Memento Mori

For The Baffler, Tamara Kneese considers the good, bad, and downright creepy uses of Artificial Intelligence and the multitude of philosophies at odds around its use. Can humans overcome their flawed selves to create AI to for the betterment of humanity? Only the bots know for sure.

IN JUNE 2022, Amazon advertised a new feature of the virtual assistant Alexa with a demo designed to prove that the device could resurrect the voices of dead relatives. At the re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa, showcased a video of a dead grandmother’s disembodied voice reading The Wizard of Oz to her grandchild. Noting the immense loss of life during the pandemic before launching into the demo, Prasad stressed that what the audience was seeing was merely a prototype. He framed the project as “a voice-conversion task and not a speech-generation task.” But Prasad was suggesting that grandma’s voice, filtered through Alexa’s speakers, was a sufficient proxy for grandma herself.

Intergenerational communication with dead family members is a canny selling point for a smart device, provided you’re not concerned with the mass manipulation of a grieving public. It is also a fantasy that barely covers for Amazon’s real goal: harnessing and selling data produced in intimate home settings and maintaining customers and their data by whatever means necessary.

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Kate Winslett Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge

For this endearing piece, Susan Dominus spends time with Kate Winslett in a freezing hut by the sea. Winslett comes across as both tough and very fair, and I came away feeling I got to know her personality better—not always the case with a profile.

Winslet is not precious or easily rattled; on set, over the years, she has broken a toe, suffered hypothermia and fainted, but very little slows her down when she’s shooting. She’s not a fan of a lunch break. Her sturdiness works its way into her performances onscreen: Even in many a period drama, Winslet, for all her femininity, conveys the impression of someone who could hold her own in a street fight. On one occasion when she actually found herself in peril, during a house fire at Richard Branson’s home in the British Virgin Islands, Winslet, efficiently assisting the evacuation, picked up Branson’s nearly-90-year-old mother and carried her down several stairs. (Winslet is married to Branson’s nephew, Edward Abel Smith.)d

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The Last Days of Mezcal

In this Bloomberg feature, Rowan Jacobsen presents a current snapshot of the mezcal industry. Mezcal’s allure has been in its artisanal nature, produced in small batches and by families in Mexico, and in Oaxaca in particular, the country’s largest producer. But, as Jacobsen reports, Big Liquor is changing that. As mezcal grows in popularity, the region’s old-school distilleries and agave farms are feeling the threat of “tequilization” as the demand for the spirit increases around the world.

At least five centuries ago, Indigenous Mexicans learned to make spirits from those sugars. At the first sign of a quiote, the plant’s pineapple-shaped heart, known as a piña, is harvested, roasted, mashed, fermented and distilled. The resulting spirit was always known as mezcal, but in the 20th century a handful of wealthy producers in the tequila region moved to differentiate themselves from the rustic versions made by Indigenous mezcaleros elsewhere in Mexico. It was a time when mass-produced goods held more cachet than handmade, and the tequila families invested in factories that could churn out a modern, predictable product. Out went the wood-fired ovens, clay stills and open-air fermentations. In came the gas-powered autoclaves and steel distillation tanks.

One of the things that makes mezcal unique is that all these specs are listed on the back label, beneath the name of the mezcalero responsible. That nerdy tradition has protected mezcal’s authenticity—aficionados know to avoid any bottle that doesn’t dish—and has given some old mezcaleros a rock star status they never expected.

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An Ice Climbing Disaster on Mount Katahdin. A Desperate Race to Save Lives.

David Goodman recounts a terrible night on Pamola’s Fury and the difficult decisions a group of climbers had to make. It’s a fast-paced adventure, which also tackles the undercurrent of animosity felt between climbers and rangers as climbing culture developed in the seventies.

In the fading light. Proudman realized they could not make it off the mountain and prepared to bivouac overnight. He used his ice ax to chip a ledge out of the ice and snow — 3 feet wide by 5 feet long — for everyone to gather. He estimated they were within a few hundred feet of the top, but he wouldn’t attempt making it there. He wanted the group to remain together.

A later AMC report included an evaluation of this moment. “In all probability, Bob, Mike, and Doug could have climbed to the ridge by dark and descended back to camp had they not waited,” the report concluded. “It is also quite possible that as a result of such action, all three of the others would have perished.”

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The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air

The latest must-have for the wealthy? The freshest, cleanest air. For The New Republic, science journalist Shayla Love toured some of New York City’s high-end buildings to learn about their sophisticated and state-of-the-art filtration systems. (At one complex on the Upper West Side, “[o]utside air is brought in, filtered, treated with an ultraviolet-C light that kills 99.9 percent of pathogens, and completely changed out once per hour.”) In a time of pandemics and wildfires, the desire and demand for excellent indoor air quality has surged, and many luxury real estate listings today attract people with “the promise of an exceptional breathing experience.” In this piece, Love discovers—unsurprisingly—that if you have money, your air will be better.

At night, when Roe’s family is sleeping, it “smells like you’re camping, because the fresh air is getting pumped in at such a rapid rate,” he said. You know the air is good, he told me, because the hydrangeas last. Typically, when cut at the stem and arranged in a vase, the delicate flowers wither and droop in a few days. In his apartment, the blooms will stay perky for nearly two weeks.

In China, the sociocultural anthropologist Victoria Nguyen reported, underground bomb shelters have been converted into communal breathing areas, while wealthier Chinese can afford to go on “lung wash” vacations. For many others, on bad-air days, activities that used to take place in parks—playing cards, exercising, reading the paper—now take place below ground.

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Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?

Of all the types of garments we wear, our pants make a big statement—and signal so much about our culture. In this entertaining read on pants trends and fashion, Jonah Weiner explores the shift to baggy and wide-legged after a period of small and skinny at the helm.

In some ways, this shift felt entirely predictable, as if a rubber band stretched tight had snapped back to laxity. And yet it was disconcerting too, as if the rubber band had immediately become a balloon. It could be hard to trust your own eyes. I’d been feeling the rumblings of a Return to Big Pants since about 2017, when I remember worrying about the fact that I was 36 and still wearing essentially the same pants I’d worn at 26. There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself — the balding guy still trying to make his high school haircut work. I made the conscious decision to resist fossilization and buy roomier pants, and over the next couple of years, I thought that’s what I did. My wife and my friends tell me they thought I did, too, having seen some of the new pants in question and deemed them conspicuously, if not laughably, large. And yet photographs confirm that, in absolute terms, my pants remained fitted for a while. I couldn’t see it clearly at first, but I was locked in an arms race against my own mounting pants dysmorphia. Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging.

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The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors

With the world’s focus on Gaza, settlers in the West Bank have used wartime chaos as cover for violence and dispossession. Investigative journalist Shane Bauer spent time on the ground there. One of his subjects, Bashar Ma’amar, is a Palestinian who documents Israeli aggression and also drives an ambulance:

On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.

The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.

“They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

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