🍿 Spellbound (2002) was as delightful as I had remembered it. This is the third or fourth time I have seen it, and as with any good work of art the experience becomes richer each time. What made this viewing the best was that we had our spelling bee-bound kids with us who had never seen it before, providing some hilarious commentary.
Somewhat less delightful was seeing how some of the kids did in the 20-some years since, but even those stories — except for one — were more hopeful than I would have imagined.
Two years ago this week, as the implications of widespread LLM use began to crystalize, my (Serbian) podcast co-host and I discussed how ChatGPT would change medicine. It was apparent even back then that we were looking at an onslaught of bullshit — since then rebranded as “slop” — that would inundate platforms of the written word from medical journals to progress notes. Sadly, that ended up being the case sooner than I remember thinking.
What I did not expect was for the already odious video calls to become even worse. Friends, co-workers, business partners potential and current: we can tell when you have a chat window open during the call. The reflection in your eyeglasses changes at the rhythm of our conversation. Your mouth stands half-open, ready to parrot the non sequitur comment that your LLM spat out. You cannot provide context or clarify your question beyond reading it more slowly and spelling out the acronyms.
Job interviewer, beware. If you hire people based on calls only you may be shocked when you meet your new employee in person. If there is absolutely no chance for a real-life meeting before hand, at least make the call video. And be ready to bring a shovel.
Of course, this is a people issue not a technology issue. I wonder, however, if at the margin the availability of LLMs is making people worse. That those who would have otherwise made some cognitive effort now rely too much on this crutch. You can make the same argument about the written word
On the note of reading and writing, today’s Experimental History newsletter dealt with the topic. I completely agree with Mastroianni’s conclusion and look forward to adding his book to the pile. and how writing caused the decay in our collective memorization capabilities, just as Socrates foretold. Clearly, that particular tradeoff was on net a good one to make. Will we be able to say the same thing about the one humanity is making now?
Last week was my first time in Portland, Oregon — all 48 hours of it. There were only a handful of meetings and I had several uninterrupted hours for a leisurely stroll, so I shouldn’t complain. No notes about the city itself except that the coffee was A+ everywhere I went, including at the hotel lobby coffee shop: a good sign of an excellent coffee culture.
It has been a while since I flaneured through an unfamiliar American city, but I am still able to sniff out the key neighborhoods without a map: the 5th Avenue knockoff with its Tiffany and Channel storefronts, the generic skyscraper district, the stately historic home quarter.
The comic I linked to, by Malachi Ray Rempen, is for a generic all-American city so does not include things found only in more upscale towns such as the expensive shopping area, while having dollar stores and mega churches. It was also made pre-covid so there was no spot with encampments of people who are in-between places. Similarly, the generic European city map is missing its immigrant/refugee district. The family favorite has always been what I think of as the “hipster district”: in the midst of gentrification but for whatever reason (close to industry, high crime, etc.) still cheap and affordable enough for independent shops run by artsy types with no business sense to either flourish or (more likely) churn frequently enough to keep every building occupied. Like Carytown in Richmond, or Baltimore’s Hampden.
So, what television told me was that the entire city of Portland would be one big happy hipster hood. To my dismay, not only was this not true, but what I thought would have been that part of town instead turned out to be skid row. We don’t need to go into details, but I thought what happened at the corner of 3rd Avenue and Harvey Milk St was a good symbol for the general state of affairs:
Sign of the times, right across a run-down Voodoo Donuts that needs a security guard to keep watch.
That used to be Cameron’s Books and Magazines, founded in 1938 and in operation until April 2021 when the building owners decided not to renew the lease. It was the gateway to a stretch of 3rd Avenue that I imagine in some better days was tourist central but was now lined with rubbish-filled shopping carts and neon-colored tents.
Walking towards the more expensive part of town I realized that the independent shop owners who were more savvy moved closer to the Tiffany district, with eye-popping prices to match the cleaner interior design; those without business sense moved to Etsy. So goes the K-shaped “recovery”:
But let’s call the phenomenon by its real name: worsening inequality. either you can afford the $20 recycled cotton tote bag brandished with a subtly progressive slogan, or you risk tripping over a passed out drug user on your way to a bargain.
January 18, 2026
📺 Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials (2026) turned one of Christie’s more pulpy novels into an equally pulpy miniseries — with franchise potential! What is there not to love, other than the camerawork which was performed by someone with an essential tremor and no stabilizing equipment?
The final (?) update on my use of the service formerly known as Twitter: I have locked the account and logged out. I shied away from deleting it completely to prevent username squatting. All the posts are still available (and searchable!) thanks to micro.blog’s wonderful import function.
There is no shortage of praise for Dan Wang on this blog. In fact, I have read, watched and listened to so much of him that I wondered whether I should even read Breakneck. Ultimately, I was so primed by Apple in China and Technofeudalism that I was eager to learn more about the country. And good thing I did, because while I appreciate the ambition of Breakneck and Wang’s quick sketches of several major events in Chinese history — the one-child policy, rise of tech manufacturing, covid-19 pandemic — I am not sure that I at all agree with his central premise.
Wang paints China as a society of engineers and the US as a society of lawyers. One is oriented to action and building, the other to stasis and obstructing. In China, the heavy and unkind hand that forced sterilization of women and locked down millions of people during the pandemic had also literally moved mountains and laid down thousands of miles of high-speed rail. In the US, the only thing that the hand wields is the pen, with consequences all Americans can recognize: nothing gets done, good or bad. If only China paid a bit more attention to the rule of law instead of wielding rule by law; and if only America built more, or rather made its legal environment more hospitable to builders.
But then this model is as simplistic and misleading as the 1970s Population Bomb projections that the world would run out of food. Engineers in the US are doing just fine in building needle skyscrapers in Manhatten and changing the skylines of Nashville, Austin, Las Vegas, and even DC. Isn’t the infrastructure crumbling, though? American Society of Civil Engineers gives it an overall score of C (“mediocre, requires attention”) in its report card.
To be cynical for a moment, the report card is a lobbying tool from professional society more than an objective assessment. I am willing to bet that more civil engineers in America work in aviation than rail. But this is about maintenance, not scale: rail gets the second-highest score of B (“good, adequate for now”) while aviation gets the second-lowest, D+ (poor, at risk). Overall rankings — which I would, to be clear, also consider dubious — still place US ahead of China
This large of a drop is a reflection of the ruler more than the table. even as America dropped from 1st place in 2018 to 11th in 2025.
Having never even visited China I don’t dare comment whether or by how much Wang’s assessment of his birth country is off. I did notice that the verbal tendencies of the Chinese Communist Party were much like those of corporate America: big initiatives with bombastic names among which are sprinkled some gentle euphemisms. I would also note that there must be at least some kind of law, otherwise what would be the point of special economic zones (special from what)?
Wang does touch upon what I think is the central problem: the financialization of America. It is wise to follow the money, and as powerful as the lawyers here appear to be they are but a proxy for the people who wield pay them. Responsible for the current American condition are not lawyers, it is greed. If the autocrats of China were able to recognize this peril to their own country and avoid it then kudos to them, but then greed can manifest in many ways.
Last year I was quite enthusiastic about Waymo, Google’s self-driving cars that have been on their way to DC for quite a while now with no go-live date in sight. Well just this week I was in San Francisco again and the difference in experience was striking. Last year I had a family member or two with me so it was never a one-person ride. This year I came by myself, and felt lonely sitting in the back seat of a large Jaguar. I couldn’t look at the phone — those dots don’t really help with motion sickness — so I just listened to a podcast while staring through the window.
In contrast, I had excellent conversations with every taxi and Lyft driver on this trip. But I’ll skip recounting those lest I turn into Tom Friedman.
Lily Lynch: Europa.–Make War.–Zenitism.. Wherein Lynch attempts to triangulate one of the distant sources of the rot, which is the hypocrisy built into the foundations of the post-WW2 economy. I will add Lars von Trier’s Europa (1991) to my to-watch list.
Kabir Chibber: What rewatching ‘The Wire’ taught me about nostalgia for a lost America. Here are more proximal sources. I remember watching the last season of The Wire in 2008 while on medical student exchange in Thailand. I spent the last two weeks on Koh Samui and passed the too-hot early afternoons in front of a tiny Asus Eee netbook (remember those?) watching Season 5, which back then I thought was too far-fetched in how it portraid the media. Maybe I should rewatch.
Hollis Robbins: Embrace your lack. Let’s end on a positive note, with a review of another great TV show. I didn’t think that Pluribus was about LLMs at all, but Robbins makes a convincing case for a connection. May need to rewatch that one as well, and Season 2 isn’t event out yet.
David Foster Wallace for Review of Contemporary Fiction (1993): E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction. On television as voyeurism-enabling best friend of a young fiction writer, among other things. Look, I know it is too long because DFW loves his asides and his self-references, but in year 2026 those make the actual value of the essay: any points he had about network versus cable TV and how those two affect American fiction have become irrelevant as all three of those things are now dead or dying. So, sit down and savor it if you haven’t already — they stopped making DFW essays, you know! — possibly with a better formatted if somewhat distorted PDF version.
Sam Kean for Slate (2014): Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient. I have used the case of Phineas Gage in an old lecture as an example of a “natural experiment”, and the amount of uncertainty about him this essay reveals makes me think it was an even better choice than I originally thought. Gage’s personality differs with each retelling, shifting to match the point being made; call it the narrative degree of freedom. No one, not even scientists — heck, particularly not scientists — is immune to a good yarn.
Gay Talese for The New Yorker (2016): The Voyeur’s Motel. Like this essay from the great — and still alive! — Talese. He was 84 when he wrote the essay about things that happened back in the 1960s through the ’80s. How much of it was true? And for what purpose did he end up putting it to paper? This reviewer was skeptical, but please hold off from reading the review until after you read the essay, because of course you have the time.
Terry Eagleton for London Review of Books (2023): What’s your story? This is a review you should read before the book — I certainly did. The book reviewed, Seduced by Story, will not make its way on to the pile as I have long ago internalized the point it seems to be wanting to make. The review, on the other hand, is a delightful reference to other people’s work on the subject, including that
Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that Donald Rumsfeld’s sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom – his litany of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – lacks a fourth permutation: unknown knowns, things we know but don’t know we know, a more suggestive notion of ideology than Brooks’s systems of extremist ideas.
An example of an unknown “known” Eagleton plops in a preceding paragraph:
Brooks also refers to myths as ideology, but makes the classic liberal mistake of overlooking his own. Along with most Americans, he probably believes in Nato, the free market and private education, but it’s unlikely he would call this an ideology. Like halitosis, ideology is what the other guy has.
But then we are getting into headier topics than simple storytelling.
There is a big red circle of my MacBook Air’s System Settings icon. Oh no! Is it a system error? Is it an update? No! It is an offer to add the two Apple TV devices I have to an AppleCare One (Plus?) Plan!
