Goof Ball Genius

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war — not only neocons like me but also most of Trump’s MAGA base — because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests.

Through his pursuit of a deal, Trump has demoralized the Iranian people, whose rescue he promised in January, triggering this war. This abandonment not only undermines American credibility but harms our war effort, for it is the Iranian people who will issue the final verdict of this war, and Trump’s credibility, by whether or not they feel emboldened to rise up against the Islamic Republic.

Along with the total absence of white people is, again, the total absence of white people behavior. The confusing thing is neither Alex nor I can tell if we’re supposed to notice this or not. Is this the world woke wants? Is it supposed to be culturally flat? Or is it supposed to be exactly what Northwestern was in 2007… only with different colors? Regardless, the coloring killed the culture. Evanston, for all its liberal intelligence, tempered it and counterbalanced it with a strong commitment to the simplicity of beer and football. This is what it means to be a midwesterner, and certainly a member of the Big Ten. But now, it’s gone. I don’t want this to be true, it simply is. The campus tour is over and we walk to get dinner in Downtown Evanston. Naturally, I ask for Hundo. It’s not there. Replaced by a slop high rise. Okay, any sports bar? This is Chicago and Big Ten country, after all. Alex says they don’t exist anymore. I don’t believe him. So we started wandering around Evanston. Nothing. No sports bars. Hipster coffee shops, chain restaurants, it's ridiculous: there are no sports bars left. Now let me just say, you’re probably thinking right now that this is anecdotal, and that I have shown myself not to be a serious journalist, and thus my reportage about the total lack of sports bars in Evanston, Illinois, is to be dismissed. But you’d be wrong. It’s real. Nobody writes about it because writing about it would be racist, and Evanston is the White Guilt capital of the Universe. So I sent my friend back there to verify my observation. He walked the streets of Evanston on a Thursday night in search of a sports bar, or a college bar of any kind, overflowing with college kids in the way Big Ten schools should be.

So congratulations, race activists: you got everyone to see race. Now we have white race activists too, who say that because politicians “took the knee” for race rioters when it was BLM, no one can complain when they do it too. I don’t know how, or even if, this Pandora’s box can be closed. But my fear is that the genie is out of the bottle, with no small thanks to BLM and social media, and that things will get considerably worse before they get better.

Here’s the part worth slowing down for. Around 130 companies were asked some version of “is AI eating your business?” and said no. Almost all of enterprise software sits here — Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, SAP, Atlassian — swatting the seat-compression question away like it’s beneath them. Now, none of this is secret. The denials are in the prepared remarks for anyone to read. And the pricing changes are in the press releases for anyone to read. The interesting thing is that they contradict each other. Almost every one of these companies is, at the same time, tearing out per-seat pricing and replacing it with usage-based pricing. Sit with the logic. If your software is sold per employee, and AI agents are about to do those employees’ jobs, then per-seat revenue is the exact thing AI threatens. A company that genuinely believed AI was harmless would have no reason to rebuild its entire pricing model on a deadline. When a company’s words and its pricing point in opposite directions, the pricing is the more honest signal — because it costs something.

Mao was remarkably successful: between 1949 and 1976, the Communist Party totally transformed Chinese life. It’s hard for us today to grasp just how brutal that transformation was. From 1950 onward, every force in Chinese life that might contest the hegemony of the Communist Party was ruthlessly suppressed and destroyed. The landlords and “rich peasants” who had comprised the traditional leadership class of the villages, for example, saw their lands expropriated by the Chinese state in the 1950s; they were forced to sit through public sessions in which the peasants would “speak bitterness” to them, typically culminating in their being beaten to death. Several hundreds of thousands of people were killed in this way. During the same time period, another several hundreds of thousands were killed as “counterrevolutionaries” opposed to Communist power. But it wasn’t just landlords, rich peasants, and “counterrevolutionaries.” Practically every representative of traditional power in Chinese life was crushed. The hundreds of secret societies and sects that had dotted Chinese life, counting about 13 million members in 1949, were destroyed in the “Withdraw from the Sects” campaign; Confucianism and other pillars of the old order were attacked and suppressed; the hundreds of thousands of small shrines that had structured Chinese folk religion were declared “superstitious” and obliterated; major faiths were brought under state supervision, and at the peak of Communist enthusiasm in the 1960s religion was banned entirely and countless ancient temples destroyed. The famous Jing’an Temple in Shanghai, built in the third century, was turned into a plastics factory.

I spent the first day going over the aria to Bach’s Goldberg Variations again and again. First I would ask them to try to think if there were any divisions or turning points in the music—after a couple listens, we would quickly come to a consensus on that. Then I would ask them to describe the emotional tone of each of our sections. Lo and behold, people would come up with very similar adjectives! So striking was this consensus that the students themselves would find their way to a deeper similarity in the few cases where the descriptions initially seemed very different. Then I would ask them to describe—in terms where they could reasonably expect that everyone at the table would know what part of the music they were talking about—what it was about the music that gave them that emotional impression. Over time, we built up to a paper where they would offer a “thick description” of a classical piece, as well as a fully student-driven discussion where they would listen to a new piece and take notes (with me announcing new “sections” for their reference). The method wasn’t fully inductive. I gave them some basic concepts—consonance vs. dissonance (which is more or less an objective fact of how our ears are structured), tension and release, theme and variation, rhythm and tempo, the effects of timbre (without having to recognize the instruments involved), etc. These concepts gave them something to listen for. And what was striking was not just that everyone could engage at that level, whatever their level of previous musical experience, but also the fact that this was new to all of them, even the musically trained ones

He described the defendant as an “A” student with a 3.7 GPA, holding down two jobs, who was on the varsity track team at the time of the incident. When Anthony arrived at the track meet, his attorney said, it began to rain; Anthony’s school was the only one at the event without a tent that day. Howard said that Anthony initially went to the other school’s tent to have a conversation with someone he recognized, when he was suddenly asked to leave by strangers who were much larger than he was. The jury was shown several angles of surveillance video that captured the stabbing, showing the entire incident, spanning from Metcalf’s arrival at the stadium to when Anthony was taken into custody, which lasted only about 15 minutes.

Just like Costco and Sam’s Club have a membership fee to keep out undesirables (though they never admit this), the little inconveniences, whether it’s the cart return, bringing your own bagging, or the lack of quick foods, was all by design to keep the clientele as a certain type even if they say it’s to keep costs down. You might think these minor requirements wouldn’t be an impediment to those who want food cheaper than even Walmart, but it does the trick.

From approximately 1980 through 2015, Trump did, by conservative estimate, several thousand long-form interviews. Howard Stern alone, over more than two decades, accounts for somewhere north of forty hours of unstructured conversation, much of it the kind of free-associative, mildly hostile, sexually frank, joke-tolerant exchange that Stern specialized in and that no other politician of Trump’s generation has any equivalent practice in. Add the local New York radio circuit (Imus, the morning shows, the sports-talk hosts). Add the print profile circuit (every major magazine did multiple long sit-downs with him over the decades, from Spy to Vanity Fair to Playboy to GQ). Add the tabloid culture he was both subject of and active participant in (he made calls to gossip columnists under his own name and under the pseudonym “John Barron,” which is the practice of a man comfortable manufacturing media on the fly). Add the fourteen seasons of The Apprentice, which is unscripted reality television, meaning he spent fourteen years on camera, in extended scenes, generating extemporaneous dialogue under the supervision of producers whose job was to elicit interesting moments from him. By the time he descended the escalator in 2015, he had probably ten thousand hours of camera time in unstructured formats.

Oswald Spengler talks at length about Rembrandt’s signature brown paint. What is the significance of that color, and what role did Rembrandt play in the evolution of mankind? Spengler points out that Rembrandt brown is the one color that cannot be found in the rainbow or prism and is therefore a metaphysical color that signifies infinite space. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are the most complex and revealing of all time, and he is unfolding the Faustian myth of the human individual as a unique species unto himself. That’s our fundamental myth, and Rembrandt’s art is particularly important for detailing it.