first and ask questions later.’ You don’t need to be a psychologist to know that this type of hyper-macho swagger is often compensatory, masking deep insecurities about weakness. There’s no reason to think words will match deeds, especially with a figure like Trump whose characteristic mode of aggressive hyperbole is invariably dishonest. Trump’s lies are integral to his politics and public persona, rooted in his background not just as a real estate huckster but also as an entertainer. Aside from his career as a reality-show star, Trump learned the art of public showmanship through many years as a fixture on the World Wrestling Entertainment circuit, where he was friends with the disgraced impresario Vince McMahon (whose wife, Linda McMahon, is Trump’s nominee to be Department of Education secretary). Trump is to real politics as professional wrestling is to genuine sports: a parody that has popular appeal because it offers the pleasures of over-the-top narratives. Professional wrestlers often engage, like the heroes of Homeric epics, in prolonged, rhetoric-filled feuds. They insult each other, give each other nicknames, fight battles, and then, as the plot twist might require, suddenly shift from bitter enemies to best buddies. Professional wrestling has given us the useful word ‘kayfabe,’ which Merriam-Webster defines as the ‘tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine.’” (Jeet Heer/The Nation)
“Researchers studying the movement of crowds at a traditional Spanish festival have shown that densely packed groups of people form swirling ‘vortex’ patterns never before documented in human gatherings. The discovery, published on 5 February in Nature1, contrasts with previous studies that have found crowds to move in more-chaotic ways. ‘I was like, what is this? Why 18 seconds?’ says study co-author François Gu, referring to how often the circular motion repeated itself. The finding, which was the outcome of a computer analysis of video footage, was so puzzling that he spent more than a month double-checking the methods, says Gu, a physicist at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. He then realized that the swirling was clearly visible in videos of the event, once the footage was sped up. The Feast of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, is famous for its running of the bulls, in which participants put themselves in harm’s way as the angry animals are released into the city’s streets. But Gu and his collaborators focused instead on the opening of the festival, in which thousands of people gather in the Plaza Consistorial. Gu and his colleagues set up cameras on balconies overlooking the plaza, and used computer models to analyse the videos. To understand the crowd’s behaviour, they modelled it as a dense continuum, akin to a fluid made up of particles (most previous studies have instead modelled crowds as made up of discrete, individual agents). They found that, as the area filled up in the morning, the crowd reached a critical density of around four people per square metre, beyond which it started — initially very slowly and almost imperceptibly — to form rotating vortices that pushed against one another, each involving hundreds of people.” (Davide Castelvecchi/Nature)
“Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Tolstoy wrote stories for the children who lived on his family estate; they went on to become popular throughout Russia and summon up the same feelings of delight and warmth that you find in Anna Karenina’s suicide scene. There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain’, a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird. There is a disputation on ‘why there is evil’, in which a hermit tells us that ‘from our bodies comes all the evil in the world.’ The blurb on the back of my edition says the stories will ‘captivate and delight children of all ages’, always assuming that those children have a more than usually potent appetite for dead puppies. They work, like many English children’s books of the time, on the assumption that children are not to be trusted with the freedom of pleasure: they might break something with it. Over the decades, however, children’s literature slowly uncoupled itself from strident moralising and nostril anxiety. Women’s suffrage and trade unions gained strength, childhood literacy rates soared, and children’s books became more than ways to regulate and admonish the child heart. They began to take the actual desires of actual children into account. As grown-ups came to recognise the childhood imagination as something unique to itself, something wild and immense, so the books, in turn, became wild and immense offerings. From being engines of control, they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be. They work to disprove the Anna Karenina principle that happy families are all alike: they offer a multiplicity of models for what delight might look like.” (Katherine Rundell/LRB)