Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.

But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.

The real story here isn't about electoral math. It's about a sitting president who talks about invading allied nations while referring to their democratically elected leaders as though they were already his subordinates. It's about the continued deterioration of democratic norms. It's about how the institutions meant to protect democracy — including the press — seem increasingly unable or unwilling to call out authoritarian behavior for what it is.

The press needs to stop treating politics like a game of electoral mathematics and start treating it like what it is: a serious business with real consequences for democracy and human lives. When the president starts talking like a mad emperor, that's the story, not how many House seats his delusions might hypothetically affect.

At first, I agreed with the critical consensus that the show is mindless entertainment, superficial and vacuous—RINGARDE. But I am now sincerely, even zealously convinced that, in my initial reaction of smug self-satisfaction, I was lured into an ambush, my response anticipated and rebutted: not in Emily’s trite soliloquy, but in Emily’s portrayal of Emily’s self-deception. For it is not just that I need her; I am her.

Most disturbingly familiar, however, is the subterranean mining operation that runs beneath Emily’s whole life, a constant alertness for usable material. Likewise, I cannot read a book, contemplate a painting, or even watch Emily without updating my mental inventory of raw material for future interpretation.

We first meet her as she finishes her daily jog, arrested by the congratulations of a mechanical voice: “eighteen seconds faster than yesterday.” Nothing is real unless it can be measured. And so the body must be tamed.

It symbolizes everything everyone has ever hated about digitization. It celebrates a lossy, creative compression for the most flimsy reason: An iPad shedding an irrelevant millimeter or two. It's destruction of beloved musical instruments is the perfect metaphor for how utterly tone-deaf technologists are capable of being. But the real story is just how little saved up goodwill Apple had in the bank to compensate for the outrage.

This should all be eerily familiar to anyone who saw Microsoft fall from grace in the 90s. From being America's favorite software company to being the bully pursued by the DOJ for illegalities. Just like Apple now, Microsoft's reputation and good standing suddenly evaporated seemingly overnight once enough critical stories had accumulated about its behavior.

Apple had such treasure chest of goodwill from decades as first an underdog, then unchallenged innovator. But today they're a near three-trillion dollar company, battling sovereigns on both sides of the Atlantic, putting out mostly incremental updates to mature products.

Some images look like they were made under a robotic sugar high. Lots of warm colors, but they make everything look like candy… they’re so overly sweet that they give you visual diabetes..

Average AI images drag down everything around them. An AI hero image is a comedian opening the show with a knock-knock joke. Good images enrich your article, bad images steal its soul.

If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers.  You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.

being part of a Corporation means that the signal to noise ratio changes dramatically.  The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. An ever increasing percent of our time went to non user value creation tasks and that changes the DNA of the company quickly, from customer focused to corporate guidelines focused.

the salaries are so high and the options so valuable that it creates many misalignments.  The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money.  Regardless of your performance (individually) or your product performance, you equity grows significantly so nothing you do has real economic impact on your family. The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted, since that drives your equity and salary payments.  This breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward.

When I first read a history of Israel, I was amazed at the image of Israel being like an onion: there always seems to be a deeper layer and an older claim to the land

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

Artists never complete a single, perfect artwork, and a single work never instigates an absolute transcendence in viewers. We may aspire toward this quasi-theological ideal, but art only has the ability to suggest the sublime. The real sustenance of the artistic is the scope of experience it provides, the cumulative sense of growth and cultivation of ourselves through art, a tendency toward a good that we can never capture but only assist in radiating itself and existence.

I quickly realized that my habits were more suited to going to galleries every week than to working regularly on longer pieces, that there weren’t very many shows I wanted to write about at length, and that a regular stream of blithe, off-the-cuff reviews would attract more attention than intermittent longer essays

Film, music, food and book critics write for a general public that can be swayed to spend their money one way or another, whereas the general public cannot afford to buy the art that is written about in Artforum.

The VP in charge of Google Plus hosted the Friday all-hands several times to get us all excited about what they were building. It was obvious to me and many others that there was no reason for people already on Facebook to switch from Facebook. Someone asked a direct question, but the VP deflected and talked about how easy it would be to group your friends with the Circles feature — which was not at all a reason to switch.It seemed like Google didn’t have the processes or experience to get the product strategy right. “Who are our potential users and what does it take to win them?” is product strategy 101. Maybe someone raised this question in an exec review, but it didn’t become a launch blocker. Google+ never took off, and was eventually shut down.

If Google didn’t start with a conviction that they needed the product, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the stamina to keep iterating and investing. Most other companies don’t have the money to build and launch products with such little conviction and oversight. Other companies need their products to succeed, so they try harder & smarter to make the products successful.

IME people often don’t realize that product strategies are actually way more important and influential than company strategies. Simply because it’s the products that have an impact on people’s lives, not the company.

Google has a company strategy, but they don’t make product strategies.

Google’s company strategy is “Hire all the smart people.” Hire all the smart people and let them build. Hire all the smart people so they can’t work at a competitor. Hire all the smart people even if we don’t have something important for them to work on.Google acts like a venture capitalist, investing in promising people with the expectation that most will fail. They invest broadly in search of the idea that will deliver 100x. Let 1000 flowers bloom, and see which are the best.

Unlike the “trauma plot,” Parul Sehgal’s coinage for the use of trauma as narrative payoff, the therapeutic plot doesn’t wallow in trauma itself. Instead, it offers formulaic accounts of diagnosis and healing—what Janet Malcolm has called “the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.”

Book blogs sort recommendations by pathology (severe social anxiety, schizophrenia, body dysmorphia), symptom (anxiety, panic attacks), and trauma (parental suicide, psychiatric stay). Fans diagnose characters with mental disorders (a fan theory diagnoses the character Bruno from another recent Pixar offering, Encanto, with obsessive compulsive disorder). Self-diagnosis even informed the development of Everything Everywhere. In early drafts of the script, Evelyn suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Writing and researching her character inspired Kwan to identify and seek treatment for his own heretofore undiagnosed ADHD.

No doubt, such a medical diagnosis can provide relief and resolution. But is such a diagnosis the job of art? What is lost when audiences and creators eschew other ways of discussing fiction (for example, E.M. Forster’s distinction between round and flat characters) and instead reduce characters to clinical profiles?

In ancient Athenian tragedy, catharsis was defined by Aristotle’s Poetics as the ritual purification and purgation of emotions, particularly pity and fear. Pity arises from identification with the tragic hero, whose nobility is compromised by a fatal flaw, and fear is elicited by his excessive punishment. The therapeutic significance of catharsis originated much later in the theories of Sigmund Freud. By applying Joseph Breuer’s “cathartic method,” Freud theorized that hypnosis allowed patients to recall the traumatic experience at the root of their condition. Catharsis was Freud’s first major breakthrough, and his first brush with the powers of the unconscious that would form the underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory.For Aristotle, catharsis was the result of anagnorisis—the humility produced by the tragic hero’s recognition not only of the calamity that had befallen him, but also of his own role in bringing it about. Freud, meanwhile, described an inherent tragedy in the “impossible profession” of psychoanalysis, “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results.” It wasn’t that Freud had no faith in his own methods; he simply perceived the enormity of the human condition, and understood that the odds of success were not stacked in the psychoanalyst’s favor.Humility is absent from today’s therapeutic catharsis, which assumes with algorithmic certainty that sharing will lead to understanding, and that understanding will lead to healing. Art’s role, according to Everything Everywhere actress Stephanie Hsu, is “to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis,” and to recognize that “empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.” Buried beneath this gauzy language is the fact that the “empathy” of Turning Red and Everything Everywhere rely on the transformation of the mothers, not their children. The adults must learn that children are individuals rather than extensions of parental will, and when empathy is granted to mothers, it is only through their shared status as victims.

Pity the immigrant women who fled war-torn nations and corrupt regimes only to be subjected to psychoanalysis from hipster filmmakers and their own children

All this is not to say that storytelling holds no empathic power, nor an ability to transcend individual perspectives. But this power lies in art’s ability to overthrow, not reify, easy solutions—to challenge rather than “validate.” The transmission of suffering from one generation to the next is a worthy subject for art, but not because its effect on any particular demographic has been under-represented.

Our approach to culture should account for rigor and complexity, not defer to trite solutionism.

one might describe neorealism as a form of methodological and stylistic resistance against the standard filmmaking techniques that weigh each scene’s productivity and efficiency in carrying the linear narrative forward. Neorealism focuses on visual marginalia and gets intentionally lost in the details happening behind the protagonists or at the margins of the frame. Neorealism is slow and processual in method. It’s about what Kogonada identifies as visual lingering.

a different kind of cinema and sensibility in which shots linger and veer off to include others, in which in-between moments seem to be essential, in which time and place seem more critical than plot or story.”

These non-human persons and personalities, in fact, have the power as built structures to influence not only people’s moods but their everyday rituals and patterns of daily life. Columbus is an ongoing experiment about whether architecture and design can influence happiness, productivity, and heighted perceptions of the quality of life.

In the modernist purview, glass has symbolically been associated with purity, hygiene, transparency, fluidity, and openness.

In some vignettes, Columbus as an applied visual-architectural theory perhaps even exceeds the abilities of theory in written, academic form. Take glass as symbolic material for built modernism.

Glass reveals and conceals. Glass displays and hides and symbolizes. Glass bespeaks transparency but is also disposed towards exclusion and control

A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers. This is Yanagihara’s principle: If true misery exists, then so might true love. That simple idea, childlike in its brutality, informs all her fiction. Indeed, the author appears unable, or unwilling, to conceive love outside of life support

Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude’s extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara’s first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot.

“There’s a point,” Yanagihara once said of Jude, at which “it becomes too late to help some people.” These are difficult words to read for those of us who have passed through suicidal ideation and emerged, if not happy to be alive, then relieved not to be dead. It is indeed a tourist’s imagination that would glance out from its hotel window onto the squalor below and conclude that death is the opposite of paradise, as if the locals did not live their little lives on the expansive middle ground between the two.

even Yanagihara’s novels are not death camps; they are hospice centers. A Little Life, like life itself, goes on and on. Hundreds of pages into the novel, Jude openly wonders why he is still alive, the beloved of a lonely god. For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible. Charles loves David; David loves Edward; David loves Charles; Charlie loves Edward; Jude loves Willem; Hanya loves Jude; misery loves company.