Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Corruption #Incompetence
“The very fact of the Alaska meeting provides Putin a major victory. First, Trump is breaking the de facto boycott on meetings with Putin that Western leaders applied in early 2022. Second, Putin will be negotiating the Russia-Ukraine settlement with Trump, not Zelenskyy. Putin has sought that since the beginning of the year. He believes Trump wants an agreement and may not care much about details. Zelenskyy cares very much about details. Putin will seek to trap Trump into endorsing a position that incorporates the major elements of long-standing Russian demands. If Trump agrees, he will suffer unflattering comparisons to Neville Chamberlain, who agreed to surrender a large part of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938. While the Czechoslovakian government concluded it had no choice and accepted the territorial loss, the Ukrainians will say no. They will not embrace their own capitulation. Trump could take a different approach. He can adopt the counterproposal put forward over the weekend by Ukrainian and European officials, which has three main parts. First, an unconditional ceasefire as the basis for negotiations. Second, the principle that, if Ukraine withdraws from some regions, Russia withdraws from other regions. Third, an ironclad security guarantee for Ukraine to ensure that Russia does not launch a new war two or three years down the road. Trump could combine this position with two threats to Putin if Russia did not quickly adopt a more accommodating bargaining approach. First, he could tell the Russian leader that the United States would prioritize arms sales to Europe intended ultimately for Ukraine’s military. Second, he could threaten to press the Europeans to agree to seize frozen Russian Central Bank assets to fund Ukraine’s war and reconstruction needs. Ultimately, what will change Putin’s position is recognition in Moscow that Russia cannot accomplish its objectives on the battlefield and will pay an enormous price for continuing to try. Putin would not agree to Trump’s position, certainly not on the spot in Alaska, but Trump would have staked out a strong and principled position. Putin and the Kremlin then would have to weigh how the war might play out if Ukraine has the money to buy arms to continue the fight for years, resulting in additional hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Russian soldiers. That would create a prospect of serious change in Moscow’s bargaining approach, one that might lead to a just and durable settlement. The question: Is Trump prepared to play tough with Putin?” (Steven Pifer/Brookings)
“Before taking off for Anchorage, Trump began the morning by writing two words, ‘HIGH STAKES,’ on Truth Social. He also gaggled with reporters on Air Force One just now. ‘Trump is in spectacle mode,’ CNN global affairs analyst Kimberly Dozier told Audie Cornish. ‘He's got this big production, he wants it to look great to the world, to his base. He wants to prove he is the only guy who could make peace." (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“In February and March, Trump imposed two rounds of ten percent tariffs on Chinese exports because of concerns about fentanyl coming into the United States from China. When China responded to Trump’s broader ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in April with countermeasures including reciprocal tariffs and export restrictions, the United States placed an additional 125 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States. Combined with existing levies, by mid-April, the U.S. tariff rate for goods from China had reached nearly 150 percent—a major escalation that didn’t seem to offer any way out. But then the situation took an interesting turn. Many observers believed that China had taken a major risk by pushing back on Trump and that China’s economy would not be able to withstand a trade war. But once reciprocal tariffs were in place, Beijing was surprised to see that it was Washington that was more eager to de-escalate trade tensions. The United States and China signed an agreement in Geneva on May 12 to reduce tariff rates, and Trump and Xi had a follow-up phone call on June 5. Although the agreement did not eliminate tariffs, the first round of trade escalation was over. China’s leaders felt, to their surprise, that they were in a very strong position on trade with the United States. Many policymakers in Beijing concluded from the events in April and May that the United States’ ability to tolerate a trade shock is weaker than China’s, which made Washington desperate to find a solution. As Adam Posen has argued in Foreign Affairs, the ‘supply shock’ that the United States faces from higher tariffs is more difficult to absorb than the ‘demand shock’ on China. This is not only because U.S. consumers immediately feel a supply shortage but also because China’s political system makes it easier for Beijing to manipulate domestic public opinion and limit blowback. Chinese leaders were pleased to discover that Trump changed his tune when tariffs affected the stock market, the bond market, the retail industry, and consumers. The U.S. reaction to Trump’s tariffs revealed to Beijing new pressure points that China could potentially exploit. China’s leaders also learned how dependent the United States is on rare-earth elements and magnets, the supply of which is almost entirely in Beijing’s hands.” (Yun Sun/Foreign Affairs)
“… (E)uropean partition created politically and socially unviable states. For instance, having antagonistic ethnic groups within the same borders doomed postcolonial states to the stylized ills of ethnic fractionalization (see here for the debate on whether these even exist) … Many invoke Pan-Africanism and call for the creation of a United States of Africa — essentially, erasing the borders. The mild version of this solution calls for attenuating the impact of colonial borders by deepening economic integration (a totally reasonable proposition). The extreme version calls for a Continental superstate (a fuzzy proposition, at best). The biggest obstacle to the creation of a Continental superstate, of course, is that barely any African country would readily cede sovereignty to a Continental entity. We have lots of evidence of them failing to do so on both low and high stakes regional projects. Plus it’s never clear how creating such a superstate would address the challenge of creating self-governing subnational units. The more daring solution calls for a redrawing of African borders. The naive form of this solution assumes away the potential for conflict, and envisions some form of consensus-based swapping peoples and territories (I guess because that always works so well?) The realistic form is more interesting, and accepts that conflict would be inevitable — and perhaps even necessary — if the process of redrawing borders were to yield optimal results (war makes states, after all). The idea is that redrawing borders through war would create incentives for elite investments in building strong states and nations. Consequently, the resulting borders would optimize for social cohesion as well as political and economic development.” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)
“Never mind the GPT-5 complaints; Sam Altman says he believes ChatGPT is on track to have more conversations per day than all human beings combined. ‘If you project our growth forward, pretty soon billions of people a day will be talking to ChatGPT,’ said the CEO of OpenAI during a dinner with journalists in San Francisco. ‘ChatGPT will be having more conversations, maybe, than all human words put together, at some point. I think it's unreasonable to expect a single model personality or style to work for all of that.’ The remarks followed the chaotic launch of a long-awaited new flagship model, GPT-5, which some users felt had a less friendly and supportive personality. As part of the launch, OpenAI stopped offering users access to the prior model, GPT-4o. It quickly reversed its position after some users rebelled. ChatGPT came out in November 2022 with little fanfare but quickly became the fastest growing tech product in history. The chatbot’s remarkable ability to mimic human communication and problem-solve sparked hope of finally building machines as clever as humans. But Altman said that the company had misstepped with the latest release by failing to realize how the model’s change in tone would affect consumers. He noted more customization will be coming to ChatGPT in the near future … OpenAI will likely spend trillions of dollars on data centers alone in the “not very distant future,” Altman said. “And you should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and be like, ‘Oh, this is so crazy, it's so reckless’ ... And we'll just be like, ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.’ Asked where he plans to find those trillions of dollars, Altman hedged. ‘I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument for financing compute that the world has not yet figured out,’ he said. ‘We're working on it.’” (Zoe Schiffer and Will Knight/WIRED)
“While it’s still early days, some are doubtful GPT-5 marks a revolutionary change, exposing a gap between lofty user expectations and the more measured reality of current AI advances. Geoffrey Hinton, a ‘godfather’ of AI who has raised concerns about rapid advances in the technology, went so far as to joke with me that GPT-5 might have been a ‘small backwards step’ for progress toward AGI. Others were a bit more charitable. ‘OpenAI released an incrementally better model, but I don’t think it was the step change which many believed it would be,’ said Rayan Krishnan, founder and CEO of Vals AI, an AI evaluations company. After running tests on GPT-5, Vals found it scored higher than other models on several benchmarks, including competitive programming, math and tax evaluation, but performed behind competing models on some others, such as for finance-related tasks. As of Thursday, a version of GPT-5 remains at the top of various categories on LMArena, a popular leaderboard for AI models based on user rankings. But a different benchmark, ARC-AGI-2, put GPT-5 behind the latest version of Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI. Where GPT-5 has improved drastically, according to Krishan and others, is price. OpenAI has achieved impressive cost savings that make its reasoning-based AI models cheaper and more widely available to the masses, said Darius Emrani, CEO and founder of Scorecard, another startup that runs evaluations of AI agents. Those savings might also prompt many business users to shift from more expensive competitors to OpenAI.” (Shirin Ghaffari/Bloomberg)
“Recent developments around gerrymandering suggest that the party is beginning to surrender an attitude that has defined it for decades. But a more profound transformation will require a shift in how the party conceives of itself. For generations, the Democrats’ love of procedure has wound its way into the party’s voter base, its leaders and its governing philosophy. To really change would require a return to a party that barely exists in living memory. The Democratic Party has long had two distinct political styles. To borrow Mr. Martin’s formulation, it’s the knives versus the pencils. For more than a century, a more ruthless, transactional model dominated Democratic politics, for better and for worse. But since the 1970s, the experts with the pencils have come to run the show. And it is increasingly clear that this model has hindered the party’s ability to deliver, even to its most loyal supporters. The story of how the Democrats became the party of procedure follows the party’s transformation into the political home of the professional class. These are voters with college and graduate degrees — the winners of the meritocracy — who now form a large portion of the party, as it bleeds support each election cycle from the working class. Voters worried about democracy are quite reasonably responding to President Trump’s ceaseless violations of ethics and the Republican Party’s brazen power grabs. The more the right shatters political norms, the more Democrats have felt called to defend them. Whether these Democrats know it or not, they are also trying to uphold a distinguished tradition of political reform, dating to the turn of the 20th century, when the original Progressive movement took aim at the Gilded Age corruption that dominated the country’s politics.” (Jia Lynn-Yang/NYT)
“President Donald Trump launched a federal takeover of law enforcement this week in Washington, DC, opening a daunting new chapter in the city’s relationship with the federal government. On the surface, Trump signed the emergency order to crack down on crime. But threaded through his announcement of the new directive was a broader vision for the aesthetic transformation of Washington. In the same breath that he described collaring criminals and clearing homeless camps, he envisioned grandiose building projects to remake Washington in his image. For the president, the two approaches appear to be linked. And while the takeover is unprecedented, Trump’s fixation on disorder — and on making the city more beautiful — has a historical parallel. The twin obsessions with crime and ornament hark back to an urban planning movement known as City Beautiful. From the 1890s through the 1920s, reformers built major plazas and gardens in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and other cities. But what began as a progressive Gilded Age effort to bring art and neoclassical architecture to city centers often morphed into something darker, bolstering segregation and displacing visible poverty. In his second term, Trump is finding loopholes that allow him to act as DC’s shadow mayor, his personal power amplified by the city’s lack of statehood or congressional representation. In the District, the president has found a stage to turn his personal bugbears into civic reality, with a focus on crime, disorder — and beauty … DC does have a higher murder rate than many other large US cities, however violent crime is falling in almost every category, in keeping with lower trend lines nationwide.” (Kriston Capps/Bloomberg)
“Reading through Proust in the past year, whom I think I’ve been drawn to out of a desire for momentary immersion in scale and duration, I’ve noticed a similar, resonant cloud of doom hovering inside the narrative’s baroquely described salons and aesthetic reflections. The resonances between Drake and Proust are many, not least of which the notion that money and competition are the drivers of life and that jealousy is the content of love. Drake’s love songs—or rather his relationship songs, since the love they speak of is almost never offered or secured—suggest that for his moneyed set of international, trips-to-Dubai, clubbed-out, bottle-serviced celebrities and hangers-on, love is all power and bitterness, back and forth, like that, forever. Just like In Search of Lost Time, the narrative trajectory of Drake’s albums shows us an arriviste filled with hope and enthusiasm for a world of art and success who finds himself increasingly shaped and embittered by that world’s ruthless quest to produce the outsider. And, like Drake, Proust’s narrator is best enjoyed against his own grain, since his diagnoses of society’s ills don’t stop him from embodying the worst of them. Meanwhile, his productivity is as incessant and anxious as Spotify or Netflix, perfect for a moment when life presents itself as a nonchoice between total grind or total despair. He’s a disruptor from the least semi of U.S. peripheries who suggested a slightly new model of popular rap masculinity only to install a mostly familiar misogyny, a numbers-obsessed winner whose latest turn to shilling for a sports-betting company, as diagnosed by Kieran Press-Reynolds, shows a man who can’t help but keep his finger on the depressing pulse. Proust, too, liked to gamble: according to Hannah Freed-Thall (‘Speculative Modernism: Proust and the Stock Market’), ‘[B]y the start of the First World War he had managed to squander about a third of his fortune on stocks.’ I thought of Jean Moreau in La baie des anges (1963): ‘What I love about gambling is this idiotic life of luxury and poverty,’ neatly summarizing the thematic poles of mainstream hip-hop as well as the rough seesawing of pleasure and pain that quick millions seem to produce.” (Benjamin Krusling/The Paris Review)
“‘Harvey’s seen a better day,’ Donald Trump observed out of nowhere later in the week to a crowd assembled at a construction site … But same as Donald Trump, same as Diddy, Harvey Weinstein still hoped he might yet see a better day as he was rolled into the courthouse on August 13 in a wheelchair, his right leg hoisted Napoleonically and not a little imperiously. In the run-up to what was initially, optimistically presented as Weinstein’s ‘sentencing day,’ Weinstein was said to be at the end of his tether, his lead attorney Arthur Aidala having made it known Weinstein would perhaps appeal that single conviction reached two months prior regarding forced oral sex on former production assistant Miriam Haley. Sure there was an acquittal on ex-model Kaja Sokola (a sexual-assault charge on which Weinstein can never be retried), but the grounds for overturn stood to be that partial-mistrial jury, an overly aggressive individual throwing the entire proceeding, claims Aidala, and not just the hung-jury non-decision taken on Mann. ‘She just wants to continue and continue and continue,’ Weinstein complained of Mann in an interview weeks ago with podcaster Candace Owens, whose own continuing accusations that First Lady of France Brigitte Macron is secretly a man are lately overshadowing these would-be epiphanies from Weinstein he is eager to get out.” (Phoebe Eaton/Here be Dragons)
“Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts, distinguish truth from falsehood, and adhere to norms of rational debate. This crisis encompasses many things: rampant political lies; misinformation; and conspiracy theories; widespread beliefs in demonstrable falsehoods (‘misperceptions’); intense polarization in preferred information sources; and collapsing trust in institutions meant to uphold basic standards of truth and evidence (such as science, universities, professional journalism, and public health agencies). According to survey data, over 60% of Republicans believe Joe Biden’s presidency was illegitimate. 20% of Americans think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, and 36% think the specific risks of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh their benefits. Only 31% of Americans have at least a ‘fair amount’ of confidence in mainstream media, while a record-high 36% have no trust at all. What is driving these problems? One influential narrative blames social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), and YouTube. In the most extreme form of this narrative, such platforms are depicted as technological wrecking balls responsible for shattering the norms and institutions that kept citizens tethered to a shared reality, creating an informational Wild West dominated by viral falsehoods, bias-confirming echo chambers, and know-nothing punditry. The timing is certainly suspicious. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. As they and other platforms acquired hundreds of millions of users over the next decade, the health of American democracy and its public sphere deteriorated. By 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president, many experts were writing about a new ‘post-truth’ or ‘misinformation’ age.” (Dan Williams/AsteriskMag)
“American families are shrinking, and many cite the rising cost of housing as the primary reason why. A new report by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) points the finger squarely at the lack of affordable housing, with report co-author Lyman Stone telling Business Insider that, ‘It's the thing that everybody thinks about first, as soon as they're thinking about fertility.’ And that thought process is not unprecedented. The correlation between the availability of affordable housing and fluctuation in birth rates dates back to the 1930s, according to Business Insider, when ‘the advent of the modern, low-down-payment mortgage’ allowed more young people to buy homes and reportedly helped fuel the baby boom. The IFS report, meanwhile, is less surprising when you consider the average cost of a home in the United States is approximately $462,000 – a number that prices out many would-be parents. The United States, however, is not alone in its birth rate decline. While CDC data show America bottomed out at an historic low of 1.6 children per woman last year – less than half of the all-time high of 3.77 children per woman set in 1957 – the overall global birth rate is also rapidly falling. The Atlantic noted a recent UN study that showed that the global population will ‘officially begin its decline’ around the year 2084, when ‘rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging. And the rest of the world will have become old before it ever got the chance to become rich.’” (Mike Chrisolago/Yahoo)