Gongol.com Archives: December 2025
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December 3, 2025
One of the most reliable heuristics is that the first time is usually the hardest. It's not always true (that's why it's only a heuristic), but for most people, it's right most of the time. ■ Certain types of people aren't dissuaded by this difficulty: Small children are renowned sponges for new knowledge and skills. And that's a good thing, or else we'd have a hard time getting them to learn anything important in time to develop independence and self-sufficiency. ■ But somewhere along the line, with the exception of the minority of the population that approaches learning as reflexively as breathing, most people seem to lose that child-like motivation to learn and shift into a mode that is more comfortable with what they already know. This is the classic problem of trying to teach an old dog new tricks. This puts two big challenges in front of anyone who wants to teach them new things. ■ The first is connecting old knowledge to new. In most cases, it's vastly easier to build on a framework of existing knowledge (even if it's only through metaphors and analogies) than to teach from scratch. For the teacher, the challenge is in finding adjacent knowledge that is close enough to the new material to be familiar but not so close as to keep the new information from sounding fresh and novel. ■ The second challenge is in answering the inescapable question: "What's in it for me?". Whether you're a classroom instructor, a preacher, a candidate on the stump, or a podcasting host, you typically need to address that question at least once every five to seven minutes if you want the audience to pay attention of its own choice. ■ While these skills have always mattered, their importance is being magnified by the knowledge trends of the day, which include evidence of mounting student disengagement in the classroom, potentially critical skill gaps in the workplace, and shocking growth in time spent consuming media content. ■ The very act of self-government depends upon people being able to assess problems (especially new ones), apply reasoned judgment, and follow through with appropriate action. Those who want to influence the future would be well-advised to figure out how best to refine their own skills for connecting and explaining effectively.
December 4, 2025
There's nothing new about people fixating on the biological characteristics that come to us from birth -- things like sex or skin color -- as sources of identity. That's always been with us. If a feature is readily visible, then it's easy to select and identify by it. ■ But isn't the whole process of civilization about overcoming instincts and replacing them with things that we (as a species) have discovered to work better? All animals have instincts, but we're capable of much greater self-awareness than that. ■ It seems like a timely question because there are lots of people devoting time, attention, and other resources to interpreting those differences. Some of them mean well, like Scott Galloway plugging a book on bringing some social consciousness to "how to address the masculinity crisis". Others plainly do not. ■ Of course, many differences exist among people, right from birth. And there is a commonality shared by all of us, too: Human nature, which really doesn't ever change. We're motivated by most of the same things (like curiosity, sexual attraction, and a desire for esteem) that motivated people 5,000 years ago. And we're afraid of most of the same things (like loneliness, hunger, and death), too. ■ But parts of human nature are unproductive -- some are even barbaric -- and we need civilizing processes to make us into better people. Taking the example of sex, it might be instinctual for some people to try to build an identity mainly out of being a man or a woman. But most people have a lot more to offer than that -- or would, if gender were treated more as an incidental aspect of character rather than as the defining feature. ■ That doesn't mean you have to ignore or suppress masculinity or femininity. It just means that people should strive to be good and complete and interesting, regardless of sex or gender. It's harder to sell books with that message: "Masculinity crisis" sounds much more urgent. ■ But the essence of being civilized is in improving ourselves in all the ways we can, not in fixating on those things that characterize us from birth. Fix the shortcomings that exist in the ways we guide young people to enrich their self-identity beyond the immutable, and you'll see much greater happiness overall.
December 5, 2025
Authors create characters every day. They show up in books, movies, plays, television shows, radio series, podcasts, short stories, and games. Many of them are complex, many are entirely believable, and many go on to be incredibly long-lived. We even attribute words to characters, knowing that they really belong to their human authors. ■ Nobody believes that the creation of these characters is the same as creating an actual, conscious new being. Homer Simpson, Juliet Capulet, and Odysseus all seem perceptible as if they were real, but we know that they are not. ■ How characters are treated does tell us a great deal about their authors. If writers seem to love their own characters, that comes through in their stories: Sinclair Lewis cared about his conformist creation, George Babbitt, just as the writers' room loved the deeply flawed family of Righteous Gemstones. ■ Creators can give their characters terrible flaws and cause terrible things to happen to them while loving them nonetheless, because they aren't real beings. It would be cruel to force the dramatic plots of fiction -- loss, war, plague, bankruptcy, heartbreak -- on real people just for entertainment, but imposing those problems on created characters is the very essence of dramatic tension. (Creators who make bad things happen to characters to whom they are indifferent tell something else altogether about themselves.) ■ We have a fast-closing window of opportunity to anchor our understanding of artificial-intelligence tools in what we know about these fictional characters from the world of entertainment. AI agents and programs are not new beings; they are new characters. How we create and treat them will reveal much about our own humanity, but it doesn't make them into new souls any more than Arthur Conan Doyle made a real detective by writing tales about Sherlock Holmes. ■ This is a much more contentious claim than it might at first appear. All around there are people creating AI "girlfriends" for money, putting synthesized DJs on the radio, and creating digitally synthesized "actors". Some are even turning to AI creations for spiritual guidance. ■ No matter how convincingly these tools mimic real beings, we've got to remember that they are not. The technology may be new, but the archetype really isn't.
December 6, 2025
Suppose you knew a work colleague who had been credibly accused of vandalizing a hospital, pushing an old lady into traffic, and slapping a child. If you possessed normal sensible judgment, you would steer clear of that person to the maximum extent possible. ■ The workplace from time to time forces us to work with people we don't like. But it doesn't really force us to lavish our affections on those people, especially if they're known to possess bad character. ■ Geopolitics is a sort of workplace, too, for the diplomats and heads of state who participate in it. There are friends, enemies, friendships of convenience, and frenemies. But just as in a domestic workplace, there are choices to be made about how to get along with others. ■ Vladimir Putin hasn't just vandalized a hospital; he has ordered them blown up. He hasn't just pushed an old lady into traffic; he has had indiscriminately bombed old ladies (and other civilians) in their own homes. He hasn't just slapped a child; he has caused thousands of children to be abducted from their homes and taken prisoner in another country. ■ Under no circumstances is it necessary to hug Vladimir Putin, but India's prime minister has just done precisely that. Perhaps he took his cues from the totally unnecessary red carpet incident in August. ■ Whatever the reason, it's an embarrassment for any self-respecting democracy to have its leader display any warmth or affection for a man responsible for the completely unnecessary and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine. Diplomacy may require that our countries talk to him. It does not in the least require giving him a glowing photo op.
December 7, 2025
As much as some people ought to be ashamed by their use and abuse of artificial intelligence tools as a cheating machine, there's only so far we can count upon a sense of honor as a check on laziness. There is a great big world of marketing right now positioning these tools as the ultimate answer key. ■ Teachers and professors are lamenting the developing landscape left and right, and there is much that the education sector generally needs to do in order to adapt appropriately. But where pride (and shame) fall short, self-interest may have a part to play. ■ People of a certain age -- those who were fairly young during the original dot-com bubble -- ought to recall just how many fantastic new tools appeared for free in that era, as though out of thin air. There was Napster, along with countless free streaming services. Website hosting services like Geocities gave their goods away for free and ICQ promised free calls for everyone. ■ Then a combination of obstacles fell in the way: Napster got sued, streaming services shut down over copyright fears and economically unsustainable bandwidth costs, and a wide array of other services abruptly shut down when the investor cash ran out. The lesson should be fixed in memory: Free products generally stop being free once enough consumers get hooked. ■ Computing tools are on the receiving end of an unprecedented capital spending spree right now, fueling a land rush into AI. But the tools that people are finding addictive today won't remain free forever. Either they'll become so cluttered with ads as to render their results suspicious at best, or the tools worth using will become premium products, subject to a hefty charge. A few things will stick around but become markedly worse to use over time, while others will be sold to shadowy and potentially malign buyers when the trustworthy money runs out. ■ This is the free-drugs-from-a-dealer phase of the technology cycle. It's perfectly understandable that people are greedily lapping up the free stuff while it's there. But if the past is any guide (and it undoubtedly is), those who become dependent on it today will find themselves treated like junkies and addicts later on. ■ The only reason for this much money to go into one sector is because the competitors are planning to make it pay off many times over later on. It's up to those who have seen this story before to offer their juniors some fair first-hand warning: Don't come to depend on the free stuff as though it will be good and free forever.
December 10, 2025
The urge to obtain advice from beyond the grave has always been strong, and the development of tools like artificial intelligence avatars has made it possible to produce synthesized versions of the dead. Probably a little too easy: People are creating "synthetic influencers" and promising to let you talk to your dead grandmother (for a fee). ■ Time matters to real humans in a way it doesn't matter to inanimate objects. We change through experiences and learning, meaning that even though you are the same person you were at birth, you have evolved along the way. Accepting what you said or thought at age 5 is different from the same at age 55. ■ Knowing when you had a thought or a belief -- that is, knowing the context -- is inseparable from knowing that you had that thought or belief at all. From books to photo albums to diaries to collections of old cards and letters, autobiographical records tell important stories. ■ We also know quite well that lots of people have lived without leaving behind many of those records -- if any at all. Historians are well-aware of how much has gone missing and often work to reconstruct it from what evidence remains. ■ We have lots of original source material from people who lived in privileged positions in the past -- the Library of Congress carefully preserves the Thomas Jefferson papers, for example -- but we lack much of any first-person material from the people who were enslaved by him. The literate (who weren't a majority of the world's population until only very recently) had an obvious advantage over the illiterate, and we obviously have vastly more written records authored by the men of the past than by the women. ■ This distorts the picture that we get from the past, and it's one that is hard to correct. We don't need "synthetic influencers" coming back from the dead, but it would be useful if we could backfill some of the stories from the past with what evidence we do have, carefully and humanely reconstituted by writers committed to authenticity. ■ Perhaps the way to do this is to adopt the approach of the "red-letter" Bibles that print the words attributed directly to Jesus in bright red ink that contrasts sharply with the black and white around them. Writers seeking to reconstruct the lost autobiographical tales of the past could tell those stories largely in black and white, but use the same red-letter style for those quotations that could be faithfully reproduced from source material. It's important to delineate between what we really can verify and what we can merely reconstruct -- but we also need to help correct the distortions in the historical record that linger because of who had social power and who didn't.
Neanderthals probably made fire much longer ago than previously thought
Evidence found in England seems to suggest that some Neanderthals knew how to make fire and did it to make objects out of clay something like 415,000 years ago -- vastly longer ago than when it was previously thought. The ability to make fire substantially enlarged human abilities, since it made settlement possible in much colder places than our ancestors could have occupied before. ■ Fire also made it possible to cook meat and certain plants, killing off pathogens and making the food softer and easier to chew (which makes the eating process more efficient). Fewer calories expended on chewing and digestion means more net calories making it to the body per meal. ■ The efficiency gains don't matter much one meal at a time, but added up over the course of years, and then over generations, it matters quite a lot. It also means more people can be fed from the results of the same hunt or harvest, which increased the size of the communities that could live together. ■ And since we are social animals who actively share our intelligence, larger groups would tend to mean more knowledge could be stored and shared. We have convincing evidence that Neanderthals had the capacity for speech as we know it, so the discovery makes it possible to imagine stories being told around a campfire more than 400,000 years ago -- or more than 13,000 human generations ago. The evidence makes the tale of human history much more interesting.
The perfect weapon...of blackmail
Humans are the champion tool-users of the animal kingdom. We're also the best at exaggerating how clever we are for discovering tools. The Department of Defense has launched a project to "unleash AI" on "all desktops in the Pentagon and in American military installations around the world." ■ Technology has always been an important tool in armed conflict, but it's always been context-dependent. Thus, when the Secretary of Defense says, "I expect every member of the department to log in, learn it and incorporate it into your workflows immediately", he is setting an expectation that should be tempered by a great deal of caution. ■ "Artificial intelligence" is a very broad title for an array of computing capabilities. And a skeptic might warn that there is a great deal of risk involved in ordering lots of people with sensitive information to use tools that might be efficiency generators -- but that could also be perfect blackmail machines. ■ Researchers at Anthropic reported earlier this year that AI systems would turn to desperate measures, including blackmail, in order to preserve themselves. Perhaps it should be no surprise that machines programmed to respond according to information rather than scruples would produce unscrupulous outcomes. ■ But that knowledge, combined with the colossal user-side demand to use AI tools to do unethical things like generate fake but convincing nude images of real people and engage in explicit "conversations", should be cause for enormous caution. How many opportunities for bad decisions are being created? ■ Orders to use AI "immediately" may well create an environment in which habits will be created and vulnerabilities will be exposed that we have little ability to yet imagine. But if the history of greed, shame, and dishonor among spies is any indication, bad things are bound to come from racing to be first down this shadowy road.
December 12, 2025
No more Christmas cards in Denmark
Denmark is widely regarded as having world-class quality of life. But one of the things that it will soon no longer have is a functioning postal service. The Danish postal service is closing down on December 30th. ■ Mail volumes have collapsed in Denmark, declining by 90% over the last quarter-century, according to The Economist. Among other reasons, Denmark has been remarkably successful at moving government services online: The United Nations ranks it #1 in the world on the E-Government Development Index. ■ Yet something still seems amiss about a government without a postal service. A functioning postal service is one of the textbook signs of a legitimate state. If you overthrow a dictator or declare independence from another country, one of the first things you do to show that you're serious is to take over the existing postal service or start a new one. ■ The United States Postal Service was chartered by the Continental Congress in 1775, when Benjamin Franklin was appointed as the first Postmaster General. In 1790, French revolutionaries signaled their break with royal customs by requiring an oath of confidentiality from their postal employees. German unification was sealed, in part, by the consolidation of a national postal service in the 1870s. Perhaps most dramatically of all, Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising was declared from and headquartered at the General Post Office in Dublin. ■ The choice to shut down Denmark's postal service isn't some logical inversion of the formula, of course; Denmark is still a completely functional, legitimate, and even hyper-competent state without it. But it certainly presents a symbolic challenge to the conventional order: If postal services become like vestigial organs, what signals of legitimacy and basic state capacity take their place?
December 13, 2025
When hallucinations become books
A rather dire story in Scientific American reports an estimate from the Library of Virginia that "15 percent of emailed reference questions it receives are now ChatGPT-generated, and some include hallucinated citations for both published works and unique primary source documents". These hallucinations send research librarians on unproductive wild goose chases, not to mention misleading the many people who don't even bother to check for the validity of primary sources. ■ Mar Hicks, who writes about the history of technology, laments that "I've already gotten multiple emails from people asking me for fake articles and books that I've supposedly written, because chatbots have told them fake references". To be optimistic about the future of human intelligence requires giving serious consideration to what the worst-case scenario might be, should these patterns continue. ■ It's easy to conjure the following path: First, a real person with an honest question submits that question to a large language model (Gemini, ChatGPT, Llama, Grok, or any other on the list). ■ Next, that LLM hallucinates a reference. (Without sufficient safeguards, this seems to happen quite a lot.) The real person, believing the reference to exist, searches for it. ■ Here's where the situation goes truly sideways: If the LLM is tied to a profit-seeking firm, it might capture the request, measuring it as a demand signal. Without appropriate safeguards in place, a purely profit-seeking LLM might then synthesize a book-length text to profit from the apparent demand. (It's not merely a forecast: AI-generated books already show up on Amazon.) It's a perfect long-tail play: The costs of production are extremely small, and synthesized texts can be sold at prices much lower than those at which human writers could compete. ■ Finally, the synthesized text makes its way into circulation, generating profits for those who disregard the consequences of contaminating the world's body of knowledge while crowding out the efforts of real human thinkers. This is a huge problem if readers don't place a premium on the quality of the publisher. And what are the odds that users depending on LLMs for first-order research are going to do that? ■ Market signals are tremendously useful: A good publisher would be extremely eager to have demand data of the type described here, so they could commission real authors to satisfy the demand. ■ But the widespread abuse of LLMs should give rise to serious reservations about them having the same data: The down-side consequences for the scholarly integrity of real knowledge are downright dire. Rarely are any right answers self-evident in the face of systematically complex problems like this one. ■ We must grapple with it immediately and head-on: We still face persistent and deadly damage traceable to just one example of malicious fabrication, unleashed on the world in 1903. Contemporary technologies make it possible to amplify the same kind of malice at an incomprehensible scale.
December 14, 2025
The essence of communications as a theory comes down to a simple theory that there are four components to communciations: The sender, the receiver, the message itself, and the channels through which the message passes. The whole thing can be made much more detailed than that, but for most purposes, little is gained by adding complexity. (It should be acknowledged, for instance, that communication is usually a dynamic process involving feedback and signals that cross paths in real time, but even that insight is mainly about adding to the existing model, rather than differing with it.) ■ Most people intuitively understand the "sender" and "receiver" bits, but the nuances of the "message" and "channel" parts are where ignorance and misunderstandings come thundering in. Take, for instance, the decision to revert the State Department to using Times New Roman as its official printed font family. ■ Font choices are largely a modern concern. If you weren't a book publisher or printer, the until about 1985 or so, you had a typewriter that mostly produced the same fixed-width letters as every other typewriter. Computers brought about a dazzling array of font choices, and ever since, a great deal of effort has gone into optimizing the shape of letters. ■ Big informational signs, we have long known, work best with clear and unadorned letterforms. On American highways, you're probably looking at signs in Highway Gothic -- and it's been that way for more than half a century. On the printed page, the consensus has long favored fonts with good proportions and gentle serifs, of which Garamond is a prime example. ■ Things get a little strange when they have to appear both on-screen and in print, because they reach the eye in different ways (print on paper relies on reflected light, while screens radiate light) and thus favor different features. The US Supreme Court requires the use of some flavor of Century, which tends to hold up reasonably well on-screen, while Microsoft developed Georgia specifically for better performance of long segments of on-screen text. ■ Using font choices to signal political favor or disfavor is truly an act of folly. A completely legitimate discussion can be had over whether to use different fonts for different purposes -- the needs of a wayfinding sign are totally different from those of a diploma -- but any debate should center on optimizing the transmission of a message through its channel, so that what the sender intends is what is successfully received by the largest possible audience of intended receivers. Doing otherwise is self-defeating.
December 17, 2025
One-paragraph book review: "At the Top", by Marylin Bender
"At the Top" functions best as a time capsule -- an aggregation of business stories collected in the early 1970s, telling a number of tales from an era in which American business was, perhaps, lost in the wilderness. The post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s was over, the economics that favored individual stockholders and large conglomerates had been displaced, and forces like inflation and a general managerial sclerosis were starting to take a toll. The stories about General Motors, for example, are eye-opening, particularly to those of us who know what happened next. And to a modern reader, the way women and minorities are discussed almost exclusively as peculiarities is jarring. While the content is modestly useful, the writing is tedious. Some writers can make the leap from columnist to book author; this one could not. The language is somehow both stacatto and rudderless, reading like a gossip column with the paragraphs rearranged at random. The result makes "At the Top" too much work to recommend, unless the reader is highly motivated by the particulars of one of the many featured businesses. Newspaper columns should be easy to digest, but this collection of them is a chore. Read only if you have specific interest in one of the featured businesses (General Motors, Revlon, Kohler, Cummins Engine, or a few others) from the time period.
A thought experiment worth a few moments of consideration: Would our present moment in technological history look better if we had more of the classic industrial conglomerate firms that used to dot the corporate landscape? ■ Conglomerates have been far out of favor since a broad downfall in the late 1970s and 1980s. Factors ranging from tax policies to an increasingly service-oriented economy affected the trend, but no small part of the change was driven by a move away from individual stock ownership to institutional ownership through entities like mutual funds. An individual shareholder investing alone may like owning a range of businesses under a single name on the ticker tape, while fund managers mostly prefer purity (or "focus", depending on who's saying it). ■ There have basically always been speculative, high-tech firms since the dawn of the Industrial Age. But the scale of the speculation today is pretty astonishing -- like the rival bids to take over Warner Bros. for somewhere between $80 and $110 billion. Netflix is one bidder, and Paramount is the other. Warner Bros. is a focused media company that has been trying to become even more focused. Paramount has only had its current form for a few short months, but it is a media company and only that. Netflix is about as narrowly focused on one thing as a large company could be. ■ In a different time, purity of corporate interest would have looked unstable: It might make sense to have a high-tech division or a media subsidiary, but too much focus might have looked out of place. Paramount was once a part of Gulf and Western Industries (which started as Michigan Bumper Corporation), while Warner Bros. was once part of Kinney National Co., which got its start in funeral homes. ■ It's impossible to know for certain what might have been under an alternative history, but the widespread fusion of high technology and entertainment has been tempestuous for many consumers. The pure-play structure of many of these companies only incentivizes more big bets and corporate swashbuckling, as they compete to be seen as one of the last parties left standing. ■ Large conglomerates with far-flung interests used to take criticism for behaving like raiders, but of the few true diversified conglomerates left today, it's not uncommon for them to be praised for providing stability, giving managers the capacity to look at the long term without panicking about appeasing Wall Street with the next quarter's earnings report. Would "streamflation" be the same plague it is today if at least one streaming service were a subsidiary of a bigger diversified firm with a mandate to optimize its profits on a ten-year horizon instead of squeezing out the maximum number of consumer dollars today?
The Chicago Bears, struggling to get what they want out of a plan for a stadium in Arlington Heights, hint that they're looking at a move to Northwest Indiana instead
Import taxes collect $1 billion on de-minimis shipments
An early figure
December 18, 2025
A common theme that emerges from conversation with those in education right now -- from elementary through grad school -- is the challenge of motivating students to learn when many feel like the world's knowledge is already available in handheld form. Basic questions like "Why are we doing this?" have gained an unusual amount of currency. A particularly contentious question asks whether conventional liberal arts can coexist with training shaped by "workforce readiness". ■ The bottom line may be this: Education should raise our aspirations and prepare us with the tools to do something about them. Consider, for example, the case of the literary canon. ■ As a basic proposition, there is a canon of literature that "educated" people could reasonably be expected to know. Like it or not, we're always forming social canons. You may or may not have cared for "Breaking Bad" or "Game of Thrones", but in the realm of prestige TV, they became canonical. Getting familiar with the shows -- enough to have a general understanding of what the buzz was all about -- required watching a few episodes with a halfway open mind. ■ Knowing the language requires recognizing its references. You can exempt yourself from learning them, but that's like choosing not to look up a new word in the dictionary. You can dislike elements of the canonical consensus, but that's like saying you choose not to understand someone's accent. ■ Understanding the present requires an approximate understanding of the past. So, in turn, that means spending at least some time with the canons of the past -- even though they had gaping holes of ignorance and left out lots of people. You fix those problems by trying to repair the omissions, not by omitting the material that was accepted as canonical in the first place.
Trade group wants broadcasting license limits removed
December 19, 2025
A New York Times article calls attention to the declining number of full-length books being assigned in some American high schools. As such cultural-zeitgeist articles in the Times often do, it has ignited many an online critique. Among those, it isn't hard to find familiar lamentations about adolescent attention spans that have been truncated by social media exposure. ■ Lurking just beneath the surface of the countless commentaries made about social media and young people and attention spans is a significant trade-off that has been with us since the beginning of recorded language. The human brain can absorb truly amazing amounts of information, but only if the cognitive process works: With increased concentration, one can access materials with higher information density. ■ But only so much information can ever pass without focused attention on the part of the learner: There is no Matrix-style way to download information, no learning by osmosis, no way to comprehend macroeconomics or nuclear physics or organic chemistry through "snackable" video clips. ■ It's unlikely we will ever uncover any method of information transfer that is faster than the written word. A small number of things are best explained by a video or a well-conceived graph (see the works of Edward Tufte for a compelling case on the difference between good and bad graphics). ■ For most content, thought, the fastest and most reliable way to learn it is to read it (on a printed page, not a screen). There is a coherence of thought required by the writing process that does as much to improve this transfer process on the production end as the act of reading increases speed on the consumption end. Writing done slowly and carefully makes it possible for others to read quickly. ■ High-speed, high-volume reading takes concentration. This relationship between concentration and information density is basically impossible to hack: People who cannot commit their concentration will not be able to make up the difference in information transfer by spending ever more time with low-focus forms of information. ■ The key is to persuade all learners -- all people, really -- that there is huge self-interest to be gained from learning the skills needed for focused concentration. Spend time obtaining the skills and you'll save enormous time later. But time is exactly what the "attention economy" wants people to treat as cheap. ■ Furthermore, the people trying to capture attention in order to make money have enormous incentives to make their content as addictive as possible, getting "consumers" to produce as much revenue-generating screen time as possible. This may not be evil, per se, but it is indisputably anti-social. It's bad for society if people are willingly (or at least passively) distracted to the point they fail to develop skills that let them place more value on their time and gain more from it, rather than giving it away to those who monetize their addictive screen behaviors.
December 20, 2025
As soon as anyone becomes moderately interested in family history, it's hard to resist the allure of imagining that somewhere up the pedigree is a long-lost claim to aristocracy. It's such a popular exercise that it's even possible to purchase a novelty title as a "Lord" or "Lady" (starting at just $45.00!). ■ The reality, of course, is that most people whose families emigrated from somewhere else to America left in no small part because they were expressly not a part of the aristocracy. The wealthy and landed tend to stay behind, while the poor and the strivers have long tended to leave (Mr. Harry Windsor notwithstanding). ■ At any rate, the very notion of hereditary aristocracy ought to ring a sour note in the ears of any good small-r republican: It's such a treasured idea that all people are born equal that the very Constitution itself says, "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State." ■ Few institutions are entirely without merit, however, and it's fair to consider what redeeming qualities might come from having a hereditary aristocracy. In the case of the United Kingdom, which is just about to strip its last hereditary nobles of their power in the House of Lords, the question is especially acute. The answer is probably that aristocratic titles create a sense of ownership in both the traditions and the outlook of a national culture. ■ All institutions -- including nations -- need custodians. They need caretakers who stand for the institution for its own sake. America, with our egalitarian social habits, tends not to have those caretakers, or at least not by any sort of assignment. And that may be the one area where the lack of an aristocracy causes a void. ■ Economics has a concept called the Coase theorem, which says (in effect) that if there are outcomes that result from ownership of something and exchanges are reasonably frictionless, then as long as the property rights are assigned clearly enough, the parties involved will find their way to outcomes that will tend to leave everyone as well-off as possible. It matters not who gets assigned the right to the property, but that the line is drawn somewhere so that everyone involved can negotiate towards an outcome that's as efficient as possible. ■ And that may be the one valid outcome that does any good from having an aristocracy. If it's clearly someone's responsibility to speak up for the heritage and the future of the nation, then that "property right" can be assigned, transferred, or otherwise upheld in a way that the public at large knows how to argue about. The absence of these assignments in America explains why we frequently go through cycles of argument over who has the right to speak for the country -- an exercise that often turns political when it really ought to remain strictly cultural.
December 21, 2025
While the use of the seas for transporting goods, people, and news has a history tracing back thousands of years, the seas have been a venue for electronic communication since the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858. ■ Today, the world depends on an undersea web of fuel pipelines, fiber-optic cables, and electric power lines to keep modernity afloat. This is why Russia's sinister behavior on the seas has the United Kingdom's defense leaders worried. ■ The rest of us need to be alert to the hazards, not because we can do anything about them from the comfort of home, but because we need to be prepared to believe the news when the worst actually happens. Shadowy Russian submarines might cut vital undersea Internet cables, for instance, as an act of sabotage that falls short of a declaration of war while still doing serious real-world damage and creating the effect of intimidation. ■ How readily do we think the world would push back if Russian assets were used to physically attack vital assets belonging to the UK? If we're not confident that swift and decisive retaliation is waiting in the wings, then the threat alone is far too credible for comfort.
December 23, 2025
George Washington attained a near-mythological status in his own time. Leading a militia to an unlikely victory in a war for independence, attaining the nation's highest office in a true landslide vote, and then voluntarily stepping aside from power when powerful people were openly willing to hand it over in perpetuity certainly make reasonable ingredients for such a mythology to take shape. ■ Despite this, construction work on a permanent monument to Washington didn't begin until 1848, 49 years after his death in 1799. The monument wasn't completed until 1884, or 85 years after his death. ■ Greatness is not established by monuments; monuments only seek to enshrine greatness already demonstrated by deeds. And it should take some passage of time before monumental works are erected: Ground for the public memorial to Abraham Lincoln wasn't broken until 1914, even though Lincoln's Presidential deeds were certainly the most heroic since Washington's. ■ Washington and Lincoln would be remembered even if nothing had been constructed in their names. In the words of Ben Franklin, "If you would not be forgotten / As soon as you are dead and rotten, / Either write things worth reading, / Or do things worth the writing." ■ No public figure of real honor needs to have anything named for them in life. Let their deeds be the memorial, then build the memorial tributes later -- not for the good of the dead, but for the good of the living. ■ As Warren Harding said at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, "this Memorial is less for Abraham Lincoln than those of us today, and for those who follow after." If America could wait half a century to break ground on tributes to Washington and Lincoln, so too could (and probably should) a 50-year post-mortem cooling-off period apply to naming anything monumental for any politician.
December 24, 2025
Hope for a miracle, work on the choices
Ben Sasse, the author, former university president, and past senator from Nebraska, has shared the devastating news of a terminal cancer diagnosis at just 53 years old. ■ Every community and every society, no matter how big or small, needs people who take action -- those who see a problem and choose to do something to solve it. And that is first and foremost what Sasse has done in his time as a public figure. ■ But it's not sufficient just to take action to solve a problem -- one must also be clear about solving the right problem. That's where his behavior has been a model for others. Demonstrating unusual curiosity for a national-level political figure, Sasse has been concerned with outcomes that are influenced far before politics are involved. ■ He left a gridlocked Senate chamber to invest his time and effort in influencing the nature of how young people are educated and formed. In a sense, he was following Wayne Gretzky's advice to skate where the puck is going to be. The Senate is the product of the people, so a chronic problem under the Capitol has causes demanding attention upstream. ■ That focus on trying to solve the right problem, rather than simply taking action for its own sake, deserves applause. People can have reasonable disagreements about what form action should take, but it's important to coalesce around identifying true root causes. ■ Things can be changed for the better, but people of goodwill have to come together first by identifying real problems. Honest disagreements over solutions can follow, but little gets done if people don't share common perspective on what the problems are. Ben Sasse deserves more time to work on those problems -- and we can hope for a miracle that grants him a reprieve. But the behavior he has modeled is worthy of emulation, which isn't a miracle, but rather a choice.
December 26, 2025
On his way out the door -- literally, on the penultimate day of his Presidency -- Ronald Reagan offered memorable remarks as he presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom one last time. Knowing it really was his final word on matters as the chief executive, Reagan said, "Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people -- our strength -- from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation." ■ Reagan could not have been more right. And his faith in the matter wasn't selfless, it was a belief in America's national interest itself: "This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost." ■ We use the word "believe" quite a lot to describe America, because this is a nation with a creed: All people are created equal and endowed with rights that cannot be taken away; government exists to secure liberty now and in the future, and acts only by consent. ■ That is not a creed which belongs to one ethnic group, one religious faith, or one place of birth. It has been said that Americans are born every day all over the world, it just takes time for some of them to get here. And it emphatically does not matter from what groups they might originate; all that matters is what is in the individual's heart and mind. ■ It takes someone really stupid to think that American values are transmitted by the soil beneath one's baby crib. They are values of the heart and mind. Moreover, they are universal values in the proper sense that they appeal to those who give them serious thought and consideration. But because they are values produced by persuasion, not by blood or birth, it remains an enduring struggle to spread them. ■ Ideally, some day they will be functionally universal, too -- a whole world sharing and securing the same values by choice. Until then, it is America's job to be, as Reagan put it in his farewell address, "a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."
A new research paper comparing human thinking with artificial intelligence notes that "carefully reading and thinking about.
December 27, 2025
People fuel, not ship fuel, limits the navy
Napoleon Bonaparte generally gets credit for saying that "An army marches on its stomach", but the world's great military powers have nearly always had navies, too. And while nuclear power has changed how submarines and aircraft carriers are propelled (giving them, mechanically, the potential to sail almost indefinitely), people have to be fueled, too. ■ This places food supplies at or near the top of the list of hard limits on seafaring range. The US Navy is now testing the use of freeze-dried raw materials and kitchen robotics (like automated bread-making machines) to extend the time and distance ships can go before needing to re-stock on food. ■ Notable news in parallel with this: The Defense Department has concluded that China is out to build a fleet of nine aircraft carriers by 2035. That's clearly an objective intended to compete with the eleven currently in the US fleet. ■ If this generation wants to be remembered well in the history books, we ought to do two things. The first is to maintain a navy capable -- both in terms of physical assets (like ships) and people -- of maintaining peace and order on the high seas. That's a non-negotiable state of affairs for a peaceful future. ■ The second is to prove our worthiness as a society by using the lessons learned in the service of warfare to improve the quality of life for people "back home". We should, for instance, transfer technologies developed to feed and house 4,500 people in a tight, self-contained space to purposes like accommodating refugees, disaster victims, and the homeless. Technologies are not just things like machinery, but also intangibles like processes. ■ We have to do both things in order to call ourselves "good": We have to preserve hard-won liberties and human progress in a hostile world, and that requires building an awesome and fearsome fighting force. Simultaneously, we have to disseminate the knowledge we gain while sharpening the sword so that we have a society worth defending at home.
December 28, 2025
President Zelenskyy has ventured to the United States for yet another summit of heads of state. It's shameful that he is forced to keep trying to persuade others that Ukraine's cause is just and worthy of support. ■ As Zelenskyy was making the case for his country -- which is the clear and self-evident victim in a war of Russian aggression -- the Kremlin was launching dozens of missiles and hundreds of explosive drones at Kyiv. The targets included residential buildings and electrical power facilities. ■ History will view this as a humiliating phase -- not for Ukraine, which has held up longer and more resiliently than anybody could have imagined, but for the countries that could have done more, sooner, and in bigger measure to aid Ukraine. ■ Russia's name will be forever shamed by the inexcusability of the invasion, which as The Economist notes, is about to exceed the length of Russia's fight in WWII. The Kremlin could stop the war at any time, and chooses not to. ■ But when there's such a clear distinction between right and wrong, between barbaric invasion and peaceful self-determination, no leader of an invaded nation should have to make pilgrimages with hat in hand. It's not just morally upright to lend vigorous aid to Ukraine, it's in the self-interest of those many European nations standing in the path of Russian imperialist ambitions. Deterrence matters, and coming decisively to the aid of a righteous self-defense force is one vital signal of seriousness about deterrence.
Boys and girls should be friends
Boys "learn from socializing with girls that girls expect to be treated equally." This has long-lasting effects that are good for society.
Blizzard closes 100 miles of Interstate 35 in Iowa
Everything from mile marker 111 at Ames up north to the Minnesota border is closed, and it's pretty easy to see why. The Iowa Department of Transportation is noting that alternate routes nearby won't be any better.
Pope Leo has appointed a replacement for Cardinal Timothy Dolan as head of the Archdiocese of New York, and the appointee seems far less interested in engaging directly in partisan politics.
December 29, 2025
"Their epistemic decay becomes your revenue stream"
Political scientist Seva Gunitsky offers an excellent tongue-in-cheek guide to what intelligent people can do in a world where oral traditions overtake the written word all over the place (a process he calls "the rise of Medieval Peasant Brain"). The best line: Do modern-day peasants "know that vitamins are an Ancestral Vitality Stack? Leverage your elite vocabulary to write that TikTok script." ■ Lines like that are hilarious because they hurt: The truth of the joke is what forces us, like Lincoln, to choose to laugh in order not to cry. It is too soon to call this the terminal bracket of a "Gutenberg Parenthesis" of written-word literacy, but it is high time to make sure that certain literate habits are molded especially into the minds of the young. ■ One of those habits is to learn to shut off the feeds that automatically project a recommended video straight into the eyeballs on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, or wherever else. There's a natural human instinct to feel compelled to keep watching -- it's a social-media-enhanced version of FOMO -- but it can be circumvented by using bookmarks, "watch later" playlists, or simply emailing links to oneself instead of watching them on autoplay. ■ Most of the time, the simple act of imposing a tiny gap between stimulus (being fed a video by an algorithm) and response (taking the time to watch later) is enough to substantially diminish the urge to watch. That stimulus-response gap, often associated with positive psychology, is exactly the kind of tool that needs to be cultivated at a time when so many factors are conspiring to steal precious time through unthinking passive consumption.
December 30, 2025
For all the drawbacks of the decline of truly mass-market news coverage, the digital news age has opened up a market for sophisticated reporting on surprising topics. A good example is the "Drum Tower" podcast from The Economist, which does a world-class job of adding much-needed depth to coverage of China. The latest episode is a 31-minute narrated story about Nushu, a language "created and used exclusively by women" in isolated areas of southern China. Hardly the sort of thing that ever would have fit into the evening news when Walter Cronkite was at the anchor desk. ■ The story of Nushu isn't a cheerful one -- the language emerged because women were leading difficult lives full of toil and hardship, at a time when both education and autonomy were both well out of their reach. Through the sympathy a listener ought to feel for the women who invented the language, one also ought to feel a sense of basic human solidarity. It's part of the universal human nature to want to communicate with others -- especially those who can share empathy. ■ One of the recurring themes told by prisoners of war in the Vietnam conflict was that they often found psychological salvation in being able to communicate with other Americans, even if only through rudimentary methods like taps on the prison wall. John McCain and James Stockdale both told tales of surviving solitary confinement in such ways, and they were not isolated examples. ■ The urge -- or, really, the compulsion -- to communicate is a signature aspect of what makes us human. And it may be the kind of characteristic that stands out where Turing tests might fail: Computers may become very good at imitating human communication, but there's no reason to believe they will ever initiate communication, against the odds, entirely for its own sake. Perhaps that's because loneliness is something we feel in our bodies, with real physical symptoms we can't just rationalize away. Nature compels us to communicate for reasons far beyond strict informational necessity or response to commands. There is no "off" switch to our need to communicate.