The sidewalks in Paris weren’t yet dry when America’s leading ghoul Bill Kristol was being wheeled in front of cameras to call for 50,000 U.S. ground troops to be deployed to the Middle East, for a war that would no doubt last decades and get many thousands of people killed. All that money and death for something so impractical as a ground effort against a moving target, when a flexible, selective offensive is much safer and more intelligent. But what can you expect from this embalmed-looking buffoon, who seems at this point to only be able to get hard from inhaling the scent of soldier blood.
Of course, this routinely discredited dunderhead won’t be alone in calling for a large-scale war effort. With GOP rivals trying to out-extreme one another, the war drums are now to be pounded with many fists.
Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.
So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.
The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong. …
Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues. Sorry, conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.•
One of the better understandings I’ve read of the current American mindset is Ben Casselman’s Five Thirty Eight piece “The Economy Is Better — Why Don’t Voters Believe It?” The reporter travels to Davenport, Iowa, to get a sense of why voters in a city with a mercifully low unemployment rate still have a profound fear of falling.
The passage below is poignant and a little heartbreaking. Local citizens (and others, no doubt, across America) yearn for a return to the time when you were educated when you were young and then coasted to success for the rest of your life on that foundation. Not only is that not coming back, but it’s going further and further away. We’re just at the beginning of a very bumpy technological and cultural transition.
An excerpt:
I was in Davenport just days before a closely contested local election in which the city’s mayor wasunseated after eight years in office. The campaign was focused on local issues — a riverfront development project, a new on-shore casino, the controversial firing of the city manager — but Jason Gordon, a city alderman running for re-election, said he had heard voters talk about how the economy had changed.
Gordon, who wasre-elected, got his start in politics working for U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a moderate Republican, and is drawn to mainstream presidential candidates, not the insurgents. (Local government races in Davenport are nonpartisan.) But he said he understood voters’ concern about the long-term direction of the economy.
“This is a county that 40 years ago, you could go to college and you’d be set for life, or you could come out of high school and get a job at Deere orCaseor wherever and also be set for life with a solid, middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “That doesn’t exist here anymore, and I don’t think it exists anywhere anymore.”
The recession may not have hit Davenport hard, Gordon added, but it nonetheless revealed how fragile the economy can be, shattering what was left of the illusion of stability.
“If you look at a lot of the numbers, unemployment and other data, they look good, but I still sense some angst that you’re one development away from a dire set of circumstances,” Gordon said. “It’s not your house that burned down, but your neighbor’s did.”•
Henry Miller wrote this in the early pages of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch: “The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls.”
While the rise of the Islamic State, a nightmarish quasi-nation of no precise borders, was certainly made possible by the senseless invasion of Iraq by the United States, I don’t think the destructive impulse that drives it was. Unfortunate geopolitical decisions liberated the madness but did not create it. Terror is usually thought to be a response, but it can also be a call, driven by deeply embedded ideologies and psychologies, whether we’re speaking of a large-scale operation like Nazism or a relatively small-scale one like ISIS. Sometimes evil is just evil.
Disappear every last Westerner from the Middle East and attacks such as the horror in Paris will continue, because the very fact of liberalism and secularism is incompatible with this small but destructive band of zealots. The world just means something different to them, and they can’t abide by such differences.
The overwhelming majority of the globe’s nearly 1.6 billion Muslims are clearly living peaceful, productive lives, but the members of ISIS and Al Qaeda aren’t among them. There’s no easy strategy to defeat them for good, with trillions of dollars of boots on the ground unlikely to bring about a lasting peace and likely to be attended by many casualties. A broader coalition of free nations acting in an opportunistic military fashion is really the best guess right now.
In his latest FT column, Edward Luce looks at the impact of the Paris attacks on the U.S. 2016 election season. An excerpt:
Even before the carnage in Paris, the sands of American public opinion were shifting. Last week a majority said they were prepared to put more US troops into Iraq and Syria to defeat Isis. After November 13, that number is likely to rise. The pressure on Mr Obama to take more drastic action, such as agreeing to “no-fly zones” within Syria, is rising. At nearly every point, Mr Obama has been caught behind the curve on Syria. In early 2014, he described Isis as “junior varsity”, which meant they were unlikely to trouble the grown-ups. Within weeks the group had taken control of up to a third of Iraq and was spreading rapidly in Syria. Whatever the reality on the ground today, Americans are prone to distrust Mr Obama’s reassuring words on Isis.
He is losing his grip on the language. When he came into office, Mr Obama quietly dropped George W Bush’s “war on terror”. That downgrade looks unlikely to outlast his period of office. It was motivated by the view that the US had brought much of the terror on itself by the mistaken 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Mr Obama vowed to undo. By 2011, all US troops were out of Iraq.
But the success of Isis, which filled much of the vacuum left by a departing US, has challenged Mr Obama’s worldview. Instead of seeing Isis as a product of the botched aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq — notably the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated army and leave Baghdad in the grip of the Shia — many Americans see it as a result of Mr Obama’s decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011. He has already put 3,500 troops back into Iraq. US public opinion would like to see more. The Paris attacks will increase that drumbeat.
Mr Obama’s fellow Democrats have yet to catch up with that reality.•
In the two decades after one of the most sensational murders in American history, the 1906 rooftop shooting of architect Stanford White, the batshit crazy gunman Harry K. Thaw sunk deeper and deeper into his sadistic mania, and the woman at the center of the love triangle, Evelyn Nesbit, downed disinfectant, trying to wipe herself clean from the face of the Earth.
She failed. Eventually, when Nesbit was done with red velvet swings and speakeasies, the former chorus girl found her footing and dedicated much of her later life to sculpting and teaching the art. She spoke of passion for her work and her disdain for brassieres in a 1952 issue of People Today, which I found courtesy of the Old Magazine Articles site.
Even at his most outlandish, George Saunders never seems to me to be writing about the future but about life right now. What is a quiet nightmare The Semplica Girls Diaries about if not growing divide between the haves and have-nots as we shift from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital one, the way technocracy removes the friction from our lives and disappears the “downsized” from our minds?
One topic I’d like to someday take on in a work of “futuristic” fiction is our increasing materialism — we are coming to believe that our minds are entirely sufficient to understand the universe in its entirety. This means a shrinking respect for mystery — religion vanishing as a meaningful part of our lives (or being used, in its fundamentalist forms, to beat back mystery, rather than engage it); an increasing acceptance that if something is “effective” (profitable, stockholder-enhancing), then that answers all questions of its morality. This insistence on the literal and provable and data-based and pragmatic leaves us, I think, only partly human. What will the future look like, given that premise? Bleak, I’d say. But interesting.
I’m actually working on a novel based in the past now, and to me, there are some parallels between writing about the future and writing about the past. Neither interests me at all, if the intention is just to “get it right.” It’s nearly impossible to recreate a past mind-set, and also, why bother? That mind-set already existed, if you see what I mean. The goal of a work of fiction is, in my view, to say something, about how life is for us, not at any particular historical moment (past or present or future) but at every single moment. By necessity, we have to choose some precise time to depict, but we wouldn’t want to confuse ourselves by thinking that the “correct depiction” of that time was the goal.
Jennifer Egan:
I’m curious what period are you writing about, and what led you to do that?
George Saunders:
Yeah, I’m going to be a little secretive about it, as sort of a mojo-protection move. … but it’s the 19th century. And the motivation for doing it was just this really cool, sad story I heard around 1998. For years, I was playing with that idea in different modes and screwing it up, and then one day I had a little insight into how I might do it. It’s also got a supernatural element. So, weirdly, although it’s ostensibly “historical,” it actually feels more like a sci-fi story than anything I’ve ever done before. There’s a heavy element of world-building — figuring out the internal rules of the place and so on.•
I can’t say whether Tesla Motors and Faraday Future will both be successful electric-vehicle companies, but I can say there’s room for two EV makers. In fact, there’s room enough if all car makers go electric, the way it was when all manufacturers were working with fossil fuels. Faraday seems to have an Amazonian approach to profits: Get the “gadget” into consumer hands and make money from apps and subscriptions.
Is there room enough for both Tesla Motors and Faraday Future in our electric-car, uh, future? A Chinese billionaire is backing what hopes to be a rival to Elon Musk’s enterprise. The 18-month-old company, based out of Southern California, aims to roll out itsfirstlong-range, premium model, comparable to Tesla’s Model S, by 2017. The engineer who oversaw the chassis design of the Model S, Nick Sampson, is now Faraday’s research-and-development chief.
The billionaire backer is Jia Yueting, founder of LeTV(“China’s Netflix”). A partner of Yueting is listedon the incorporating documents as chief executive. There have beensome rumorsof the company being an Apple-affiliated venture; Apple is said to want to get into the car business. In any case, Sampson has said the car will be more like a smartphone.
“Our business model is not based around moving a car out of the dealer,” Sampson said. “We envision this like a smart phone. The revenue starts once you get the device in the owners’ hands. We’re looking at subscriptions and apps and other opportunities.” This could include car-sharing services, which already operate off your phone.•
In a 1968 Playboy Interview, Eric Nordern tried to extract a definitive statement about the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey directly from the mouth of the horse, but Stanley Kubrick wasn’t having it. The director was happy, however, to expound on the potential existence of extraterrestrials of advanced intelligence and what it would mean for us relatively lowly earthlings. An excerpt:
Playboy:
Speaking of what it’s all about—if you’ll allow us to return to the philosophical interpretation of 2001—would you agree with those critics who call it a profoundly religious film?
Stanley Kubrick:
I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001—but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguingscientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that its star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visibleuniverse. Given a planet in stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the cosmology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.
Playboy:
Even assuming the cosmic evolutionary path you suggest, what has this to do with the nature of God?
Stanley Kubrick:
Everything—because these beings would be gods to the billions of less advanced races in the universe, just as man would appear a god to an ant that somehow comprehended man’s existence. They would possess the twin attributes of all deities—omniscience and omnipotence. These entities might be in telepathic communication throughout the cosmos and thus be aware of everything that occurs, tapping every intelligent mind as effortlessly as we switch on the radio; they might not be limited by the speed of light and their presence could penetrate to the farthest corners of the universe; they might possess complete mastery over matter and energy; and in their final evolutionary stage, they might develop into an integrated collective immortal consciousness. They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men’s minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation.
Playboy:
If such creatures do exist, why should they be interested in man?
Stanley Kubrick:
They may not be. But why should man be interested in microbes? The motives of such beings would be as alien to us as their intelligence.
Playboy:
In 2001, such incorporeal creatures seem to manipulate our destinies and control our evolution, though whether for good or evil—or both, or neither—remains unclear. Do you really believe it’s possible that man is a cosmic plaything of such entities?
Stanley Kubrick:
I don’t really believe anything about them; how can I? Mere speculation on the possibility of their existence is sufficiently overwhelming, without attempting to decipher the motives. The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man’s own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.
Playboy:
In this cosmic phylogeny you’ve described, isn’t it possible that there might be forms of intelligent life on an even higher scale than these entities of pure energy—perhaps as far removed from them as they are from us?
Stanley Kubrick:
Of course there could be; in an infinite, eternal universe, the point is that anything is possible, and it’s unlikely that we can even begin to scratch the surface of the full range of possibilities. But at a time when man is preparing to set foot on the Moon, I think it’s necessary to open up our Earth bound minds to such speculation. No one knows what’s waiting for us in our universe. I think it was a prominent astronomer who wrote recently, “Sometimes I think we are alone, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.”
Playboy:
You said that there must be billions of planets sustaining life that is considerably more advanced than man but has not yet evolved into non- or suprabiological forms. What do you believe would be the effect on humanity if the Earth were contacted by a race of such ungodlike but technologically superior beings?
Stanley Kubrick:
There’s a considerable difference of opinion on this subject among scientists and philosophers. Some contend that encountering a highly advanced civilization—even one whose technology is essentially comprehensible to us—would produce a traumatic cultural shock effect on man by divesting him of his smug ethnocentrism and shattering the delusion that he is the center of the universe. Carl Jung summed up this position when he wrote of contact with advanced extraterrestrial life that “reins would be torn from our hands and we would, as a tearful old medicine man once said to me, find ourselves ‘without dreams’ … we would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed.” I personally don’t accept this position, but it’s one that’s widely held and can’t be summarily dismissed.
In 1960, for example, the Committee for Long Range Studies of the Brookings Institution prepared a report for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warning that even indirect contact—i.e., alien artifacts that might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus or via radio contact with an interstellar civilization—could cause severe psychological dislocations. The study cautioned that “Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behaviour.” It concluded that since the consequences of any such discovery are “presently unpredictable,” it was advisable that the government initiate continuing studies on the psychological and intellectual impact of confrontation with extra-terrestrial life. What action was taken on this report I don’t know, but I assume that such studies are now under way. However, while not discounting the possible adverse emotional impact on some people, I would personally tend to view such contact with a tremendous amount of excitement and enthusiasm. Rather than shattering our society, I think it could immeasurably enrich it.
Another positive point is that it’s a virtual certainty that all intelligent life at one stage in its technological development must have discovered nuclear energy. This is obviously the watershed of any civilization; does it find a way to use nuclear power without destruction and harness it for peaceful purposes, or does it annihilate itself? I would guess that any civilization that has existed for a few thousand years after its discovery of atomic energy has devised a means of accommodating itself to the bomb, and this could prove tremendously reassuring to us—as well as give us specific guidelines for our own survival. In any case, as far as cultural shock is concerned, my impression is that the attention span of most people is quite brief; after a week or two of great excitement and over-saturation in the newspapers and on television, the public’s interest would drop off and the United Nations, or whatever world body we had then, would settle down to discussions with the aliens.
Playboy:
You’re assuming that extraterrestrials would be benevolent. Why?
Stanley Kubrick:
Why should a vastly superior race bother to harm or destroy us? If an intelligent ant suddenly traced a message in the sand at my feet reading, “I am sentient; let’s talk things over,” I doubt very much that I would rush to grind him under my heel. Even if they weren’t superintelligent, though, but merely more advanced than mankind, I would tend to lean more toward the benevolence, or at least indifference, theory. Since it’s most unlikely that we would be visited from within our own solar system, any society capable of traversing light-years of space would have to have an extremely high degree of control over matter and energy. Therefore, what possible motivation for hostility would they have? To steal our gold or oil or coal? It’s hard to think of any nasty intention that would justify the long and arduous journey from another star.•
Introduced byVernon Myers, the publisher of Look, the 1966 short film, “A Look Behind the Future,” focuses on the magazine’s former photographer Kubrick, who was then in the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey at London’s MGM studios. It’s a nice companion piece to Jeremy Bernstein’s two great New Yorker articles about the movie during its long gestation (hereandhere).
Mentioned or seen in this video: Mobile phones, laptop computers,Wernher Von Braun, memory helmets, a 38-ton centrifuge, Arthur C. Clarke at the Long Island warehouse where the NASA L.E.M. (Lunar Excursion Module) was being constructed, Keir Dullea meeting the press, etc.
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I would think I’m in the small minority of Don DeLillo readers who feel that his best novel is White Noise, a book about an airborne toxic event and other looming threats. From Nathaniel Rich’s just-published Daily Beast piece:
How did the novel that Don DeLillo originally titled Panasonic become the phenomenon that was, and still is, White Noise? Canonized at birth by rhapsodic critics and instantly ubiquitous on college syllabi, the novel won the National Book Award and journalists hailed its publicity-shy author as a prophet.
But White Noise was not different in kind from Don DeLillo’s previous seven novels. He had been writing about the same paranoiac themes for 15 years: nuclear age anomie, the tyranny and mind control of American commercial excess, the dread of mass terror and the perverse longing for it, the aphasic cacophony of mass information, and even Hitler obsession. In those earlier novels DeLillo had written in the same clipped, oracular prose, borrowing sardonically from bureaucratic officialese, scientific jargon, and tabloid headlines. Some of White Noise’s main insights—“All plots tend to move deathward,” declares the narrator, Jack Gladney—were recycled from the earlier novels, too. White Noise was more conventionally plotted than End Zone, Great Jones Street, or Players, and the characters more conflicted, more human. But something else had changed.
“The greater the scientific advance,” says Jack Gladney, “the more primitive the fear.” White Noise is bathed in the glare and hum of personal computers and refrigerators and color televisions. Like bulletins from the subconscious, the text is intermittently interrupted by litanies of brand names designed to be pronounceable in a hundred languages: Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue. At one point Jack observes his daughter talking in her sleep, uttering the words Toyota Celica. “It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered.”
Something is hovering all right.•
The 1991 BBC program, Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, and The Gun, was originally aired the same year the author published that strange thing Mao II, a novel with wooden characters and plotting, but one so eerily correct about the coming escalation of terrorism, how guns would become bombs and airplanes would not just be redirected but repurposed. It’s like DeLillo tried to alert us to targets drawn in chalk on all sides of the Twin Towers, but we never really fully noticed. This program is a great portrait of DeLillo and his “dangerous secrets” about technology, surveillance, film, news, the novel, art and the apocalypse.
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The 1980 killing of Scarsdale Diet creator, Dr. Henry Tarnower, by his longtime companion,Jean Harris, was a slaying that awakened all sorts of emotions about the dynamics between men and women. From “Murder with Intent to Love,” a 1981 Time article by Walter Isaacson and James Wilde about the sensational trial:
Prosecutor George Bolen, 34, was cold and indignant in his summation, insisting that jealousy over Tarnower‘s affair with his lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos, 38, was the motivating factor for murder. Argued Bolen: ‘There was dual intent, to take her own life, but also an intent to do something else . . . to punish Herman Tarnower . . . to kill him and keep him from Lynne Tryforos.’ Bolen ridiculed the notion that Harris fired her .32-cal. revolver by accident. He urged the jury to examine the gun while deliberating. Said he: ‘Try pulling the trigger. It has 14 pounds of pull. Just see how difficult it would be to pull, double action, four times by accident.’ Bolen, who was thought by his superiors to be too gentle when he cross-examined Harris earlier in the trial, showed little mercy as he painted a vivid picture of what he claims happened that night. He dramatically raised his hand in the defensive stance he says Tarnower used when Harris pointed the gun at him. When the judge sustained an objection by Aurnou that Bolen‘s version went beyond the evidence presented, the taut Harris applauded until her body shook.•
In 1991, the year before her sentence was commuted, Harris sat for a jailhouse interview with Jane Pauley, who has somehow managed to not murder Garry Trudeau.
One thing I know for sure about the future is that it won’t be a utopia–we’ll see to that. Tomorrow will be only as good as humans are, and we tend to stink up the joint.
However, major changes will come to life, especially city life, in the short run, because we’re on the precipice of game-changing technological innovations. If driverless, for instance, is really perfected in the next 25 years or so, the nature of urban life is remade, and car ownership will become ever-more optional. Our world will be a greener and more convenient thing, but I’m willing to bet it won’t all be electric bicycles and vertical gardens.
So what could a successfully networked city of the transportation near-future look like? Picture this.
You wake up and open an app that tells you how to leverage the city’s various transit options to get to your appointment. Maybe it’s a walk to a bicycle, which you pedal to a bus. Or an autonomous taxi to the downtown perimeter to hail a ride-hailing service, driven by a human. Or borrowing a car that belongs to your apartment building’s small fleet.
Once outside, you’ll notice community gardens and playgrounds where parking lots once stood. The air will be cleaner and you might hear birds chirp, both due to the preponderance of electric vehicles. Emergency vehicle sirens are less common as automotive accidents decline thanks to on-board car sensors that track moving objects and humans. Trucks don’t crowd the streets because deliveries are made at night by self-driving vehicles.
“In many ways, we’ll be moving back toward the city of the past, and much like in the 18th century we’ll be designing around people who are walking, biking and even growing their own food,” says Gabe Klein, author of Start-Up City: Inspiring Public and Private Entrepreneurship, Getting Projects Done, and Having Fun.
In less than two decades, researchers say cities could become safer for pedestrians and cyclists and what cars do exist will be small, electric and largely driverless. Under this optimistic forecast, public transit will be efficient, and smart traffic signals will keep the system moving along.
Not that this vision is either guaranteed or without potentially damaging potholes.•
In an excellent Five Books interview, writer Calum Chace suggests a quintet of titles on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, four of which I’ve read. In recommending The Singularity Is Near, he defends the author Ray Kurzweil against charges of techno-quackery, though the futurist’s predictions have grown more desperate and fantastic as he’s aged. It’s not that what he predicts can’t ever be be done, but his timelines seem to me way too aggressive.
Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, another choice, is a very academic work, though an important one. Interesting that Bostrom thinks advanced AI is a greater existential threat to humans than even climate change. (I hope I’ve understood the philosopher correctly in that interpretation.) The next book is Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, which I enjoyed, but I prefer Chace’s fourth choice, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age, which covers the same terrain of technological unemployment with, I think, greater rigor and insight. The final suggestion is one I haven’t read, Greg Egan’s sci-fi novel Permutation City, which concerns intelligence uploading and wealth inequality.
An excerpt about Kurzweil:
Question:
Let’s talk more about some of these themes as we go through the books you’ve chosen. The first one on your list is The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil. He thinks things are moving along pretty quickly, and that a superintelligence might be here soon.
Calum Chace:
He does. He’s fantastically optimistic. He thinks that in 2029 we will have AGI. And he’s thought that for a long time, he’s been saying it for years. He then thinks we’ll have an intelligence explosion and achieve uploading by 2045. I’ve never been entirely clear what he thinks will happen in the 16 years in between. He probably does have quite detailed ideas, but I don’t think he’s put them to paper. Kurzweil is important because he, more than anybody else, has made people think about these things. He has amazing ideas in his books—like many of the ideas in everybody’s books they’re not completely original to him—but he has been clearly and loudly propounding the idea that we will have AGI soon and that it will create something like utopia. I came across him in 1999 when I read his book, Are We Spiritual Machines? The book I’m suggesting here is The Singularity is Near, published in 2005. The reason why I point people to it is that it’s very rigorous. A lot of people think Kurzweil is a snake-oil salesman or somebody selling a religious dream. I don’t agree. I don’t agree with everything he says and he is very controversial. But his book is very rigorous in setting out a lot of the objections to his ideas and then tackling them. He’s brave, in a way, in tackling everything head-on, he has answers for everything.
Question:
Can you tell me a bit more about what ‘the singularity’ is and why it’s near?
Calum Chace:
The singularity is borrowed from the world of physics and math where it means an event at which the normal rules break down. The classic example is a black hole. There’s a bit of radiation leakage but basically, if you cross it, you can’t get back out and the laws of physics break down. Applied to human affairs, the singularity is the idea that we will achieve some technological breakthrough. The usual one is AGI. The machine becomes as smart as humans and continues to improve and quickly becomes hundreds, thousands, millions of times smarter than the smartest human. That’s the intelligence explosion. When you have an entity of that level of genius around, things that were previously impossible become possible. We get to an event horizon beyond which the normal rules no longer apply.
I’ve also started using it to refer to a prior event, which is the ‘economic singularity.’ There’s been a lot of talk, in the last few months, about the possibility of technological unemployment. Again, it’s something we don’t know for sure will happen, and we certainly don’t know when. But it may be that AIs—and to some extent their peripherals, robots—will become better at doing any job than a human. Better, and cheaper. When that happens, many or perhaps most of us can no longer work, through no fault of our own. We will need a new type of economy. It’s really very early days in terms of working out what that means and how to get there. That’s another event that’s like a singularity — in that it’s really hard to see how things will operate at the other side.•
Long before everyone was a brand, James Michener was one. His name connected to a huge pile of words on pretty much any topic guaranteed a large advance and sales. He was far from a graceful writer, though that never impeded his success, which was propelled by an indefatigable zest for research. With his production methods and prolificity, he was almost a one-man corporation.
In 1983, as he did fieldwork for his proposed novel about Texas (which ended up, in Michener-esque fashion, being titled Texas), Andrea Chambers of Peoplepenned a profile of the septuagenarian scribe. The opening:
A sultry heat shrouded the groves of live oaks and the goat pastures on the edge of the Texas hill country as a state trooper drove down Interstate 35 from Austin to San Antonio. “This is the most dangerous highway in America,” he told his passenger, James Michener. “Going south is dangerous because there are stolen cars on the road to Mexico; heading north is even more dangerous because of the cocaine and marijuana smugglers coming up from Mexico.” Michener made a mental note of this statement, just as he had carefully considered the story, told him by a Texas banker, about a man who had deposited $1.25 million in his checking account. It seems that the man’s wife was going to New York City to shop, and he wanted her to be able to write all the checks she wanted. “This state has possibilities,” concluded the author. “How can I lose?”
How indeed. The 31 books of James Albert Michener have been translated into more than 50 languages, nine movies, four television shows and one musical, South Pacific. His novels, such as Chesapeake, Centennial and The Covenant, generally hit the top of best-seller lists within a week or so of their official publication date. Michener’s latest, Space, has held the No. 1 spot for six months and is tentatively scheduled to appear as a 10-part CBS miniseries next year. By that time Michener fans will have been presented with his opus on Poland, a multi-generational historical novel he finished researching and writing nearly a year ago.
And then there is Texas, where the Wild West still lives and money spills off in rolls, like paper towels. Michener is now one and a half years deep into researching his saga of the state, beginning in 1527, when the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca set off to explore the New World, and ending in 1984. “Have you ever met anyone who was inordinately, spiritually proud of being from New Hampshire?” he asks. “Here people love this state. They have a passion for Texas.” So has the Pennsylvania-raised Michener. Sporting a string tie and Stetson, he crisscrosses Texas, using as a base a rented Austin ranch house he shares with his wife, Mari. “I went to a dance hall outside Kerrville where there were 2,000 cowboys and their ladies,” the author recalls. “I saw fellas dancing with their hats on and gals in gingham. There it was, a little world nobody in Pittsburgh would ever have imagined. I was there very happily. I fit in rather easily.”
He felt right at home, too, spending four days on duty with a Texas Ranger in Big Bend country and following every foot of the Natchez Trace to trek the course of the early emigrants toward Texas. Quail hunting on the 823,000-acre King Ranch was especially appealing. “Seeing the shooting skill of those society women—boom, boom—was very sobering,” he says. “There is an illusion of a man’s world here. It may be a myth.” Another dubious myth is the shallow kingdom of lust and lucre displayed on the evening TV soaps. “I have to be very careful not to write a Yale University version of Dallas. I have to avoid the stereotypes.” He is also largely avoiding some of Texas’ great families—the Kings, the Hunts and, especially, the Johnsons. “I am not capable of dealing with Lyndon,” he says. “You would have to give him a disproportionate amount of space to do him even unequal justice. Besides, I am not obligated to cover everything.” What he will cover is the story of ranchers, cotton planters, oilmen and land developers, as well as the fate of the English, Spanish, Mexican, Scotch-Irish, German and other groups who settled in the state. Great historical figures, such as the Mexican general Santa Anna, Sam Houston and Cabeza de Vaca, will weave in and out of the plot.
To research the scene, Michener spends long hours reading at home or at his office at the Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where he is a visiting scholar (he has devoured 400 books so far). “You can’t go out and just whomp it up. You have to be prepared,” he says. On his field trips, Michener may fill his senses with the smell of Texas winter wheat or the sight of grazing long-horns. He also seeks out local folk who can tell him what their jobs are like. “You don’t choose a dodo,” he explains. “If you’re going to pick a Mexican sheepherder, pick a good one.”
At 7:30 one morning just before his 76th birthday, Michener is off on yet another trip through the state. At the wheel of the car is his trusted “project editor,” John Kings, 59, a former editor of Reader’s Digest. An Englishman, Kings served as Michener’s field adviser and all-around organizer on Centennial and is doing the same for the Texas book. Mari Michener, 62, and Lisa Kaufman, 26, the novelist’s administrative assistant, are also along for the journey from Austin to San Antonio and exotic points west.
First stop is Fredericksburg (pop. 6,412) for coffee at a small café decorated with red-checkered tablecloths and a giant painted Comanche. Michener, a foundling whose early childhood was impoverished, relishes simple eateries as much as he likes a good cheap hotel and down-to-earth, salty conversation. “Aren’t you James Michener? I enjoyed your deal on Spain,” says a husky man in a hunter’s hat, referring to Michener’s 1968 non-fiction work Iberia. Jim, as his friends call him, quickly pulls up a chair and joins the man and his pals for coffee and doughnuts. Within a few minutes he has learned all about their jobs as well as a few tidbits about business practices in the area. There is something about Michener’s avuncular style that encourages people to tell him everything about themselves. The novelist absorbs it all, occasionally jotting down a number or date. For the most part, he relies on his memory to store the facts and feelings he will later pour into the novel.
His impressions of the café crowd duly recorded, Michener moves on to Comfort (pop. 1,460), home of the state’s only armadillo farm. “It’s bloody amazing,” he says. “It’s as if you had a skunk farm.” These slow-witted, shell-encased “Hoover hogs” (they were eaten like pork during the Depression) are run over on the roads by Texans, but are valuable for medical research. But to Michener, “The fact that they are so visibly ancient and that they have migrated north from Mexico becomes related to everything I’m writing about.” Promising that an armadillo will figure prominently in his novel, he strides forth to the wire coop where 26 of them are burrowing under hay. “Hello, little fella,” he clucks delightedly and swoops one up. His wife lets out a squeal of protest. “Oh, Cookie,” he says (the Micheners call each other “Cookie”), “they don’t scratch badly. I have handled wild hyenas, so I can handle this.”
Unscathed and overeducated with facts about the armadillo’s eating, reproductive and sleeping habits (they devour June bugs and dog food, breed four identical offspring from one egg, and emerge primarily at night), Michener is off again. After a stop at a restaurant for liver and onions (“I keep hoping I’ll find an edible chicken-fried steak,” he says of one prized Texas delicacy) and a visit to a Union war memorial in Comfort, he arrives at the ranch of Bob Ramsey and his wife, Willie. Michener, who likes to visit places two and three times, has already gone deer hunting near the Ramsey spread. Family and friends have gathered to welcome him back and proffer books to be signed. Michener inscribes them all. (“I only put my initials in paperbacks,” he jokes.) He is given a jar of venison jerky, a piece of hill country flint, Mrs. Ramsey’s etching, on a limestone slab, of a turkey, quail and armadillo, and a leather hatband adorned with arrowheads for his Stetson.
Visibly pleased, Michener pushes on to the nearby Frio River, a shallow waterway with such a smooth riverbed that a car can be driven down its center. Jim, naturally, tries it out, riding in the back of Bob Ramsey’s pickup. He then resumes his trip, gazing out at the cattle pastures and the windmills turning lazily against the darkening sky. “I love the expansiveness of this world,” he says. “I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and see it all. I’ve never been bored.”
In the course of his two-day trip, Michener will pace the boundaries of the Alamo so that he can better understand the battle, visit the Spanish Governor’s Palace and stroll the grounds of San Antonio’s San Juan Capistrano mission, which dates from 1731. He will also knock off some spicy Mexican meals, over which he discourses eloquently—for example, on the country with the most beautiful women (Burma) and on his literary influences (Milton, Dickens, Keats, the Bible, Wordsworth). He can describe in detail the floor plan of the Louvre or the Prado and can sing many of the world’s great operatic arias. Proud of his erudition, the Swarthmore-educated Michener quips that his epitaph will read: “Here lies James A. Michener, a man who never showed home movies or drank vin rosé.”
Back in his Austin study, he entertains himself with tapes of Bach or his new discovery, Willie Nelson, and sips pineapple juice. Then he diligently resumes work on his book, typing with two fingers. “I have never been big on the agony of writing,” he says. “I see no evidence that Tolstoy suffered from writer’s block.” Still, he frets that this novel will be his last. “I often think: ‘How will I hold all this together?’ ”
Most likely he will, and then go on to another epic.•
I’m all for incentivizing the exploration of space as long as its done with sane regulations, though it is strange that the United States has unilaterally privatized asteroids and the like, making it finders keepers for American corporations that lay claim to pieces of the final frontier.Granted, trying to get the whole world on the same page for global guidelines would be difficult, but certainly some wider agreement would be helpful since we’re not likely to be the only nation pioneering out there. Hopefully this solitary move will force a worldwide discussion that results in a broader consensus.
The United States Senate has passed theSpace Act of 2015, which includes a range of legislative changes intended to boost the US space industry.
Perhaps the most significant part are measures allowing US citizens to engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of “space resources,” with examples including includes water and minerals. The right to exploit resources covers anything in space that isn’t alive – so if a commercial exploration team discovers microbial life, they can’t exploit it for profit.
For the purposes of this bill a “citizen of the United States” is defined as “(A) an individual who is a citizen of the United States”, “(B) an entity organized or existing under the laws of the United States or a State” or “an entity organized or existing under the laws of a foreign country if the controlling interest (as defined by the Secretary of Transportation) is held by an individual or entity described in subclause (A) or (B) of this clause”.
That means not only individuals but also corporations, including those that are not wholly US owned, qualify as US citizens for the purpose of mineral exploitation in space. For example, Richard Branson is a British citizen, but he’s an investor in Planetary Resources, a self-described “asteroid mining company” that has been heavily involved in lobbying in favor of the Space Act. As a result, he’s likely to be one of the first British people to profit from US commercial asteroid mining.•
Technology won’t make us poorer, at least not in the aggregate. Distribution could be a thorny problem, but there are worse things than having to come up with political solutions to close a yawning wealth inequality in a time of plenty.
In his latest Financial Times column, Andrew McAfee focuses on a different issue concerning to him in regards to technological unemployment: the devil and idle (non-robotic) hands. He cites the alarming Case-Deaton findings of a scary spike in the mortality rate of white, middle-aged Americans, believing the collapse of industrial jobs and of communities is a matter of causation, with the former prompting the latter.
It’s difficult to know for sure if that’s so, but it’s possible McAfee is on to something. Already it seems we’ve become too much a nation anesthetized by prescription painkillers, fantasy football and smartphones, not willing to take a good look in the mirror, unless it’s the black mirror. Sure, there’s nothing new in feeling lost, but you only get to find yourself through a life lived with purpose. My best guess is that people in a less-workcentric world will eventually find new kinds of purpose, but the transition may be a bumpy one.
An excerpt:
So what happens when the industrial-era jobs that underpinned the middle class start to go away? Voltaire offered a prescient caution when he observed that: “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
Of the three of these, I’m the least worried about need. Trade and technological progress, after all, make a society wealthier in aggregate. The problem that they bring is not one of scarcity — of not enough to go around. Instead, they bring up thorny questions of allocation.
But rather than spending time on that issue here (if you’re interested, Erik Brynjolfsson and I dedicate a lot of our bookThe Second Machine Age to it), I want to focus on Voltaire’s other two evils, boredom and vice. How bad are they? How worried should we be about them?
I sometimes hear the argument that we shouldn’t be that worried at all. If we don’t need people’s labour, this logic goes, why should we care what they do with their time? Why should traditional notions of boredom and vice matter? If people want to drink, take drugs, engage in casual sex or play video games all day, where’s the harm? These are not the most conventionally respectable or productive activities, but why should we let convention continue to hold sway?•
Eugenics has always been such a horrible thing–a Nazi thing!–hardly anyone wanted to think about, let alone speak its name. But what if the technologies have changed so much that eugenics isn’t a brutal thing about death but a noble one about a better life? How can we ignore it then?
In the torrent of recent stories about the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, it’s become clear that we’re at the dawn of new possibilities to eliminate diseases, and, yes, enhance humans who aren’t ailing in any traditional sense.
In Jennifer Kahn’s New York Times Magazine piece, a scientist says, “There’s an almost frantic feeling of discovery. Crispr has made so many experiments possible.” With those possibilities come responsibilities, of course, but part of that burden will be to throw off entrenched beliefs and see the world anew.
Some of the thorniest questions may be asked of parents, who’ll have wade into that sci-fi-ish territory known as designer babies. From Erik Parens’ Aeon article “Made to Order“:
If a technology such as CRISPR-Cas9 could be used to safely and effectively treat diseases or create what some see as improvements in future generations, we would have to face the question we didn’t need to face back in 1990 when the Human Genome Project was getting off the ground. Even if it won’t be possible to use this technology to alter the sorts of hugely complex traits – say, intelligence – that are envisioned in sci-fi movies such as Gattaca (1997), it might be possible to use it to edit out some disease traits, especially rare ones that result from mutations in single genes. More ambitiously, perhaps it could be used to edit in some enhancements such as muscles of greater strength or bones of greater length. Whatever the traits, once the fig leaves of safety and efficacy fall away and we have a technology that can alter the traits of future generations, the naked ethical question stares back at us: is eugenics, really, inherently bad?
That seemingly simple question takes us to the heart of a deep tension that decent parents have felt for a very long time, but that will become ever more intense if a technology such as CRISPR-Cas9 is in fact safe and effective. I refer here to the tension between the ethical obligation of parents to accept their children as they are, and their ethical obligation to shape them. This technology could become yet one more site of cultural polarisation – a high-tech variation on the already high-pitched debate between ‘Tiger Moms’, who are whole-heartedly committed to shaping their children, and ‘Elephant Moms’, who are equally whole-heartedly committed to letting their children unfold in their own ways. (The more accurate formulation would be between Tiger and Elephant Parents, but that isn’t the one being deployed today.) On the other hand, and far more optimistically, this technology could create the opportunity to sustain – as opposed to resolve – the enormous tension between the obligations to shaping and accepting.
Grasping the nature of this tension in the context of embryo editing forces us to revisit the question, ‘Is eugenics inherently bad?’ It forces us to see why it won’t be enough to assert, ‘You can’t do that, it’s eugenics!’ — and why we need to distinguish between good and bad eugenic practices. That will not be an easy distinction, and attempting to make it may be fraught with social danger. Nonetheless, we need to start along that path if we want to face the future with intellectual and ethical integrity.•
Positions traditionally seen as starter jobs or bridge positions have become permanent ones for many people in the post-collapse economy, which is part of the reason you see the campaign for $15 minimum wage. Unfortunately, this type of low-skill employment is most easily replaced by Weak AI, which is developing quickly. If Toyota’s just-announced $1 billion investment in AI is any indication, that process will only speed up. What then becomes of the bellhop, shelf-picker and fast-food worker?
From Heather Kelly’s CNN report about Tally, the inventory robot:
Retail stores typically have human employees who roam the floors, manually taking inventory with handled devices.
In a mid-sized store like a Walgreens, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 products for sale. Bogolea says it takes an employee 20 to 30 hours a week to audit all those items.
One Tally robot can scan 15,000 items in an hour.
Completely autonomous, Tally moves four feet at a time before pausing to take high-resolution photographs of everything on store shelves. It tags the images with metadata, like an exact location, and uploads them to the cloud. The system then matches those images against a store’s files of what exactly that shelf should look like and instantly creates reports.
If Tally sees the cereal aisle is low on Cheerios, an employee can quickly restock that shelf.•
The problem with treating fledgling fascists like jokes is that’s what they all seem like, at least initially.
I’m sure Benito Mussolini originally appeared to be a vulgar cartoon too outlandish to be feared, until it was too late, his entire country perverted into something awful before his murderous gaze. One of the least-insane things he did: In 1933, Il Duce ordered all Italian newspapers to push aside current events and dedicate their front pages to articles about Julius Caesar. The message was clear, that Mussolini was a latter-day Caesar and would rule with absolute authority. Tragically, that’s how things went, until he found himself hanging from the business end of a meat hook from the roof of an Esso gas station in 1945. The odd decree was covered in an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of that year.
We’re clever enough to kill ourselves en masse, that much we know, but are we adequately creative to save our species from a human-made disaster that seems more and more likely to visit devastation upon us? Can the collateral damage caused by our intelligence be undone with more intelligence?
In an Atlantic post, Ross Andersen interviews Oliver Morton, author of The Planet Remade, and wonders if we need to be more aggressively redesigning our environment. As he writes, “the geoengineers offer us a third way,” one beyond status quo as we attempt to worm our way through the Anthropocene, and immediately abandoning the fossil fuels we heavily rely upon.
Even the seemingly outré proposals bandied about by scientists and technologists don’t seem theoretically impossible, but most aren’t feasible in the near future, and they certainly will have their own unintended consequences. I would think geoengineering is certainly a piece of the answer as we move forward, but a dedicated effort to change the way we go about business better accompany it.
An excerpt:
Ross Andersen:
In your book, you argue that it would be impossible to transition away from fossil fuels quickly, because our current global-energy infrastructure simply can’t be replaced within a single generation. Can you give me a sense of the scale of that infrastructure? What would need replacing?
Oliver Morton:
Well, you have to remember that over 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels—and the world uses a lot of energy, and will be using even more energy soon. There are, after all, a large number of people who still don’t have access to modern energy services. In the beginning of the 20th century, no one lived the sort of life that well-off people in developing countries live or aspire to. Now about 1.6 to 2 billion people live that kind of life. And that’s great, but there are 5 billion people who aren’t leading that kind of life. They are going to use a lot of energy.
At the end of this century there will be 9 or 10 billion people on the face of the planet. You would kind of hope that in a century’s time, they would all have the access to energy that you and I enjoy. That would mean going from 2 billion people with access to 10 billion, a much larger increase than we saw during the 20th century.
Of course, there’s a huge amount that we can do with better energy technology over the course of the 21st century. But as the world develops, I think there’s still going to be an awful lot of fossil fuels burned. I think it’s a fundamental mistake to think that with just a bit more political will, you can suddenly go to a zero-carbon world.•
Everybody could be wrong. It’s wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe the new technologies will birth plentiful jobs and industries we just can’t yet imagine. Or perhaps we will have to radically think our economy in a climate that favors machine labor over the human kind.
It’s striking that the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. seem almost alternative universes, with a growing number in the former acknowledging that Guaranteed Basic Income may need become a reality, and the latter, represented last night by the GOP debate, in which it’s not even part of the conversation. I believe Marco Rubio spoke up against the minimum-wage hike because it would make “people more expensive than machines,” which glancingly acknowledges the actual world we’re living in, but doesn’t offer any sort of solution. Be poor or automation will make you poorer isn’t the best we can do.
In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman havespoken up in favor of a universal basic incomethat would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce enough decently compensated work for everyone.
“Everyone in the country having jobs is not going to make sense anymore because we’re going to have computers and robots doing what we’re doing most of what we’re doing today,” saidJim Pugh, who got a Ph.D in distributed robotics before he worked on the original 2008 Obama campaign. “If you accept that as a premise, what we need to do as a society is not made up of small changes. It’s actually a fairly radical change and basic income seems to be an elegant solution for doing that.”
A basic income is a kind of Social Security system where all citizens or residents get an unconditional amount of money on top of whatever their wages are from elsewhere. It assumes that, above this minimum level of income, people will still be motivated to work for more money or on more meaningful projects. …
Pugh said the point ofthe Createathonis to build energy for a broader political movement that will advocate for universal basic income and push for small pilots to test the idea out in the United States.
To be fair, not everyone prominent in the tech industry agrees with the premise that there won’t be enough jobs for everyone.•
The real problem isn’t that your Vizio Smart TV is watching you though, sure, that’s not good. The main issue is that when the Internet of Things becomes the thing, when everything is a computer, objects of all sorts will be quietly collecting information about us just the way the Internet does. There will be no opt-out switch, no notification, no hum to clue you in. The new arrangement will be silent and seem perfectly normal.
TV makers are constantly crowing about the tricks their smart TVs can do. But one of the most popular brands has a feature that it’s not advertising: Vizio’s Smart TVs track your viewing habits and share it with advertisers, who can then find you on your phone and other devices.
The tracking — which Vizio calls “Smart Interactivity” — is turned on by default for the more than 10 million Smart TVs that the company has sold. Customers who want to escape it have to opt-out. In a statement, Vizio said customers’ “non-personal identifiable information may be shared with select partners … to permit these companies to make, for example, better-informed decisions regarding content production, programming and advertising.”
Vizio’s actions appear to go beyond what others are doing in the emerging interactive television industry. Vizio rivals Samsung and LG Electronics only track users’ viewing habits if customers choose to turn the feature on. And unlike Vizio, they don’t appear to provide the information in a form that allows advertisers to reach users on other devices.•
Years before he was to become a Hollywood heavyweight, Ivan Reitman helped launch the career of affable, parody-ready illusionist Doug Henning, who came to attention in Canada with the stage performance Spellbound. Relocated to Broadway in the mid-1970s and rechristened The Magic Show, it was a long-running sensation. After a break from the NYC boards and some permutations in his personal life, Henning tried, with disastrous results, to recapture the old magic with his 1983 creation, Merlin. Before itwas delivered a death blow to the stomach, à la Houdini, by indifferent audiences, Henning was profiled by Mary Vespa of People. The opening:
Doug Henning learned one of his most valuable tricks not from another magician but from the manager of the famous mime Marcel Marceau: “Keep yourself scarce.” He has. Though he’s been doing his annual NBC-TV specials for eight years now, and frequently takes his act on the road, he hasn’t set foot on Broadway since The Magic Show, the popular revue that established him as big box office when he starred in it from 1974 to 1977. Now he’s back, this time with Merlin, a musical with a $4 million budget, lavish sets, stunning effects and stunts on a scale that, he says, “staggers the imagination.”
Indeed, the Mark Hellinger Theater has never seen quite such goings-on. There is exotic music. Beautiful women emerge from fire, burst into a constellation of stars, disappear into thin air. Chita Rivera, as the evil queen intent on doing in the young Merlin (Henning) before he meets the future King Arthur, changes a black panther into a temptress who tries to distract him from his magic. But Henning survives this and other hazards—at one point he disappears from a flaming cage being lifted above the stage—to triumph in the end.
Whether all this will dazzle the critics won’t be clear until the show, now playing to preview audiences, opens on Jan. 9. But for Henning, at least, Merlin is already a milestone that is not only professional but personal: The show’s water spirit, a lithe brunette dream woman he levitates above a fountain, is in fact a new wife who’s given him a badly needed lift.
Cut to 1981. Henning was trying to bounce back from a busted marriage. Exhausted after doing one of his TV shows, he retreated to a favorite haunt, the Transcendental Meditation Center at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. “Doug was just so sad and lonely,” recalls friend Jim Bagnola. “It seemed as though he was achieving all his goals and still remaining unfulfilled.” Call it luck. Timing. Or was it life playing a trick on a superillusionist? There, at a banquet, he met a beauty who would sweep away his woes like, well, magic.
“My friends said there was practically a flash of light,” says Henning, 35. “I had never felt anything like it in my whole life.” The dazzler was Debby Douillard, 27, an abstract painter with bottomless blue eyes who was taking classes at the university and also had just separated from her spouse. She, too, felt Cupid’s bolt: “It was like I blossomed right on the spot.”
They got engaged within the week and wed last December. He still marvels at the sorcery she’s worked on him. “When I perform, I could love a million people,” Henning admits, “but I had trouble loving one person. I would separate love and sex. Debby’s helped me overcome my fear of intimacy.” Her problem was shyness, and Henning’s Rx has been to use her not only in Merlin but also on tour, where she performs as a singer, dancer and his assistant. “I have a tendency to be inward,” says Debby. “Doug’s turning me inside out. Sometimes it’s painful, but it’s a great growing experience.”•
Not content with merely being a magus, Henning also founded a political organization, The Natural Law Party, which helped him lose elections very badly in both the UK and Canada. Sometimes democracy works.
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Immanuel Velikovsky was an outsider scientist whose work was impressively elaborate nonsense. “Astronomers at Harvard consider the sensational theory of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky that the earth stood still a couple of times in Biblical days sheer nonsense,” noted Popular Sciencein 1950.A charismatic guy, he nonetheless managed to befriend some of the greatest minds of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson. In a New York Review of Books piece, Dyson recalled their friendship. An excerpt:
After I came to America, I became a friend of Immanuel Velikovsky, who was my neighbor in Princeton. Velikovsky was a Russian Jew, with an intense interest in Jewish legends and ancient history. He was born into a scholarly family in 1895 and obtained a medical degree at Moscow University in 1921. During the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution he wrote a long Russian poem with the title “Thirty Days and Nights of Diego Pirez on the Sant Angelo Bridge.” It was published in Paris in 1935. Diego Pirez was a sixteenth-century Portuguese Jewish mystic who came to Rome and sat on the bridge near the Vatican, surrounded by beggars and thieves to whom he told his apocalyptic visions. He was condemned to death by the Inquisition, pardoned by the pope, and later burned as a heretic by the emperor Charles V.
Velikovsky escaped from Russia and settled in Palestine with his wife and daughters. He described to me the joys of practicing medicine on the slopes of Mount Carmel above Haifa, where he rode on a donkey to visit his patients in their homes. He founded and edited a journal, Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum, which was the official journal of the Hebrew University before the university was established. His work for the Scripta was important for the founding of the Hebrew University. But he had no wish to join the university himself. To fulfill his dreams he needed complete independence. In 1939, after sixteen years in Palestine, he moved to America, where he had no license to practice medicine. To survive in America, he needed to translate his dreams into books.
Eleven years later, Macmillan published Worlds in Collision, and it became a best seller. Like Diego Pirez, Velikovsky told his dreams to the public in language they could understand. His dreams were mythological stories of catastrophic events, gleaned from many cultures, especially from ancient Egypt and Israel. These catastrophes were interwoven with a weird history of planetary collisions. The planets Venus and Mars were supposed to have moved out of their regular orbits and collided with the Earth a few thousand years ago. Electromagnetic forces were invoked to counteract the normal effects of gravity. The human and cosmic events were tied together in a flowing narrative. Velikovsky wrote like an Old Testament prophet, calling down fire and brimstone from heaven, in a style familiar to Americans raised on the King James Bible. More best sellers followed:Ages in Chaos in 1952, Earth in Upheaval in 1955, Oedipus and Akhnaton in 1960. Velikovsky became famous as a writer and as a public speaker.
In 1977 Velikovsky asked me to write a blurb advertising his new book, Peoples of the Sea. I wrote a statement addressed to him personally:
First, as a scientist, I disagree profoundly with many of the statements in your books. Second, as your friend, I disagree even more profoundly with those scientists who have tried to silence your voice. To me, you are no reincarnation of Copernicus or Galileo. You are a prophet in the tradition of William Blake, a man reviled and ridiculed by his contemporaries but now recognized as one of the greatest of English poets. A hundred and seventy years ago, Blake wrote: “The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass and obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art and Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not, he must be starved.” So you stand in good company. Blake, a buffoon to his enemies and an embarrassment to his friends, saw Earth and Heaven more clearly than any of them. Your poetic visions are as large as his and as deeply rooted in human experience. I am proud to be numbered among your friends.
I added the emphatic instruction, “This statement to be printed in its entirety or not at all.” A quick response came from Velikovsky. He said, “How would you like it if I said you were the reincarnation of Jules Verne?” He wanted to be honored as a scientist, not as a poet. My statement was not printed, and Peoples of the Sea became a best seller without my help. We remained friends, and in that same year he gave me a copy of his Diego Pirez poem, which I treasure as the truest expression of his spirit. I hope it will one day be adequately translated into English.•
A 1972 CBC doc about the Velikovsky and his catastrophist claptrap.
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Here’s an oddity: In 1991, Doris Tate, mother of actressSharon Tatewho was among those murdered by theManson Family, appeared on To Tell the Truth hosted by Alex Trebek. The elder Tate became a campaigner for the rights of crime victims. This short-lived iteration of the venerable game show, which had a harder, more provocative edge than such fare usually has, provided a platform for Tate’s work. She passed away the following year as a result of a brain tumor.
If we don’t extinct ourselves in the short run, it will seem almost beyond imagination one day, and hopefully one day soon, that we ever stubbornly continued to get the majority of our energy from sources other than the sun. Children born into a solar world won’t understand why we didn’t sooner heavily invest in R&D try to exploit this clean, natural abundance.
In Ed Crooks and Lucy Hornby’s FT Magazine piece, “Sunshine Revolution,” the writers look at, among other things, Las Vegas as an “unlikely hotbed of radicalism” for U.S. solar conversion, a shift driven more by lower costs than the bigger picture. The opening:
The suburbs of Las Vegas do not look like the cradle of a revolution. Golden stucco-clad houses stretch for street after identical street, interspersed with gated communities with names such as Spanish Oaks and Rancho Bel Air. The sky is the deepest blue, the desert air is clear and the distant mountains are beautiful. The only sounds are the buzz of a gardener’s hedge trimmer and a squeaking baby buggy pushed by a power-walking mother. The bright lights of Sin City seem a very long way away.
Yet these quiet streets are being changed by a movement that is gathering momentum across America and around the world, challenging one of the most fundamental of economic relationships: the way we use and pay for energy. There are now more than 7,000 homes in Nevada fitted with solar panels to generate their own electricity, and the number is rising fast. Just five years ago, residential solar power was still a niche product for the homeowner with a fat wallet and a bleeding heart. Not any more. Technology, politics and finance have aligned to move it into the mainstream. Solar power has become the fastest-growing energy source in the US.
For decades the electricity industry has been a cautious and conservative business, but the plunging prices of solar panels, down by about two-thirds in the past six years, have woken it up with a bang. Dynamic rooftop solar power companies have entered the market, in the most radical change to electricity supplies since the industry was born in the 19th century. It has been described as the equivalent of the mobile revolution in telephony, or the PC in computing.•
When things take a turn for the worse, people often follow course, the need to blame seemingly wired into the less-blessed areas of our brains. As globalization and technology have conspired to assail the privileges of the American white middle class, fingers have increasingly been pointed, especially in this political season. Somehow, Mexicans are supposedly culpable, even though they were long welcomed here, legal or not, to work our farmland.
Except that Mexican people are trying to beat the border patrol in Arizona in greatly diminished numbers, an inconvenient truth for panderers. Many of the immigrants attempting to stealthily enter the U.S. are Central Americans arriving in Texas. Why the shift? In an excellent London Review of Books report, Tom Stevenson answers that question and visits the checkpoints to see the harsh reality awaiting those seeking refuge. An excerpt:
If you take Route 281 south from San Antonio, past the billboards (‘We buy ugly houses – call this number’; ‘AAA finance loans from $50-$1280’), you eventually reach Falfurrias, the largest place in Brooks County but still a one-horse town. The Dairy Queen burned down in May and the Walmart closed in July. Falfurrias once had a reputation as a hub for illegal gambling but this summer the gaming houses were raided and shut down. The town seems abandoned, apart from a border patrol station and a detention centre. The United States Border Patrol operates checkpoints on main roads many miles from the actual frontier. Falfurrias is 70 miles from the border and one of the inspection points is just outside town. If you’re an undocumented migrant this is where you leave the highway and walk for miles through the wilderness. More migrants die from thirst and injury in Brooks County than anywhere else in the United States.
In Falfurrias I met Lavoyger J. Durham, a large man with a deep voice who drives a big 4×4. He was born on the King Ranch – Texas’s best-known agribusiness, roughly the size of Cornwall – and he has been a cowboy all his life. In his home he has framed copies of magazines in which he’s featured: on the front of the Cattleman he appears on horseback lassoing a calf. He has managed the El Tule ranch, just outside Falfurrias, for 25 years. His grandfather, he told me proudly, signed up with Captain Leander McNelly, a Confederate officer and Texas Ranger, to ‘clean South Texas’ of ‘bandits’, most of them Mexican: McNelly’s militia hanged hundreds of people in the 1870s. But Lavoyger is now worried about the number of would-be migrants dying on south Texas’s ranches. He’s half Mexican himself – what would his grandfather have made of that? – and speaks fluent Spanish. On the way to El Tule, he gossips about the Bush family – ‘Barbara was at my second wedding but not, well … involved’ – and plays around with names for the borderlands that don’t quite hit the mark: the ‘catch me if you can’ zone comes after the ‘free nilly willy’ zone, and so on.
I asked him how many people had been found dead in Brooks County so far this year. He wasn’t sure of the exact number and phoned the sheriff. ‘How many dead people we got this year?’ The answer was 28. ‘Tell your daughter I love her.’ That the remains of 28 migrants had been discovered in just one of Texas’s 254 counties in a six-month period ought to be remarkable, especially given that the sheriffs estimate only 10 to 15 per cent of those who die are ever found. There are no figures on the total number of undocumented migrant deaths in Texas. Lavoyger himself has come across more than two dozen bodies over the years. On the ranch he showed me a clearing littered with half-rotten clothes, although these filthy coats and jeans in this macabre collection didn’t necessarily come from dead bodies; as Lavoyger explained, most of the dead are found without clothes, and usually it’s the local wildlife – vultures circling or coyotes playing with the bones – that point to their whereabouts.
So how does an undocumented migrant end up dead on Lavoyger’s ranch?•
