Chris Kammerud
William Kristol, from a piece in The Weekly Standard, equal parts elegy and clarion call.
We know America has no manifest destiny. We know America does not face manifest doom. We know we do have a manifest duty to our predecessors, our contemporaries, and our posterity. We know America remains an experiment in liberty and self-government that can succeed, and that can fail.
We know a lot of factual information about the starling—its size and voice, where it lives, how it breeds and migrates—but what remains a mystery is how it flies in murmurations, or flocks, without colliding…
The world is a strangely wonderful place.
Masha Gessen, in The New York Review
Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm.
Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture.
See also. Hitler’s only kidding.
Kevin Nguyen, writing at GQ, on adapting Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life” into the film Arrival.
Arrival is every bit as sophisticated as its short story origins, and magnificently translated into 2016’s best piece of cerebral science fiction. Amy Adams brings a precise, introspective performance to the film’s hero linguist Dr. Louise Banks. Villeneuve (Sicario, next year’s Blade Runner sequel) conjures intimacy and muted tensions to a film of global scale. But it’s arguably the script by Eric Heisserer that demands the most recognition for how it translates Chiang’s high-concept sci-fi so effortlessly.
Or at least it looks effortless on screen. The script took Heisserer six years to write. To get the rights to the adaptation, he required Chiang’s approval, so he worked on spec—meaning that he worked on it for free, and would only be paid if Chiang sanctioned it after it was completed. “It was the most stressful pitch of my whole career,” Heisserer said. “I lived with it for so many years.”
Listen to Carmen.
If you need an incredible, gorgeous, optimistic, brilliant film to get you through this weekend, go see ARRIVAL.
— Carmen Maria Machado (@carmenmmachado) November 12, 2016
And, if you’re interested in Storyological’s discussion of Ted Chiang’s short fiction, listen to that here.
Hello, readers.
This blog may look a little different from now on.
There will still be posts like this, on occasion, where I speak to you directly.
But, for much of the time, and from henceforth, this particular blog will function, more or less, as a compendium of the stuff and things that rattle about the head of one particular human.
The name of this blog is the same as the name of one of my earlier blogs. The word ‘magnelephant’ comes from the play Cyrano de Bergerac. It means to be as magnificent as an elephant. Or possibly as magnetic.
I like the word ‘magnelephant’ because it means a great deal to me. Also, because, for the most part, it is entirely imaginary. Go ahead. Look it up.
To see my blogging in a previous life, readers, go here.
To see something inspirational, go here.
To see the future, close your eyes.
ttfn.
A couple of articles in the Times 1 about Europe, nationalist movements, and the possibly opposing destinies of Angela Merkel and Marine Le Pen 2
Here.
Those who follow Ms. Merkel closely say that she is weary of grappling with Europe’s troubles, and that her close circle, always small, is more defensive and withdrawn after last year’s migrant crisis, which has weakened her politically. Still, she is under pressure to run for a fourth four-year term, a decision expected by early December.
“She’s the last one standing, and that makes her both strong and weak at the same time,” said Stefan Kornelius, one of her biographers and a political analyst for the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “She’s a pillar of stability, the last wall, and people want to lean against it.”
And here.
That revolution, they said, has overthrown what they called the “elites” — the mainstream news media and establishment politicians — who are in a tacit alliance.
The enthusiasm of the far right was in striking contrast to the coolness of Europe’s mainstream leaders to the week’s news. Some of them, like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, offered veiled criticism even as they sent Mr. Trump pro forma letters of congratulation.
“It’s the emergence of a new world,” Ms. Le Pen said, after being the first to lay a wreath at the monument here to France’s World War I dead. “It’s the end of the 20th century.”
Trump named Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff. In appointing Priebus, 44, Trump has brought into his White House a Washington insider who is viewed as broadly acceptable by vast swaths of the party, and he signaled a willingness to work within the establishment he assailed on the campaign trail.
But the president-elect sent an opposing signal by tapping Stephen K. Bannon, his combative campaign chief and former head of the incendiary Breitbart News, as his chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon, 62, has openly attacked congressional leadership, taking particular aim at House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — who recommended Priebus for his new job.
Priebus, after the Access Hollywood video:
Nothing has changed in regard with our relationship,” Priebus said in a call with RNC committee members, according to sources on the call. “We are in full coordination with the Trump campaign. We have a great relationship with them. And we are going to continue to work together to make sure he wins in November.
Those people need to get on board. And if they’re thinking they’re going to run again someday, you know, I think that we’re going to evaluate the process of the nomination process, and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for them.
In choosing Reince Priebus—someone who supported his campaign throughout the election and threatened to punish those parts of the Republican establishment that opposed him—Trump signals a willingness to work with the establishment1.
Makes sense.
Update: From the Times, what amounts to a mini-profile of both Priebus and Bannon, as well as the strategies behind their appointment.
The simultaneous announcement and competing lines of authority are consistent with Mr. Trump’s management style in his businesses and in his campaign: creating rival power structures beneath him and encouraging them to battle it out.
It is also a reflection of who has the ear of the president-elect: his children, and especially his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Both had argued that the chief of staff job should not be held by someone too controversial, according to several people familiar with the decision-making inside the transition effort.
Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic:
But America is what we thought it was. It is still a 50-50 nation, dominated by negative partisanship, in which about half of the country will reliably vote to defeat the other half for the foreseeable future. It is still a nation of propositional pluralism—“send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me”—crossed with ineradicable xenophobia—“go back to where you came from.” It is still a country teetering on the razor’s edge of both a social-democratic revolution and 1950s-era conservatism. That’s the country Americans knew we had at midnight Tuesday morning. And it’s the nation reflected in the votes tallied on Tuesday night.
Also. The Washington Post with a fantastic visualization of how few votes decided the election. Turns out:
This election was effectively decided by 107,000 people in these three states. Trump won the popular vote there by that combined amount. That amounts to 0.09 percent of all votes cast in this election.
That number of votes is about the same as the number of people who can pack into Michigan’s “Big House” stadium.
Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab director, joined President Barack Obama in a far-reaching conversation about the role of technology led by Wired editor, Scott Dadich.
Here are some highlights. Note, this conversation occurred before the election.
Ito on his concerns concerning AI.
This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.
But they underestimate the difficulties, and I feel like this is the year that artificial intelligence becomes more than just a computer science problem. Everybody needs to understand that how AI behaves is important. In the Media Lab we use the term extended intelligence1. Because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI?
Obama on the government’s tech debt.
There is a whole bunch of work we have to do around getting government to be more customer friendly and making it at least as easy to file your taxes as it is to order a pizza or buy an airline ticket. Whether it’s encouraging people to vote or dislodging Big Data so that people can use it more easily or getting their forms processed online more simply—there’s a huge amount of work to drag the federal government and state governments and local governments into the 21st century. The gap between the talent in the federal government and the private sector is actually not wide at all. The technology gap, though, is massive. When I first got here I always imagined the Situation Room would be this supercool thing, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, where he’d be moving around stuff. It’s not like that, at all. Particularly when it comes to hunting down terrorists on the other side of the globe, the movies display this omniscience that we possess somehow, and it’s—it’s just not there yet, and it has been drastically underfunded and not properly designed.
Obama on Star Trek.
I was a sucker for Star Trek when I was a kid. They were always fun to watch. What made the show lasting was it wasn’t actually about technology. It was about values and relationships. Which is why it didn’t matter that the special effects were kind of cheesy and bad, right? They’d land on a planet and there are all these papier-mâché boulders. But it didn’t matter because it was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems.
Star Trek, like any good story, says that we’re all complicated, and we’ve all got a little bit of Spock and a little bit of Kirk and a little bit of Scotty, maybe some Klingon in us, right? But that is what I mean about figuring it out. Part of figuring it out is being able to work across barriers and differences. There’s a certain faith in rationality, tempered by some humility. Which is true of the best art and true of the best science. The sense that we possess these incredible minds that we should use, and we’re still just scratching the surface, but we shouldn’t get too cocky. We should remind ourselves that there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know.
The saddest quote ever, perhaps, from Ito:
I think we’re in a golden period where people want to talk to each other. If we can make sure that the funding and the energy goes to support open sharing, there is a lot of upside. You can’t really get that good at it in a vacuum, and it’s still an international community for now.
The whole conversation is great, even if, on occasion, there’s this sinking feeling like you’re watching some once possible golden future quickly accelerate into the distant past.
Hello, readers.
Of late, I’ve thought about my mom, and how, very often, she took politics so very personally.
She often responded to my sister or I disagreeing with her on one or another political issue as a threat to, sometimes even an erasure of, her identity.
Almost as if our not agreeing with one aspect of her reality, meant we might not agree with the entirety of her reality.
And if we didn’t believe in her reality, then how could we see her? And if we couldn’t see her, how could we love her?
She fought so hard to get us to agree with her.
She fought so hard to get us to see her point of view.
She is not alone in this.
Everybody wants to be heard.
Everybody wants to seen.
Everybody wants to believe their reality is real.
Generally speaking, when people argue they tend to search more for different ways to make the other person see their point of view and less for different ways they might see the other person’s point of view.
And possibly this feeling has increased, over time, along with technology’s long march towards the seemingly celebratory ideal of granting each individual the power to broadcast, and curate, their own reality.
I don’t know.
It certainly seems like, for most of history, and without much trouble, one segment or another of humanity has always excelled at not seeing the reality of one segment or another of humanity.
It’s like the way phones come with certain apps pre-installed.
Evolutionary bloatware, perhaps.
Gather ye bloatware in a folder while ye can, readers, and draggeth it yonder to the furthest pages of your home screen.
Good luck.
ttfn.
the magnelephant review 