“Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power?” John Burn-Murdoch points to several indicators that humans across the world are simply thinking and understanding less now than happened ten years ago. The lure of AI seems likely to exacerbate this trend: “Across a range of tests, the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since.”
“Major League Baseball vs. America.” In this excerpt from his new book, Will Bardenwerper visits Bill Kauffman in Batavia, New York to try to understand the fate of small-town baseball—and community life more broadly: “What is baseball? Is it our “National Pastime,” an essential, enduring part of American life, as it has been marketed it for decades? Or is it — as the decisions made by MLB’s owners and Commissioner Rob Manfred would suggest — just a business, where efficiency and profits drive all decisions, as if they were manufacturing bathtub liners or selling cement? Does an enterprise that purports to be part of the fabric of America have a responsibility to prevent that fabric from fraying?” For more on Bardenwerper’s new book (and its connections to FPR), listen to this recent podcast.
“Meaning & Membership.” Elizabeth Stice reflects on Berry’s articulation of membership and the consequences of a lack of belonging to others in at least some form: “No doubt much of our national political drama is linked to our inability to manage membership. Lack of engagement in the communities close to us has led us to focus too much on the national scene and consider it the only place where meaningful wins are possible. The unwillingness to accept the responsibilities that come with membership are plaguing us. We treat the country and the culture as though we can press a button and get a result we like. We want privileges and products, but we sidestep our obligations. We fail to see the interconnections between ourselves and others, because we are not very good at connecting.”
“We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” Zeynep Tufekci continues to be an essential voice on public health and the failures of its expert class: “And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax. Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right? Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.”
“We’re Running Out of Eggs: The Global Farming System Lies in Ruins.” James Rebanks sees egg prices and the avian flu as the leading edge of a much larger challenge: “The more complicated explanation is that the era of ever-cheaper food is over. We are reaching the limit of our ability to cheapen food staples. All around the world, populations are growing and becoming more affluent, and when people get richer, they want more and better food. Demand is therefore rising, but as the old saying goes, ‘they aren’t making any more land’. And clearing more forest or wilderness for farming is deeply unfashionable for sensible environmental reasons. So supply is not magically rising as it once did.”
“How to Keep Chickens in the City.” Larissa Phillips has a warning for those who are thinking of getting some chickens given the high price of eggs these days: “if you’re thinking of getting chickens, I heartily recommend doing so, but beware: They might transform your life. I now have ponies, goats, and sheep, and more chickens than I can accurately count. And with this looming egg shortage, I obviously need to buy some more chicks. That’s just how it goes, with keeping chickens.”
“The Philistines versus the Pharisees.” Sebastian Milbank takes a sober look at our ravaged culture: “Caught between populism and progressivism, our culture is having the intellectual life beaten out of it. Tribalism increasingly substitutes for independent thought, and partisan politics seeps like poison into more and more areas of life. Even if you switch off your phone, turn aside from the news and try to ignore it, the world will change under you and you won’t know how or why. There is one imperative project in this time of chaos and technological barbarism: the construction of a new elite, and the revival of our intellectual and spiritual life.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“Sex Without Women.” Caitlin Flanagan articulates the profound destruction of human lives and relationships that online porn unleashes: “The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price.”
“The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem.” Alex Reisner details what we know about Meta and OpenAI using a database of stolen books and essays to train their LLMs: “One of the biggest questions of the digital age is how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society the most. LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals. Will these be better for society than the human dialogue they are already starting to replace?”
“MAGA Teslas? Elon Musk is Upending the Politics of EVs.” Kate Yoder tries to parse the shifting political valence of EVs:“The strong feelings surrounding Musk have already started to scramble the politics around EVs. Trump’s exhibition at the White House on Tuesday was a defense of Musk, who he said had been unfairly penalized for “finding all sorts of terrible things that have taken place against our country.” Yet the bizarre scene of Trump showcasing a vehicle that runs on electricity instead of gas felt almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, and not just because the Trump administration has been trying to reverse Biden-era rules that would have sped up the adoption of low-emissions vehicles. Here were the two biggest characters in MAGA politics promoting a technology that’s been largely rejected by their right-wing base.”
