Gongol.com Archives: September 2026
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September 1, 2026
A recent transfer student at Arizona State University is in serious medical peril after collapsing at an outdoor practice at Sun Angel Stadium in Tempe on August 20th. ■ The National Weather Service had been warning day after day after day about the need to remain hydrated and take regular cooling breaks from the heat. But that's not what happened in the hockey workout, according to attorneys for the family, who say the workout lasted more than an hour and "not everyone" got water breaks. ■ The story is unsettlingly familiar on two levels. First is the level of the basic facts of the situation. Workouts that claim a basis in military training (the ASU incident was purportedly led by a Green Beret veteran) are faddishly popular, and they often involve drills meant to mimic the relationship between an overbearing drill instructor and a bunch of ill-prepared recruits. Deprivation of things like rest, shade, and water are sometimes used to bolster the "tough" image. ■ But that points to the second level of familiarity: Where superficial demonstrations of "toughness" are revered regardless of their hollowness. Physical strength doesn't always look like a muscle-bound tough guy ripping through a sleeveless shirt; sometimes, it looks like the 4'8" frame of Simone Biles. Power can sometimes be best expressed through self-control. Discipline can be demonstrated by knowing when to pause rather than pressing on. Real athletic dominance sometimes emerges by mastering the brain rather than any particular muscle. ■ No 21-year-old should end up in a coma because of a workout. Whatever the specifics of the case may be, the familiarity of the environment apparently created by coaches and coaching adjuncts is tragically unnecessary -- and it reflects a misguided mentality about toughness that ought to be quashed.
GE shows off hybrid aircraft propulsion
It's not just cars that can run on electricity anymore
A family from Ukraine who fled to Minnesota under a US program is now planning to leave because the government has ended the program that got them here and left them with no legal means to stay. This is a stark example of the government getting everything wrong: The war they were fleeing is still underway, the peril is ongoing, and they've done everything we could reasonably expect to be good residents here. It's cruel and stupid not to give them a way to stay.
America as a project in pluralism
If you believe in "E pluribus unum", then pluralism shouldn't be a tough sell
September 3, 2026
To name something is a tremendously powerful act. It's one of the first great privileges extended to Adam in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. The act of naming a child is so often surrounded by such great religious ceremony that atheist and humanist groups have co-opted the ceremonial instinct. Similarly, one of the most meaningful moments in Deaf culture is for a person to receive a name sign all their own. ■ To bestow a name is an act of power. To try to change a name is an attempt to exercise power, as well. Sometimes it's an act of aggression (as when a bully coins an unflattering nickname for a victim). Other times, it merely looks pathetic (as when someone tries a little too hard to self-apply a nickname). ■ To give, adopt, or change a name is always an act of power -- one that can be used with love and respect or with hostility and malice. Names are so sacred to individuals that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says explicitly that every child "shall have the right from birth to a name". ■ Google and Apple have capitulated to a preposterous attempt to change the name of a lake that has been in place for hundreds of years longer than the United States has been a country. Microsoft and Mapquest have not. ■ Those who have participated in this attempted act of maritime unpersoning will have to apologize, sooner or later. What has always been the name will always remain the name, and it's morally treacherous to pretend otherwise.
September 4, 2026
One of the main attractions of a disruptive event is that it tends to flatten the competitive environment, allowing small, nimble upstarts to enter into battle with old, entrenched incumbents at some level of relative parity. The same story tends to play out across business, technology, culture, and politics, among other domains of human activity: A breakthrough occurs, surprising success stories bubble up, and a new balance of power ensues. ■ That may be fine, as far as it goes, but it's dangerous to forget that every existing order is generally the product of lots of small corrections, forgotten iterations, and embedded pieces of information that incrementally built up along the way. Even an object as seemingly simple as a bathroom faucet represents a long cumulative history of changes that led to the present state. ■ Someone may come along and invent the revolutionary "HandWashr" app to completely disrupt the old industry, and it might even work. But the revolutionary step always risks omitting important insights from its incremental predecessor. And even when it does not, it still only resets the clock on a whole new generation of incremental changes to follow. ■ Sooner or later, the new innovation becomes the old order. It's up to the broader public not only to recognize these tendencies, but also to prepare for the changes, Real disruptive events don't make incremental changes go away, they just move us to a different place in the evolutionary cycle. Some useful knowledge is often lost in the the disruptive event, and we have to beware of the risk that the architects of the new reset don't get away with pretending that they are immune to the need for their own corrective evolutions. Nobody is that brilliant.
September 6, 2026
The UN General Assembly often underperforms its potential, in no small part because blocs devoted to selfish interests manage to manipulate the proceedings. But the assembly's overwhelming vote in favor of displacing the Mercator map projection with the "Equal Earth" projection is a rare move that won over almost every country present. ■ The Mercator projection may be useful for navigation, but it's terrible as a flat representation of a round Earth. The distortions involved are massive, particularly around the relative sizes of different landmasses. The "Equal Earth" design is intended to replicate the basic familiar look of a world map but with the landmass sizes corrected and standardized. This makes Africa look much larger and Greenland much smaller, among other things. The US delegation opposed the change. ■ But why? In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "We must face the facts as they are." And the fact is that the Mercator map doesn't usefully represent the facts of the globe. ■ A principled objection is raised by Ukraine, which opposes the way some of its territory is represented in one of the versions of the map. That objection is sound. But the broad principle that a map should try to reflect a usefully accurate view of the world is one worth supporting.
September 8, 2026
When one AI researcher publishes a personal announcement that "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade" and another responds by saying, "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade", even sober deliberative types ought to take a moment to digest what is being said aloud. A 10% extinction risk from a wayward asteroid would surely be enough to mobilize an all-hands-on deck response from the world's scientific and engineering communities. So why isn't this purported 10% risk being taken with equal concern? ■ The incentives right now are almost incomprehensible in their complexity. It's like we're in a large casino, where every slot machine has a Powerball-scale jackpot, a handful of whales have hired everyone in Nevada to keep pressing "SPIN" on every machine in sight, no matter what, and the whales don't actually know their account balances. Meanwhile, the roof is on fire and could cave in at any moment. ■ As has so often been the case throughout history, what we have is not a technical problem but a human one: We live and breathe and feel, and we can do those things with or without these tools. The only moral thing to do with the tools is to make life (specifically, human life) better off. We have never held the capacity to forecast all of the outcomes of a new technology (nobody hanging around with James Watt looked down the road and foresaw global warming), but we have nearly always known that human endeavors come with social responsibilities not to harm others: "Do not plot evil against your neighbors, when they live at peace with you" (Proverbs 3:29). ■ Navigating a strange new world ought to be done with intention and due caution not to do harm. Whether the right people with the right sensibilities are in the right places making the right decisions may not be known for some time. But we definitely know enough already to realize that if anyone close to the action is sounding alarms as dire as "10% extinction risk for humanity", then it's worth placing the problem on the front burner.
September 9, 2026
The unfortunate rise of "true crime" as a leading podcast genre doesn't reflect well on our progress as a society. Other than the particular mode of delivery, it's nothing new: Television shows like "48 Hours" have thrived for decades on the same formula that sold sensationalist newspapers a century or more ago. Some people just like to digest their scary stories with a side of real-life misfortune. ■ We have to take care not to let that numb us to the realities of truly sinister things actually taking place in real time around us, like the unconscionable kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russia. It's behavior so vile and so loathsome that it eclipses any story that a podcaster might "rip from the headlines". ■ More importantly, it is a form of cruelty we can do something to stop -- or, at least, one we can monitor until it can be reversed. The Yale School of Public Health operates the Humanitarian Research Lab, which "generates evidence for operational response and accountability in humanitarian crises", in part by preserving data in a variety of forms that could help to correct injustices and prosecute those responsible. Literally tens of thousands of children have been abducted by Russia. ■ But the lab needs funding to conduct its work, and that funding might be gone or disrupted by year-end. It's not even a lot of money, in the scheme of things: About $25 million, or about the cost of six Patriot missiles ($3.9 million apiece for just the missiles, not including the launchers). ■ Russia's kidnapping of Ukrainian children is true crime of a monstrous variety on an almost unfathomable scale. If we cared more about the actual victims of crime than about the (dubious) entertainment value to be experienced from reading or listening to "true crime" stories, then it would be easy to convince the government to fund the Yale program without a moment's hesitation -- purely in the interest of justice and human rights. ■ The lab is trying to fundraise on its own, but of all the worthy things a government like ours should be able to afford, high on that list should be an almost trivial amount in the pursuit of reuniting children with their families and ultimately holding war criminals accountable for their savage cruelty.
September 10, 2026
Few things are as reliably predictable as the wretched cowardice of those who fear losing their grip on illegitimate power. Real, authentic legitimacy in government comes from delivering on public expectations and maintaining the earned consent of the governed. ■ It's much the same in other spheres of leadership: Good leaders in business, voluntary associations, and even religion -- even when not democratically chosen -- maintain their legitimacy through an exchange of consent with their employees, members, and followers. It's not always exactly a matter of giving the people what they want, but over the long term, it generally weighs out whether leaders have given the people the type of service they most need. ■ But illegitimate leaders -- the ones who hold power through force, intimidation, violence, oppression, fraud, or manipulation -- are quick to reveal themselves as cowards when faced with even the slightest challenge. ■ Whatever remains of Hong Kong's special protections for rights and liberties under Chinese rule has effectively vanished because of this type of cowardice, with a court sentencing three activists to prison terms of five to seven years for organizing candlelight vigils in honor of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. ■ Imagine just how weak and unsteady a power structure has to be to take a peaceful commemoration of the massacre of another peaceful commemoration and turn it into a criminal offense. It is cartoonishly unjustifiable. When people holding power reveal themselves to be thin-skinned, short-tempered, or violently overbearing, it's a telltale sign they are unconcerned with legitimacy and want only to preserve their leverage over others. ■ Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in freedom should be quick to remove those kinds of miscreants from power through our own legal means, and to treat the contemptible ones living beyond our borders as the obstacles to human flourishing that they are. We may not be able to remove them, but we don't owe them a shred of respect, deference, or regard.
September 11, 2026
Twenty-five years after Pearl Harbor, the world was far from peaceful, but Japan and (West) Germany had been not just thoroughly subdued but also meaningfully resurrected. Both of the nations that had instigated World War II had been reintegrated into world affairs and the global economy, not to stray again. Peace and prosperity had triumphed, at least where the Soviet Union wasn't able to stop them. ■ The story was far different 25 years after the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania. Now barely remembered outside of history textbooks, it was a savage attack on innocent civilians that took 1,195 lives, including 128 Americans. Woodrow Wilson was not up to the task of responding decisively, leading an editorialist at the New York Tribune to write one year later that "We have been learning that what is going forward remorselessly, steadily, is a war between civilization and barbarism, between humanity and savagery", and, presciently, that "This war in Europe is going on until the German idea is crushed or conquers." 25 years after the Lusitania was attacked, the world was right back at war. That outcome may not have been predictable, as such, but there is scant evidence that the right people were willing to spend those years charting a better course. ■ We are now 25 years past the sadistic attacks on the World Trade Center and the nation's capital. We are not embroiled in a world war as we were in 1940, but nor are we on a golden trajectory as it seemed we were in 1966. The surprise attack of 9/11 didn't come from a nation-state as it had in 1915 or 1941, but there is very little that one might find reassuring about affairs in the region where the United States has been fighting wars ever since. ■ The effort that went into rebuilding, reordering, and reorienting the world that followed WWII was vast. Hard-headed leaders like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall saw how an inept and short-sighted response to World War I had only led to a return of disorder and bloodshed. So they made plans, accepted hard choices, and used their resources to forge a better world after the conflict of their own times. In many ways, their actions looked dovish -- but they understood that a degree of charitability, even towards their past enemies, would make their own country safer in the end. ■ They built up international institutions, spread trade and prosperity, and made durable alliances. It's not like everything went perfectly between 1941 and 1966, but principles like liberty, magnanimity, and cooperation got to lead the way more often than not. And things got better. ■ Twenty-five years can be a very long time over which a lot of good can be done. It can also be a long time during which mismanagement may let problems compound on one another. We are always making choices along the way, whether to mimic the ugly path from 1915-1940 or the much better one from 1941-1966. It does not seem like we've used the bridge from 2001-2026 very well. The bad news is the time we've wasted cannot be recovered. The good news is that we still have those role models from the past and can choose their course again at any time.
September 12, 2026
Betting on everything going wrong
Few fads have exploded quite like betting on prediction markets, which have become multi-billion-dollar arenas for guessing about the future. Sports betting, of course, is nothing new: That's been around since long before ancient audiences bet on chariot races at the Colosseum in Rome. ■ Nor is it really new and novel to gamble on the outcomes of future events. But what is different is the scale of access: There are literally hundreds of markets on what the President of the United States will say out loud alone, plus scores of others on economic and cultural events. The markets are global and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. ■ In other words, the "market-making" obstacle has been removed entirely: You don't need to convince the fan sitting next to you at a game to make a bet, because there are millions of people waiting to bet on the other side of your phone. Apart from the very sensible concerns that ought to arise over the risk that some people will find themselves addicted to gambling in disordered ways, there's also the considerable problem that the naive will think it is an actual pathway to wealth. ■ One columnist noted that more than a quarter of young adults responding to one survey considered sports betting "a deliberate part of their long-term strategy" for future financial security. If the math hasn't already sunk in for them, perhaps an adage from Benjamin Franklin will: "No gains without pains." ■ But an even bigger hazard comes from another Franklinesque warning: "'Tis easy to see, hard to foresee." If there is one completely safe bet to take, it's that some people with inside information (those who can "see") are betting on what they know to take advantage of those merely trying to "foresee". And the greater the weightiness of the matters on which the wagering takes place, the more severe the moral hazard that some people will manipulate real-world events in order to enrich themselves. ■ Access to decision-making power or secret information, long regulated by ethics rules in government and insider-trading regulations, becomes a form of currency to those who can hide their tracks just well enough (or use corruption to shield themselves from prosecution). That's not just a financial problem: It's a civilization-threatening one.
(Video) Lewis Black's rant about "maxxing" trends is a classic in his own unique style, but it's also a helpful highlight reel of a deeply unhelpful phenomenon that's been around since long before TikTok. ■ CNN started it: The 24-hour news cycle. Or, more properly, the 24-hour "news-like" cycle. A true "all-news" format had already been on the air for more than a decade, pioneered by 1010 WINS in New York in 1965. Other all-news radio stations followed, so CNN's launch in 1980 wasn't the birth of continuous news coverage -- just the birth of 24-hour "news" that didn't repeat every 30 minutes. ■ In the end, it's hard to assess it as an improvement. Only so much happens in a day -- the essential brand promise of all-news radio was and remains "You give us 22 minutes: We'll give you the world". It's a promise of self-containment. ■ The only reason "news" packages give time and treatment to faddish nonsense like "maxxing" is because they're trying to fill an infinite void. In the end, nobody ends up wiser for it. Nonsense gets platformed, time gets wasted, and people end up with lower opinions of other people because of it. ■ A typical issue of The Economist probably contains about 65,000 to 70,000 words. A very swift reader going at 500 words per minute would need more than two hours to read it cover-to-cover. And when done, that reader would know more about the world than if they had watched "news" on television for 24 hours a day for an entire week straight. ■ But even still, almost nobody reads The Economist cover-to-cover (even though it's thoughtful, comprehensive, and edited to a fine polish) because there's really only so much that anybody needs to know about current events. And we certainly don't need to get swallowed up by hours upon hours of seductive filler masquerading as news.
September 14, 2026
Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, and a cluster of AI company executives have all sounded alarms about the rate of change in artificial intelligence development. They don't all agree on what causes them the most concern, but there is a common refrain that effectively says, "We don't know how to stop the technology if it gets out of hand." ■ That isn't an unwarranted concern. The language of "AI could kill us all" seems a bit alarmist, but any truly existential risk ought to be taken seriously. Even a low-probability risk deserves attention when the stakes are extremely high. ■ But we shouldn't let the sci-fi concern overshadow lower-stakes risks that are utterly certain. It is absolutely the case that artificial intelligence tools are being deployed in coordinated ways to cause lots of social-scale troubles. Misinformation and disinformation are already being generated at scale, and it is completely certain that bad actors with lots of bots to deploy are going to use them to create cunning and manipulative schemes to steal and defraud people by the millions. ■ On the personal level, the jeopardy could be even worse. It should be easy to imagine malicious people with axes to grind using AI tools to carry out terrible vendettas against others: Romantic ex-partners, business competitors, electoral rivals...the list could be endless. All it really takes is for an unscrupulous person to assemble the right prompt to get Grok or Gemini or Claude or any of the rest to build them customized action plans to ruin someone else's reputation, business, credit score, or other store of social value. Some of the tools would even execute the plan, for the right combination of tokens and prompts. ■ It's not enough to say that we should worry about far-out, hard-to-fathom misuses of a frontier technology when there are simple, almost pedestrian ways in which the tools can be used for evil on a much smaller scale. Worrying about a technology out of control isn't wrong -- but we can't overlook the plain fact that we don't need self-interested, out-of-control machines for harm to be done. ■ Self-interested, out-of-control human beings are already here, and the harms they can conjure up when armed with extremely powerful computing tools are already more than enough to be worthy of attention. A tool that could potentially destroy every life demands close attention, but a tool that could be used to ruin one life at a time (but in volume) could be nearly as bad.
September 16, 2026
Canada isn't Europe, but it might be moving next door
Stupid self-defeating behavior by the United States might be pushing our closest neighbor farther away
What South Korea's superannuation teaches the US
Getting older takes changes
If a fake actor will do anything, doesn't that put real actors in jeopardy?
NBC "interviews" an AI-generated "actor" that knows no way to say "no"
Federal Reserve raises interest rates
Not something they do just for fun.
September 17, 2026
There's nothing unusual about the Federal Reserve making a quarter-point increase in the target interest rate. Nor, historically, is there anything all that unusual about a 4% Federal funds rate: It's been much higher than that in the past. ■ Inflation is higher than the 2% rate officially being used as a target -- again, a pretty ordinary target rate in the modern era -- and the only real tool the Federal Reserve has to slow the rate of inflation is to raise interest rates. If it costs more to borrow, people will (in the aggregate) tend to borrow less, and less borrowing tends to mean less demand for goods and services. For a simple and stark example, fewer people tend to buy new houses when mortgage rates hit 7% than when they're down at 3.15%, and the houses that they'll buy at the higher rate will tend to be smaller and cheaper than what sells when the rates are lower. ■ No amount of ranting and raving is going to change the basic reality: Many important costs (like fuel) are rising, the geopolitical environment is uncertain to the point it's unsettling lots of people who understand how factors like trade influence the economy, and weird promises like $5,000 unsolicited payments drawn entirely from deficit spending only fan the flames of inflation. ■ The one thing about markets is that they can't be bullied very much for very long before self-interest (expressed strictly in dollars and cents) takes over. Even when someone has tried to perfect the art of sly salesmanship, when there's real money on the table, facts speak louder than words.
September 18, 2026
We really don't acknowledge often enough how much American cities have changed for the better over the last 40 to 50 years. The difference is visible in many ways, both metaphorical and literal, as skylines have thickened while parks and trails have flourished, and economies have boomed while downtown residency has become thoroughly mainstream. ■ The defining images of cities well through the 1980s and into the 1990s were crime, vice, and decay. Pop culture was chock-full of depictions of cities as cesspools, full of muggings and streetcorner drug deals. Some of those depictions were true to reality, while others played on tired old prejudices. ■ Now? Cities are nice, generally speaking. They're often wealthy, full of amenities, and generally clean. Shopping and entertainment districts have expanded and keep late-night hours in well-illuminated safety. Urban living gets high marks for environmental efficiency and for human health: There's even been a sharp divergence in life expectancy that actually favors urban dwellers. People used to leave the cities in order to get well. ■ A lot of people still fixate on the concept of cities that still look like they're out of "The French Connection" or "Hill Street Blues". And of course there are still plenty of urban places in decline, but the old stereotype of "city as terminal failure" is competely out of touch. ■ Lazy police procedural dramas don't help with the image-making, but even some of those franchises have given up on making the city itself the fallen character. Society would be better off without those shows entirely, but at least now it's almost laughable to blame the city for its depraved crooks.
September 19, 2026
Our human brains are unfathomably sophisticated at performing a huge range of tasks -- enough to make us the ultimate apex predators of the animal kingdom, despite having no useful physical advantages over all the rest. But one thing we are almost universally incapable of doing is grasping probabilities. ■ If you properly shuffle a deck of cards, that exact order of cards has never happened before and will never happen again. It's not even close, either: The odds of predicting any exact order of 52 cards are completely unfathomable. Even if you were to shuffle merely a single suit of cards in that deck, there are more than 6.2 billion ways it could come out, or close to a unique possibility for every single person on Earth. Add in three more suits, and there's no analogy anywhere in the natural world that our brains can map to those kinds of odds. And it involves a set of inputs and outputs that anyone can easily hold in a single hand. ■ When people serve up hypotheses about the prospects of an AI-driven apocalypse, it's important to bear in mind that the outcome certainly is possible. But the sequence of events that might deliver us there is long and involves a chain of probabilities that rapidly take the forecast to the realm of the incomprehensible. ■ That sort of uncertainty tends to be paralyzing. But we don't have to think about the wild scenarios before we give closer thought to the outcomes we can comprehend. Just like a simple deck of cards contains vastly more possibility than we can even remotely grasp, circumstances as they already exist today contain far more than enough possibilities for bad outcomes that we should examine -- soberly and thoughtfully -- without waiting to ponder worst-case "Terminator" scenarios. ■ In fighting one of the worst human foes to ever curse the earth, Dwight Eisenhower observed that "[E]very battle plan comprises merely an orderly commitment of troops to battle under the commander's calculations of desirable objectives and necessary resources, but always with the certainty that enemy reaction will require constant tactical adjustment to the requirements of the moment." ■ We need that same limberness of mind today. The worst could come to pass, or so could the best. So could trillions of possibilities in between. ■ But we ought to start with comprehensible battle plans in mind for harms we can be certain will come to pass: Spouses trying to manipulate partners, candidates trying to destroy rivals' reputations, criminals seeking to fleece victims, and bullies trying to exact pain on classmates. For each of these and many other obvious scenarios, we should be asking, "How could these tools be used for harm, how can the harm be prevented or mitigates, and who is legally or morally responsible for doing something about it?" ■ And we can't try to solve every problem one-by-one: Like shuffling only a single suit of cards, the number of possibilities are still beyond comprehension. But we do need to start somewhere. Only when we break the big, highly uncertain problems down into smaller, highly likely ones will we start to know if we've got what it takes to make Eisenhower's "tactical adjustments to the requirements of the moment".
September 20, 2026
When Ronald Reagan quipped during a mic check, "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes", it was the kind of joke an alert press corps could write off with ease. A mere transcript of the words would have been a disservice; real, knowledgeable people could hear his tone of voice and distinguish with ease between fact and punch line. ■ The press corps may not be employed by the government, but they are indispensable to its proper function. Independent verification of the welfare and whereabouts of people like the Constitutional officers alone is a service that no serious government could do without. A press corps that really does its duty is more than just an amplifier for official statements; it's an independent source of validation that what we are told is true really is. ■ So it is more than a small problem that three reputable news organizations have been denied access to the White House. It's a decision entirely based in a complaint about editorial content, not some higher moral claim. ■ We are known by the company we keep. We are also known by the company we leave behind. The Army Ranger Creed says, in part, "I will never leave a fallen comrade", which is a promise of even more gravity than the promise to fight. Who chooses to stay in the room when others are arbitrarily kicked out ought to color their reputations for some time to come. ■ We don't need preening or self-aggrandizement. Nor do we need self-righteous declarations or exaggerated appeals to solidarity. We simply need to know that the news media has enough self-respect to know that the standards we choose reflect back on us. ■ In the words of Maimonides, "Man is created in such a way that his character traits and actions are influenced by his neighbors and friends, and he follows the custom of the people in his country. Therefore a man needs to associate with the just and be with the wise continually in order to learn [from] their actions, and to keep away from the wicked, who walk in darkness, so that he avoids learning from their actions."
September 21, 2026
Up until now, when people have said they were "of two minds" on a matter, it was nothing more than metaphorical imagery. Researchers at Stanford have made it quite literal: They've uncovered provocative evidence that the brain and the brain stem (or "hindbrain") are two different organs. They're inseparable but separate. ■ This is really important news for medical research: The ability to conduct research at the cellular level depends on having the right cells, and one of the chief implications of this discovery is that all "brain" cells are not created equal. If we want to make progress on brainstem-related diseases like ALS, making the distinction could be a significant milestone. ■ It's also another reason we should be skeptical of anyone's claims about having uncovered anything like artificial general intelligence -- or even a grand unified theory of the human mind. If it's literally just coming as news to us right now that the "brain" is actually two different organs (with separate evolutionary histories!), then we can hardly say that we know everything there is to know about ourselves. ■ It also means we should give an enormous amount of credence to the understanding that the brain isn't simply a rational calculating machine that accepts simple inputs and produces logical outputs. It's an organ engaged in a sort of complex ballet with other organs, and we ought to approach sciences like psychology with an appreciation for the influence of other systems working in and for the body. ■ If we've only fairly recently uncovered that the digestive system is in a two-way influence loop with the brain, then we should be looking all over for signs of other sources of unexpected influence. Our brains are what really set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But now we may be coming to realize that what matters to making the "self" is a systemic concern that reaches far beyond the old model of a single wrinkled organ squished inside the skull.
September 22, 2026
The first public advisory on what became Hurricane Polo was issued on September 20th at 3:00 pm Central Time, noting that a new tropical depression had developed and was "expected to produce rainfall totals of 4 to 8 inches, with isolated maximum totals up to 12 inches". 39 hours later, the public advisory issued on September 22nd at 6:00 am declared that the storm had reached Category 5 status. It's not just a case of rapid intensification, it's an extreme form of a rapid intensification -- an exception among exceptions -- and it's a matter to be taken seriously. ■ There are lots of people who are aware of the news less often than once every 48 hours. Someone in those news habits might have missed the hurricane's emergence altogether. If rapid intensification is here to stay (and it certainly looks like it is), then on top of all the steps that need to be taken for physical mitigation, we also need an upgrade to how we disseminate emergency information to a public that already largely rejects the citizen-responsibilities of classical news cycles. ■ For now, at least, the hurricane is supposed to menace mostly the open waters west of Mexico. But people are going to have to pay attention to this specific event until the storm loses momentum. We're also going to need ways to harness psychology and other social sciences to zero in on ways to communicate urgent, authority-dependent messages to a public that wants to follow its own pace and not be told to check in every night at 10:00 for an update. If things can turn this far, this fast, then Nature is presenting a fairly new set of challenges that we ignore only at our own peril.
September 23, 2026
The likely imminent closure of the Toledo Blade, a 190-year-old publication, is yet another sad milestone in the long, slow decay of local news operations, particularly printed newspapers. ■ Toledo is a top-100 market by population, which would make it one of the largest American cities to go without a conventional print news source (or even a print/digital hybrid, as so many have gone) dedicated to local coverage. In some other places with newspapers that have either been hollowed out or closed down, digital-only news sites have popped up. No small number of these have been agenda-driven, representing both left-wing and right-wing sentiments. One might call them "gap-filler" sources. ■ Part of the problem that emerges with those sites is that their coverage tends to be intentionally and deeply biased, according to very predictable partisan framing of coverage that often emphasizes localized versions of national debates. Besides being unimaginative and frequently offputting to those who don't share the outlet's in-house bias, it tends to be a disservice to the local community. ■ People don't necessarily want unbiased news coverage, but they do seek objectivity. The problem with many of the gap-filler sources is that even when they don't explicitly seek to advance an agenda, they often still seek out a narrow and predictable set of boogeymen. The resulting coverage isn't very organic, and as a result, it usually isn't all that responsive to local interests. ■ We don't really want news coverage that is completely neutral; most people actually want news coverage that has a rooting interest for the community. That rooting interest, though, is rarely well-served by reporting that centers on horse-race issues and predictable partisan bickering. Political news often isn't very civic-minded. ■ Audiences desire objectivity about the facts and fairness in the representation of competing advocates, but they usually want the news outlet to have an interest in the outcome, as it affects the community at large. As conventional newsrooms have shrunk and editorial staffs have dwindled, it's become harder to find shining examples to follow. But it is important that we find them -- or establish them anew -- because the public interest is ill-served by news deserts and conflict entrepreneurs.
September 24, 2026
It can be difficult to tell to what extent the rise of social media has revealed pathologies that were already all around us or played a specific role in creating them. But spend any meaningful length of time observing people getting into outlandish debates or indulging in self-absorbed posting sprees, and you might justifiably reach the conclusion that there are not a lot of people who spend enough time visiting cemeteries. ■ Not in the ghoulish sense, of course, but in a basic act of getting grounded with reality. There are lots of people who seem to be out of touch with not only their own mortality but also with their place in a long, unbroken chain of human existence. ■ It's easy to fall for the myth of having made oneself from scratch, but every one of us is the lucky product of lots and lots of generations before us, all of whom struggled, all of whom faced difficulties, all of whom faced far more adversity than most any of us will ever see in the modern world. Yet all of them cared about their loved ones, feared death and dying, wanted success, and hoped for a better life just like we moderns do. ■ Having a tangible connection to the meaning of mortality and the essential need to understand gratitude for those who came before us is a grounding sensation. And it's apparent this sensation is absent from a lot of lives, like the ones who sacrifice living in service of not dying. ■ There's probably no better cure than a visit to the burial places of one's own ancestors (the more generations, the better), but even in the absence of that, thoughtfully immersing oneself in the awareness that we are all fortunate simply to be here is a worthy use of time. Nature wiped out billions of other bloodlines all around our own ancestors, so the odds were stacked pretty high against any individual one of us making it here. ■ Lots of people with the very same human essentials as our own came before us. Really grasping that -- sometimes by touching a headstone -- makes a world of difference to how seriously one takes the fleeting distractions of the present.
September 25, 2026
The proper greeting for China's Communist Party chief was the one issued by Tibetan activists in Washington, DC, who made their presence and their grievances known with a visible display of free speech and peaceable assembly. "Free Tibet" has been a cliche of celebrity activism for so long that it's much too easy to ignore the reality that the Tibet is a nation under occupation and has been for three-quarters of a century. ■ It was entirely inappropriate to give President Xi the literal red-carpet treatment for a meeting that had no compelling reason to occur. Nothing in the government's own account of the meetings was substantial enough to rise beyond what could have been conducted over a telephone call. ■ What point is pageantry for an adversary when so many of our friends and allies are feeling rebuffed and rejected? It's so bad that Canadians are in love with the idea of taking up "associate membership" with the European Union. ■ Red carpets should line routes like the Gordie Howe Bridge, not the landing path for an authoritarian who uses words to drive wedges between the US and its closest friends.
September 27, 2026
Twenty times the draw of Taylor Swift
In drawing 800,000 people to the streets of Paris, Pope Leo has done what no other American could. Even Taylor Swift fell short -- by a factor of 20 -- and no member of the US government could come close. ■ It's not that France has experienced a sudden outburst of religious fervor; French Mass attendance, like elsewhere in Europe, is a shadow of its past. Nor is it a matter of access; the Vatican is only a 2-hour, $200 flight away. ■ There's a very good chance that much, if not most of the momentum is simply a reflection of a hunger for continuity. There is a global appetite for certitude, and the Catholic Church is in a rare position to offer an institutional form of it. Whatever might happen to any other trans-national organization, from the Olympic Games to NATO to the International Criminal Court, one thing is completely certain: Someone will be Pope a hundred years from now. ■ And this Pope is a good one, with an unassuming manner, an easy wit, a globetrotting biography, and a quick mind. He has many of the qualities people seek in a leader, and yet of course he wasn't popularly elected. ■ His very presence conveys a reassuring message that America can produce leaders of good character, peaceful demeanor, and constructive long-term vision. It also says that there are still sources of worldly (or divine) authority to be found away from politics. That message couldn't be more important in an era of widespread institutional disruption. The world could very eagerly use more charismatic figures like him.
September 29, 2026
Gaps in the historical record and the dangers of mis-filling them
One of Benjamin Franklin's most compelling quotations (and that's a high bar) comes from his 1738 Poor Richard's Almanack: "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing." In theory, this advice is sound -- and it's actually even more applicable today than it was in Franklin's time. The gap between then and now reflects the fact that it was far easier then to get things done and to be written about if one came from Franklin's demographic than if one were a woman or a person from non-English stock. ■ A lot of stories are missing from most of human history, because they would have been written by or about people who weren't in the most privileged classes of people. This deprives us today, both of the knowledge of their stories and of the context we should have about their times. If history had been written only by the left-handed or by people with hazel-colored eyes, something would be missing -- the problem is, we wouldn't really know what. A great deal is missing from our history, and we can only try to claw back a tiny fraction of what that is. ■ This deficit in our knowledge has been problematic for generations, but now we face a truly bizarre turn of events: Generative AI tools make it possible to put words into the mouths of people from the past. "George Washington" can call himself "Bro-mander in Chief" and "Albert Einstein" can "teach" math class. ■ There's an extremely narrow pathway via which versions of some missing stories could be told through careful reconstruction of the evidence. Down this particular pathway, some of the missing stories could be told -- though they would still need to be carefully labeled as reconstructions based upon limited available evidence. ■ Down another pathway, some of these stories could be told, but badly. Instead of evidence-based reconstructions, we could get hallucinations or confabulations -- the kind that has already prompted dangerous errors in the real world, with grave potential consequences. This could end up contaminating the real historical record if unaccountable knockoffs of important stories like the Narrative of Sojourner Truth find their way into competitive circulation. ■ Most likely of all, though, is the possibility that chat experiences with "George Washington" and other already-prominent figures will crowd out interest in other subjects. It's a "rich get richer" problem: Those who are already prominent as historical figures left behind the largest records, and those records will make them more attractive as subjects for further content generation. AI "Thomas Jefferson" will probably attract a lot more attention than AI "Sally Hemings" -- even though their stories are conclusively intertwined in the genetic record. ■ Gaps in the historical record are more than just curiosities. They tell us where our understanding of both the past and the present are subject to imbalances. Those imbalances are worth examination and correction, but we have to make profoundly careful and thoughtful choices about how to rectify them.