Quoth the Financial Times' How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right:

René Girard is best known for his theory of ‘mimetic desire’. Now Peter Thiel and the vice-president are among his fans.

These are the headline and the subheading as seen in the latest issue of FT magazine. As a casual fan of Mr. Girard’s work I read the whole thing and it seems to be a fair description both of his major themes (mimetic desire, scapegoating) and of how they are being interpreted by the dramatis personae above. What the body of the article does not mention again is the word “bellwether”, and for good reason: Rene Girard died in 2015, age 91.

FT headline writers think that a dead person can still be a bellwether. Does ChatGPT?

“Bellwether” literally comes from the practice of putting a bell on the lead wether (castrated ram) of a flock so the other sheep would follow its sound. In modern English it’s a present-tense indicator—something (a region, product, company, demographic group, etc.) whose current behaviour gives an early signal of where things are headed.

Because the word’s sense is tied to leading or pointing ahead, the subject is almost always:

• alive (or at least active) now, and
• capable of exhibiting real-time behaviour that can be watched for clues.

A person who has already died can’t do that, so in everyday usage you won’t hear “the late X is a bellwether of …”. What you might hear instead are words such as harbinger, forerunner, prophetic voice, emblem, icon, or canary in the coal mine. These capture the idea that the person’s life, writing, or death ended up foreshadowing later events, but without implying that we could have looked at their behaviour as it unfolded to predict the future.

That said, in loose or rhetorical writing you could stretch the metaphor—for example:

• “The 1970s novels of Octavia Butler have become a bellwether for 21st-century conversations about race and biotechnology.”

Here the author really means Butler’s work signals themes that would later dominate, not that her actions are a live barometer. It’s creative licence, not standard usage.

Bottom line: Grammatically you can call a dead person a bellwether, but stylistically it feels off because the word implies an ongoing lead role. If you want to emphasise posthumous significance, choose a term like “prophet”, “forerunner”, or “canary in the coal mine” instead.

But “prophet” is overused, including in this article, so could we invent a word to describe a deceased person whose work signals themes that would later dominate? Deadwether is there for the taking, and we already have two examples: Rene Girard and Octavia Butler. Who else?

It takes a special kind of negligence to accumulate $200,000 in traffic tickets over 7 years. To post about it on Reddit while whining about your car being impounded is the chef’s kiss. Many thanks to the ANC Commissioner who immortalized the now-deleted posts and to DC Councilmember Charles Allan for making it happen.

The Department of Justice is just asking questions:

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

The Clinton administration bombed Yugoslavia under the thinnest of pretenses; his successor one-upped him. The Obama campaign used “Big Data” to target individual voters; his successor one-upped him. The Biden administration cloaked their attempts at censoring social media under the guise of “misinformation”; and, well, see above.

For every hair-raising breakdown of values and norms there is a precedent, and time and again the precedent has been set by the same side, with remarkable shortsightedness.

If the world wasn’t chaotic enough, get ready for an invasion of the home humanoid robots. My cynical side predicts mechanical Turks, or rather Cambodians and Vietnamese, controlling these remotely as a service that is not (yet) subject to tariffs.

Big news: DEVONthink 4 is almost out as a public beta. A Reddit user got an early look at the announcement and a few things stick out:

• As expected (and hoped for), AI features prominently, with options to integrate your preferred online model
• There now seems to be built-in version control
• Purchase (or upgrade from v3) gets you updates for a year, after that you pay for continuous updates

I wish AI integration was on-device only as online integration will limit the types of data I can use it on, but still, sign me up! (↬r/devonthink)

What to call this momentous moment in history? “Liberation Day” doesn’t quite capture the sentiment. I propose FAFO Day.

Waiting with bated breath for the “Make America Wise Again” campaign.

With 23andMe closing shop today and the bluebird bio sale to private equity last month it is clear that the DNA bubble has burst.

Every bubble leaves something positive in its wake. Yes, there was a lot of speculation with tulips in the Netherlands, but the Netherlands is still the world’s top exporter of cut flowers. There was a railway bubble in the United States that left us with a lot of railroad tracks and not so great passenger rail. More recently, the dot-com bubble left decent network infrastructure and a lot of IT professionals with nothing better to do than to invent Web 2.0.

And so with DNA. Sequencing has never been cheaper, and it does have some valid uses. Unfortunately, there are many harms of fetishizing DNA, from thinking that DNA mutations are the be-all and end-all of every disease pathology — think, “the fat gene” — to completely missing the point of the entire field of epigenetics, which has much more to it than molecular changes to histones and base pairs.

Business and finance are now the first to realize that there is more to genetics than DNA, and more to medicine than genetics. Academia and funders, ossified as they are, will be slower on the uptake and come to this epiphany one retirement at a time.

A less hopeful harbinger of the future: someone in Serbia — most likely the government — seems to have used sonic weapons to disperse a 100K+ strong crowd of peaceful protestors. Here is a convincing audio analysis, and here are a few videos. Coming soon to a protest near you.

Facts about the District’s budget from DC council member Charles Allen:

Like any other state, DC’s budget is mostly funded through local tax revenue and fees. About 25% of our budget is from federal programs, largely Medicaid and Medicare, in line with or lower than most US states.

The DC Council and Mayor have collaborated to pass 28 consecutive balanced budgets.

DC continues to have one of the strongest bond ratings of any municipality in the country and has fully funded its pensions.

DC is the only jurisdiction in the nation that budgets out four years on the operations side and six on the capital side to ensure responsible spending.