Aretai

1. Much of this data center backlash story takes place in Michigan: Harper’s.
2. Stephen King’s latest is in the Atlantic. He can’t be too lowbrow?! His book on writing was terrific.
3. On architecture in London, Rome, and Athens: “[Richard] Alston, a historian, pinpoints within what has been called the Age of Nationalism crucial periods of economic, cultural and social change when, paradoxically, ‘the cities of this new, modern world were dressed in Classical architecture’. Just as a person’s costume conditions the behaviour of onlookers, who respond to cues that the style and formality of dress convey, so architectural construction within a city, beyond any practical use, acts as a form of soft power, its appearance contributing to national identity and the expression of other cultural ideals.”

1. JS Bach cantata for Trinity 3:
   Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, I had much affliction (My heart was deeply troubled, BWV 21, 1713); first movement, Benjamin Appl; full recording.
2. More AI token cost woes: “Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said it was becoming “harder to justify” its outlay on AI tokens. “It’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and ‘OK now we’re actually producing like 25 per cent more useful consumer features,’” he said on a recent podcast.”

“The stabilising and consistently influential force of ancient traditions offers technology the roots it needs to grow. It provides predictability for the guardrails required and a defence against the caprices of politics,” writes Glen Weyl in the Economist.

Peggy Noonan: “As we near America’s 250th birthday, my thoughts keep turning to what we’ll need to get to our 300th.”

1. Industrial and manufacturing companies are growing in value because of the AI data center boom.
2. Governments and companies are trying to outsmart youth who find ways around social media bans, FT reports.
3. Cal Newport on “doom trolling” from AI companies: “As a computer scientist and a digital ethicist, I’m both optimistic about the possibilities of A.I. and confounded by the terrifying and grim way that current technology leaders insist on talking about it. This could have been a period of hopeful innovation, but instead our emotions are being manipulated by Silicon Valley’s self-serving and morally untenable addiction to doom trolling. This communication strategy has to stop. The harm it’s causing to the public’s mental health has arguably outweighed the benefits that A.I. has so far delivered. There have been some signs that this behavior is starting to shift.”
4. And Ross Douthat’s framing of an ideological battle at the center of an AI conflict: “But beyond the specifics of why, say, the libertarian tech people in the Trump administration distrust the effective-altruist tech people running Anthropic, the kind of conflict we’re seeing here is overdetermined by the trajectory of the A.I. models: There is too much potential power here not to have ongoing, escalating struggles over who actually gets to rule.”
5. Paul Graham tells the Oxford Union how to be a billionaire: “So how do you find startup ideas without looking for them? By working on projects with your friends. That’s where the very best startups come from. Initially they’re not even meant to be companies. They’re just something people built because they thought it would be cool. That’s how Apple and Google and Facebook all started. None of them were meant to be companies at first. The reason this works is what I told you earlier: you predict future demand. So if you just build random stuff you think would be cool, the things you build will actually be far from random.”

1. Semiquincentennial: Copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and of the 13th Amendment, each signed by Lincoln, are on display at the Lincoln Memorial. “The copy that will be on display at the Lincoln Memorial was one of 48 signed by Lincoln to raise money for hospitals, injured Union soldiers and the families of soldiers killed in the war, said Selby Kiffer, international senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, where the documents were sold. 
   Each copy was sold for $10 — roughly $200 today. They did not sell out,” reports WaPo.
2. “When [university] presidents negotiate detailed termination provisions, guaranteed faculty appointments, or substantial deferred-compensation arrangements, they are protecting themselves from unpredictable board behavior. In a way, the contract has become a substitute for the stability once provided by effective governance,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

1. RIP, Robert Louis Wilken.
2. “Attention is its own substrate in American politics.”
3. Teacher satisfaction is high globally, OECD finds.

1. Bob Dylan in NYT: “The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
   
   “The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.
   
   “The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.”
2. “Tokenmaxxing” is now a problem.
3. Brad Wilcox interviews Freya India about Girls.
4. “People ages 18 to 29 express higher levels of happiness about the future than those 65 and older,” according to Pew.
5. Parents are breaking the bank on berries, says WaPo: “American’s berry eating has shifted from seasonal treat to year-round habit in a generation. The supply of strawberries per person has more than tripled since 1980, from under two pounds a year to nearly seven, on average. Blueberries have gone from a supply of less than three ounces per person a year in 1980 to more than two pounds per year today. Other fruits have not followed: per capita supply of apples, bananas and grapefruit has fallen since 2000.”

1. JS Bach cantata for Trinity 2: Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, The heavens declare the glory of God (BWV 76); German-English interlinear; first performance in Leipzig, June 6, 1723; a 2024 recording.
2. Semiquincentennial: “The distance between the data and the vibes is the central puzzle of the United States in the 2020s. Exploring that was the impulse behind the making of a new podcast we are launching this week to celebrate this spectacular country on its big birthday,” says the Economist this week.

1. Can leaders motivate employees whose work can be done by AI? Bloomberg thinks so: “Hariharan[, a mathematician who spent two years on a project that AI did in 5 days,] is already working on both parts of the job. He spent months after the scoop cleaning up the machine’s proof, turning its cryptic output into something a person could read, and he says he pulled a real if modest amount of understanding out of the work. His next project will not be a formalization. The next theorem he formalizes, he told the Times, he wants to have proved himself first. Hariharan has found his stick and rudder. You have to help your people find theirs.”
2. There’s not a narcissism epidemic, writes Joseph E. Davis: “Whether we like it or not, each of us must discover or author (and revise as necessary) our personal identity and project it in such a way as to make it intelligible to strangers. Few, if any, of our life choices will be made by default. The task is ours and necessarily involves a self-referencing orientation and acts of self-assertion. Does it also lead to self-fascination and indifference to the general good?
   
   “We now even speak of a moral duty, enforced by our institutions, to make choices based on self-interest—my life, my future, my happiness. The old moral sources served to restrain the pursuit of self-interest, with the good defined primarily in terms of wider community benefit. “Now, instead,” to quote the psychologist Roy Baumeister, “people are free to do what is best for themselves individually, with a clear conscience because of the presumptive moral duty to the self.
   
   “We might call this new duty a self ethic. It is less an ideal than an adaptation to our loss of cultural guides to action. It reflects the paradoxical way that self-realization has become an organizational requirement. Given its imperative of an optimal self, we can see why this self ethic might be confused with a narrow self-love or disregard for others. …
   
   “The effects of our predicament do not promote grandiosity or the assertion of some imperial self. Something like the opposite seems to be the case. Studies going back decades suggest that self-image and “ego strength” have declined over time, while reported feelings of emptiness, uncertainty, and inadequacy have increased.⁴ Though largely unreported in the press, efforts to replicate the original claims for a “narcissism epidemic” have failed [see here]. And all the comparing that people do on social media does not boost self-confidence but undermines it.
   
   “Narcissism is not a helpful category. If anything, beleaguered or demoralized might be better terms for the effects of our self ethic at the individual level.”

1. James Chanos on the SpaceX IPO that he isn’t immediately shorting: “We’re going to be doing a $75 billion IPO for a valuation of close to $2 trillion for a company with revenues of $19 billion and negative free cash flow… This is really a hopes-and-dreams IPO. … Tesla trades at roughly 14 times revenue based on promises of the future. … SpaceX is coming at roughly 90 times revenues, which is a completely different animal.”
2. Chanos continued, via Bloomberg: “Bull markets put a premium on promises. Bear markets put a discount on reality. Right now we’re clearly in the former.”
3. Gen Z church attendance hits a cliff after high school: “Among Gen Z Protestants, 82% reported regular church attendance as young children—6 points higher than Catholics and 12 points higher than generic Christians. Those gaps held relatively steady through the high school years, even as consistent attendance eroded across all three groups by roughly 13 to 15 percentage points during that stretch. The trajectories diverge sharply after high school. Protestant attendance declined 8 percentage points between the high school and post-high school stages. For generic Christians, the drop was 12 points. For Catholics, it was 19.”

1. David S. Reynolds in NYRB: “Already in the nineteenth century observers were pointing out the growing importance of visual media and their ability to alter how people focus their attention. The old worry that images might compete with words now seems almost quaint: the ‘rage for pictures’ identified in 1848 has not lessened; it has grown exponentially, taking new forms and reaching new heights, and images dominate the cultural scene now more than ever before. The more urgent question is what occurs when visual media become the main way we connect with the world. Images provide immediacy and accessibility, but they can also oversimplify and diminish experience. By giving in to their charm, we risk losing not only the depth that comes with sustained reading but also the habits of thinking that such reading encourages.”
2. Tips and tricks from a Jeopardy contestant: “I first took the show’s online contestant test in middle school, and when I was 18, my dad drove me to my first in-person audition in a hotel ballroom in Raleigh, North Carolina. (“Total success,” I wrote on Instagram, incorrectly.)”
3. “We are witnessing the return of a politics of morality organized around the injustices of the economic system and an array of related problems: the costs of technological change, the unraveling of community, civil rights, and financial and work-balance issues confronting families,” writes EJ Dionne.
4. Height is a salient determinant of body image among adolescents, independent of body mass, a new NBER working paper by Syracuse economists argues.
5. LC-MS runoff!

1. Hacking pays: “The security firm Cybereason said in 2024 that 84% of ransomware victims paid, and that most were breached again within a year,” via Bloomberg.
2. Social security funds have six years until depletion: “When the programme launched in 1940, its future must have seemed assured. Lots of money went in and little came out: for each retired person drawing benefits, more than 150 workers were contributing to the fund, which invested in Treasury securities.
   “Today, after years of demographic transformation—lower birth rates bringing fewer workers to the labour force, and longer lifespans for the fortunate recipients—the ratio of workers to recipients is less than three to one.”

1. Gen Z-variety socialism, via Economist: “Plenty of the grievances that animate Gen-Z socialists do stem from real issues. Inflation has been too high, rent in big cities is now often unaffordable and AI could upend the labour market. Dismissing these worries would be foolish. Yet Gen-Z socialism is wrong about how to fix the problems of capitalism. It must be resisted, because it is a profound threat to prosperity.”
2. On the American middle class in NYT, by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship of AEI: “In a recent report, we measured class using constant, inflation-adjusted thresholds. The “core” middle class shrank, but so did the classes below the middle — the poor, the near-poor and the lower middle class.”
3. Mary Beard’s book on the importance of ancient classics, reviewed: ‘The unlikely image of the future Cambridge don drilling Latin conjugations under the revolutionary eye of Davis is suggestive of what is lost if we allow discourse around the subject to be dominated by what Beard refers to as the “Column Crowd” on the one hand (which celebrates the ancient world as a bastion of the tradition, power and authority it sees embodied in classical architecture), and the “Burn It Down Crowd” (which sees classics as irredeemably tainted by its appropriation for various racist, fascist and imperialist ends) on the other. … “The good news,” Beard tells us, “is that it has always proved hard to corral the ancient world to support convincingly any single modern ideology.”‘
4. Toward theories of altruism in psychology: “Despite psychology’s near-universal buy-in to self-interest as the prime mover of prosocial (and other) behaviors, there are well-conceived arguments and growing evidence to suggest that humans are also other-directed—that is, deeply interested in the welfare of others.”

1. Yuval Noah Harari in FT: “Granting AIs corporate legal personhood would allow AI agents to take numerous new initiatives, potentially generating enormous new wealth. But legal personhood is an all-purpose key that would also allow AIs access to our financial, economic and political systems.”
2. ”The rise of the child-haters” is a sad commentary on our cultural moment.
3. Alzheimers from the inside: gut wrenching.
4. ”You must account yourself ‘desolate’ in this world, however great the prosperity of your lot may be,” Augustine wrote to Proba, via Tim Keller.
5. I read scores of book reviews every week, but the craft isn’t flourishing, writes Daniel Bell in Liberties.