There’s Nothing Unnatural About a Computer

In this interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares thought-provoking observations about the role of artificial intelligence, the awareness of living in a more-than-human world (and what gardening can teach us about building technology), and the importance of resilience and transmittal of knowledge as the world radically changes.

But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI — but mostly incredibly fearfully. There’s always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. It’s where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the way in which it’s controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesn’t need to be read that way.

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Of Innocence and Experience

In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:

The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:

a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.

In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.

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Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country

Every day, anti-trans rhetoric is spreading and becoming more virulent. Conservative forces in statehouses across America are pushing bills that would strip trans people of rights, including access to vital medical care. In some places, these laws have already passed. This is all part of a concerted, coordinated effort, as Madison Pauly’s reporting shows. Pauly gained access to a trove of emails exchanged by a group of anti-trans advocates who workshop legislative bills, public messaging, and other aspects of their crusade:

They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child. 

Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post. 

Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.

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Frog

At Harper’s Magazine, Anne Fadiman’s hilarious and poignant essay recalls Bunky, an African clawed frog the family kept as a pet until his death at age 16. After years of feeding the required “Stage Two Food Nuggets” that formed Bunky’s diet and regular tank cleanings, Fadiman feels as though the family never did quite right by the frog, despite his longevity. This is a fun and insightful read on what it means to be a pet owner.

George and I agreed that we should wait until Henry and Susannah were both home before we buried Bunky under the weeping cherry, next to Biscuit and Bean. We joked about it, but we were also serious. We never considered throwing him in the trash. We wanted to honor him in death as we hadn’t in life; otherwise we’d be like a family whose photo albums get thinner with each succeeding child, until the last one has no pictures at all. (Come to think of it, we’d never taken a single picture of Bunky.) So Bunky went into the freezer. He’d spent more than a decade on the kitchen counter, so he didn’t have to travel far.

What is a pet? Is it an animal you love, as we loved Typo? Is it an animal you are responsible for, as we were for Bunky? Do you have to be able to pet a pet? Must there be reciprocal affection, or is it enough merely to have a guest in your midst that has a different number of legs, or perhaps no legs at all? Is it enough to house, feed, and bury an animal, to keep it alive for sixteen years, or maybe seventeen, and never understand the first thing about it?

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Welcome to the No-Budget Era

The film world has long included an ecosystem of young budding auteurs doing everything on a shoestring — but as Max Cea points out, it’s never been this possible to make a movie look this good for this cheap. And those young auteurs are starting to get noticed.

Some of these filmmakers also worry that Hollywood will take the wrong lessons from these movies. At the moment, the ability to make a $50,000 feature that rivals the quality of something made for $5 million is an exciting democratization, but it’s easy to imagine how that advancement might be exploited. “The second you tell people who finance movies that they’re paying five million dollars for something they could be paying fifty grand for, we’re just going to continue to erode at the idea that anyone could ever make a living doing this,” says Free Time director Ryan Martin Brown.

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In Search of Lost Time

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, oversees just about anything measurable in the United States. It collects and calibrates samples of materials. It owns the world’s tiniest ruler. It also standardizes the units by which we measure, which means everything from the meter (distance) to the mole (substance). But it’s the second (time) that has always fascinated Tom Vanderbilt, so off he went to discover — and, by extension, to delight us with — everything he could about that slippery duration.

In this world of metrology, which has left behind the dusty archives of physical things in favor of fundamental properties of the universe, it seems a kind of cosmic joke that this intangible, evanescent unit is the one that is understood most accurately. Even so, there is something amiss in the world of the second, the world of time. In a world of staggering exactitude, there are new timepieces on the horizon, capable of even more accuracy, clocks that are moving beyond mere measurement and opening new inquiries into time, into the universe itself. These machines have helped to drive a creeping suspicion that the second—that fundamental base unit upon which our temporal kingdom is built—despite all the synchronous activity of the world, despite the advent of clocks whose fidelity could theoretically outlast human civilization itself, is not being realized as exactly as it could be. Having come in search of the origin of time, I was learning that the very thing that drives it—the standard second—is flawed.

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The Tinder Car Heist Was a Mess — and the Revenge Plot Even Messier

The subject of this piece —  a 32-year-old technology entrepreneur named Mike — is a wholly unlikeable character. The way Ian Frisch portrays him makes it hard to sympathize with the way he is scammed on Tinder, which is more a testament to his narcissism than his naivety. Nevertheless, this is a rollicking tale with some jaw-dropping moments that will keep you gripped to the end.

Mike quickly matched with a woman named Ky. She seemed cute, if somewhat inscrutable, with no biographical details and photographs that included only a mirror selfie and a snapshot of her butt in a bikini. “I am the sweetest person you will ever meet,” she would later tell him. Mike had never used Tinder before; he told Ky that he’d be happy to get together.

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