The basic takeaway is, of course, that given an ugly man and a hot man doing exactly the same thing, the woman will enjoy the hot man’s behavior and punish the ugly man’s behavior. Occasionally I make references to how I think this meme is badly wrong, because it’s taken from a cluster of premises that are unknowingly operating without accurate information. I thought I’d devote a post to what I mean, finally, instead of simply referencing the above.

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Skye shares my surface-level read here. She fully acknowledges that beauty usually helps and that beauty combined with poor social skills is generally a worse situation than beauty without them. The mechanisms she notes are plausible too, and shared with my own: beauty shrinks your margin for error, so if you’re the kind of person who makes a lot of errors, being beautiful will be a much more mixed bag for you than it might otherwise be. People will absolutely project onto you if you are beautiful, and not always in flattering ways. The key point I most disagree with is here: “To this day, I’m inclined to believe that Helen would never have ended up where she did — floridly mentally unwell, using heroin, doing time, regularly kissing death full on the mouth — if she looked like an average human woman, or even a normatively attractive one.”

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Obsession analysis is everywhere. One of the most popular TikTok-header takes you’ll see is: “Bear [our protagonist] is the villain.” This is true, or it is depending on how you define it. It’s leaving out the bulk of what makes the movie so good, unfortunately.

Bear is a fascinating antagonist/anti-hero/protagonist because he can’t really make sense of how what he wants could be bad. It makes him so authentic, so human, and so (I wish I were sorry to say this) male onscreen, and it is the primary reason that the entire movie is duct-tape sticky as discourse fodder. Bear really struggles to move outside of his own frame of innocent desire until the horror movie consequences have cranked up from PG-13 to R.

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Specifically, I’m complaining about Jeremiah Johnson’s uncharacteristically superficial reading of Bo Burnham’s "Problematic”.

To wit:

Inside also indulges in one of the worst habits of modern discourse — the use of self-criticism as a shield.

And I’ve been totally awful
My closet is chock-full of stuff that is vaguely shitty
All of it was perfectly lawful
Just not very thoughtful at all and just really shitty

Yes, Burnham is a white man doing comedy in a time when white men are being asked to take a back seat… but he’s aware! He tells jokes about how he’s aware but doing it anyway!

This is the entire conceit of songs like “Comedy” or “Problematic.” Sure, Burnham is a straight cis white guy, but he’s one of the good ones. He’s so sorry for his past!

This is wrong. I say this as someone who’s spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Bo is actually doing here. The tone of “Problematic”, in particular, is muddled. This isn’t new territory for him as an artist - Bo Burnham’s work in general has a strange but compelling mixture of earnestness and artifice. There are a number of songs where he’s conflicted and he’s telling you he’s conflicted and he knows that by telling you he’s conflicted you’re going to exonerate him for feeling conflicted but he knows and tries to tell you you probably shouldn’t. He’s most definitely not just pointing at his self awareness and expecting you to applaud, smiling beatifically at your graciousness.

“Problematic” holds a funny, cramped, confusing little posture in style and tone, almost the opposite of the above two-step. The lyrics are not nearly as conflicted as he’s telling you they are, but he’s willing to go through the motions, and he’s aware that going through the motions (however neurotically) is not going to make him perfectly respectable.

It’s easier to get a sense for what he might be doing in “Problematic” when you compare it to a different song, one where his uncertainty sounds if not less sarcastic at least considerably less cheerful. A piece from his 2010 special Words, Words, Words called “Art is Dead” is one of my favorite ever of his songs. In it, he seems genuinely unhappy with elements of his success, but if anything, more unhappy that openness about the unhappiness makes people give him credit he doesn’t deserve.

The first:

Relevant lyrics:

“My drug’s attention, I am an addict
But I get paid to indulge in my habit
It’s all an illusion
I’m wearing make-up”

“Art is Dead” is from his HBO special at just 19 years old, Words, Words, Words.

Then the lyrics to “Problematic”, from 2021’s Inside:

Times are changing, and I’m getting old
Are you gonna hold me accountable?
My bed is empty, and I’m getting cold
Isn’t anybody gonna hold me accountable? Ugh!

The first song is explicit about the guilt and embarrassment that he feels that fundamentally what he’s doing is singing dumb songs after getting famous online. There’s even a hair of shame visible about the fact that even as he’s devoting himself to “art”, the art he’s doing is dumb songs about sex and online memes. There’s real conflict and real stakes: I don’t think this Bo was being sarcastic when he referenced the money he’s making that he just doesn’t need, as a 19 year old, in the way that a family with young kids actually does need it. I think he recognizes that that conflict doesn’t make him want to part with his money and there’s a part of him that doesn’t respect that and doesn’t respect that his audience applauds him for admitting it.

I suspect that this uncertainty and conflict is instrumentally relevant to his reported panic attacks on stage, referenced in Inside as pulling him out of performing for more than five years. Something was fundamentally unintegrated to him about the idea that he was a dumb kid writing dumb puns about hoses on a low budget and turned into a superstar for it. This song reeks of real discontentment that something felt tectonically wrong to him about being rewarded for something that didn’t create much for other people, not physically, anyway, and that he just didn’t respect all that much himself. You can sense it. You can sense it in the register of the song - the arch musical theater tone from Bo usually contains a bit of darkness that some of his others do not, it’s the major reason that “Welcome to the Internet”, one of his best songs ever, is in precisely the same timbre.

Compare this to “Problematic”, which is fully in corny 80s Footloose fight dancing mode.

This is such an aggressive trope for mockery of a certain kind of tortured masculine emotiveness that it has imitators everywhere.

He’s distancing the vibe from himself and from any hint that he actually deserves our pity with the style of the song alone.

A lot of this song does sound sincere, in its way. He does seem to think he’s written and said offensive things, but he doesn’t sound remotely as tortured about that as he does in “Art is Dead” about being turned into a celebrity for his inability to tolerate being something other than the center of attention.

One read of this song is that it’s resentful, that it’s mocking the idea of having to apologize for stupid things. This read requires Bo to think of himself as a straightforward victim of the culture, and whatever Bo’s flaws (boy, does he have them), Bo is much too proud to intentionally take a victimhood stance unless he’s calling himself a victim of himself. “Art is Dead” paints Bo himself as the most embarrassing person in the tableau. “Problematic” doesn’t seem to paint Bo as embarrassing for having done anything wrong, nor for wanting to apologize, but more for the fact that this apology is going to feel like it makes him and his feelings the most important thing in the room. But it would be worse not to say it. And it won’t earn him much in the way of grace or sympathy for having done problematic things. And I think Bo genuinely finds that snarl of conflicting issues really funny, without feeling all that bad for himself, per se, in making sense of it. Bo Burnham seems to find his self-pity as a person with unimaginable good fortune (wealthy for doing dumb stuff) incredibly funny.

I certainly can’t get on board with a reading where Bo is genuinely trying to apologize with this song - it’s too overwrought, musically and lyrically, to signal that he wants people to know that he’s full of remorse for what he’s done. I also think Bo is unafraid of saying that he’s done/said/written offensive things.

Compare them. Look at the feelings that bounce off Bo’s self-regard in “Art is Dead”:

I am an artist, please God forgive me
I am an artist, please don’t revere me
I am an artist, please don’t respect me
I am an artist, you’re free to correct me

Now look at the comparatively tepid way he apologizes in “Problematic”:

And I’m really fucking sorry
(Bitch, I’m tryna listen)
(Shit, I’ve been complicit)
Sorry
(If I wanna catch up)
(First, I gotta fess up)
Sorry
Sorry

One of these people is begging. The other is making fun of. Something. Himself, sure, but the first song is also Bo mocking Bo. There’s some mockery of the self-indulgent white guy, too, sure, but this song is definitely not a straightforward, full-throated approval of the expectation that white guys apologize for everything questionable they’ve ever done.

Notably, it was not received by the “woke” contingent of society as one, either. This is because it very clearly is not a straightforward apology, at least not if you’re close enough to that cultural regime to know what’s expected in the same. It sends up a lot of the tropes about the perfect public apology, including the endless self-reference, the focus on the performer’s feelings, the attempts to focus on something other than those feelings while being an apology - an expression of the feeling of remorse - and the apology for the apology. The tortured 80s man dance energy of it is laying it on quite thick, as a matter of fact. It’s just as obvious (to me, anyway), that it is not a resentful, bitchy response to the idea that he has anything to apologize for. Bo seems to think it’s funny that there’s no good way to apologize without making everything about himself but that he’s unavoidably done some things that weren’t perfect by modern standards anyway.

This dance shows up in much of his work, and it means that even when he’s addressing niches like 2020 news events, his work ages far better than most from the same year. He’s making fun of himself with some obvious earnestness, which earns him the respect of the left even when he’s making fun of his failures to get out of the way, center other causes, even apologize properly. This has been part of his appeal for years.

Some of his work does contain some gentle nods to how difficult it is to toe the progressive line well, but again, he never hits this point head on nor does he do it without directing the primary mockery to himself. There is no uncomplicated resentment of wokeness here. Critics from the left notice of course that he’s doing this, but pointing it out is anticlimactic when the bulk of his comedy is directed at the fact that he’s complaining when he has so little to complain about. The right can hear in his comedy something that feels like earnest dissatisfaction with being a white man right now, and not be as put off by the fact that he directs some of that dissatisfaction into humor at himself as other comedians.

The resulting mix is less clearly messaged politically while being full of political content. More importantly, he’s unusually broad spectrum in his appeal as a result of it. He’s not an unproblematic white bae who dutifully does exactly as the progressive wing wants him to and thanks them for it, but he clearly sneers at complaints about being a victim of the culture and calling it comedy. He’s not asking you to exonerate him for being self-aware, he is, if anything, mocking anyone who would cut him a blank check for being self-aware. But, lest he alienate his audience - as a person who makes money off of you, and also as the type of person he appears to be - he makes fun of himself for accepting that bargain, accepting that his pantomime of self-awareness allows him to keep getting away with being loved for doing so little. Respect to Jeremiah Johnson, who is usually a much more on-the-money culture writer, this song and the special that surrounds it are so much more interesting than Bo cheerfully playing the Self-Aware White Guy.

To reference an older piece on the same theme:

Related Posts:

This covers my thoughts on almost all “the people are all jealous of the hotly contested lifestyle choices of the internet person” discussion. They’re reacting to what they perceive as an outlier in earnest, and doing so on some level because public display of outlier good outcomes despite mixed/unusual inputs really stokes people’s sense of concern about What Others Will Assume Is Normal. There’s even a steelman for that impulse: it’s genuinely not ideal for a high number of people to hope to achieve positive outlier status with normal or worse, high-risk, low average reward inputs.

People who are certain others are jealous of or controlling about e.g. their dreamy tradwife content/their beautiful marriage despite years doing porn online/their fuckable wife and high salary while being extremely unwoke might be singing a different tune about what drives their haters if they were forced to confront the similarities with someone they don’t share a kinship with.

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• Monday: Defensiveness

• Tuesday: Group Activities

• Thursday: HAES

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For your Friday, an assortment of songs in French.

Stromae: Tous Les Mêmes

Bagarre: Claque-le

Charlotte Adigéry: Le froid

Juniore: Tout (sinon rien)

Stereo Totale: Tas de Tole

Polo & Pan: Pays imaginaire

Suzane: Laisse tomber les filles

Jacques Dutronc: Les cactus

Evergreen: Comme Si

And if you ever wanted to know what French Dashboard Confessional sounded like, Kyo: Dernière Danse

Happy Friday! Until next week!

Crem is sloppier with his definition of HAES, despite basically admitting to being sloppy in the following footnote: “Specifically, it is a weight-neutral, non-diet approach to health that emphasizes supporting healthy behaviors rather than pursuing weight loss. But the idea behind it is that you can be healthy by doing those things, even if you are fat. Hence how I’ve defined it there.”

This footnote frames HAES correctly, unlike the bulk of his post, but goes on to engage with what he claims is “the idea behind” this accurate framing, because it’s easier to make fun of. To be fair to Cremieux, one of the primary ideas people associate with HAES is that you can be healthy at any size, or that obesity has little effect on health on its own. This is true of many who identified with the movement.

To be fair to HAES, the acronym is “Health at any Size”, not “Healthy At Any Size.” This may seem like a small change, but “you can be healthy at any size” was not the intended claim, and it was named accordingly. It would be more accurate to frame HAES as arguing that you can get healthier at any size. If you don’t exercise, you can start. If you don’t eat vegetables, you can start. If you don’t take walks, you can start. In short, the movement was interested in encouraging people to see health as a set of behaviors that were within their control, rather than something that was out of reach if they were unable - for any reason - to lose weight, just as Crem’s footnote says.

You can, of course, argue that that’s still stupid. For one thing, weight loss is a considerably more effective intervention than any of these, as long as we’re talking about a person who is significantly overweight. Eating vegetables will do some good on the margins even if you’re overweight and sedentary. If you have 60 pounds to lose, losing that weight (and keeping it off) will dramatically reduce your risks for all kinds of negative health outcomes, from joint problems to cardiovascular disease. Exercise helps more than adding broccoli to your diet, but it too is worse at making you lose weight - which again, does more for your health if you’re overweight - than it is at improving several bodily functions.

The claim that obese individuals can eat better, move more, and improve their health to some extent is just not as stupid as the claim that anyone can cancel out obesity with some fiber and consistent lifting. Additionally, having healthy habits makes weight loss easier and more likely to stick longterm than does simply taking GLP-1s or dramatically slashing calories with no other lifestyle changes. Before, during, and after significant weight loss, overweight individuals would genuinely be wise to increase the number of behaviors they engage in for their health.

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Precious few things you do in dating are going to land you a spouse more than 10% of the time that you do them. Going out with your friends? Not likely to get you a spouse. Talking to strangers? Not likely to get you a spouse. Work? Unlikely. Using that as a metric for what should be treated as “successful” will have you staying in your house half the time.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t specific things you can do to increase your chances of getting married. I can’t get you data on the following because it’s taken from my personal experience, so you’ll either have to trust me or not: meeting a spouse through a group of people with a shared vision, whether that’s church, a club, or a volunteer setup, can be a great way to improve your chances at getting a spouse. However, when people talk about this online (selected population, I know), I get the sense that people don’t always have a sense for the particular rules that attend this approach? I am here, online, and if you trust me, I can make some suggestions for how to improve your odds of dating out of a group.

I’ve mentioned - tangentially - some failure modes associated with this approach. A lot of people fail at dating from a social environment because they assume that the social environment is an inert container for potential dates, rather than a dynamic system that cares about how you engage with it. The people you attend any group with will care about what effect you have on that group, and dating people in a group is a particularly high-salience way to affect a group dynamic.

Group dynamics can prevent you from getting dates, they can and will put limits on what happens after a relationship ends, whether in marriage or dissolution or otherwise, they can box you out. They can also make it easier for you to meet people you like, whether inside or outside the group, provide positive references for you (you want positive references, especially as a man. You want them from the right people and you want them badly), and provide a container that a future spouse may want to participate in. This advice will focus on in-person groups, not on online ones. All advice and all choices in in-person groups have more power when done in-person, even once you’ve identified and attended your group. You get more agency and success probability by taking action in real life as opposed to online. Don’t waste the advantage or the practice.

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We often find convenient excuses not to pay attention to what other people think, feel, or want, in fact. Humans are very good at telling ourselves that we’re showing up while we half-ass things. We want to be understood, but we want to receive pretty specific social goods without asking for them. Our loved ones get more grace for showing up, those we trust have earned the right to disagree without increasing distrust. Especially when immature, we want to be seen in a very particular way rather than merely being understood and then disagreed with by strangers.

The way we react to strangers but especially to loved ones when they get us wrong can be very loud. Sometimes it’s louder when they’re right: human beings have a noticeable tendency toward defensiveness. Perhaps this is why I’m so critical of that impulse to talk about our fear of being kicked out of the tribe: what people call being understood usually means “understood the way they understand themselves.” That’s not the sum total of the possible ways to understand you, and life is rough for people who never really grasp that reality.

Unless you’re dealing with genuinely abusive people (and maybe even then) defensiveness is a trait worth rooting out of oneself. For one thing, defensiveness is loud: it carries a lot of information about what you can’t stand to be misunderstood on, your anxieties, your psychological vulnerabilities. You want to be careful giving people that kind of information about yourself.

People will reflexively assume you’re trying to convince yourself of whatever you spend the most energy defending. You don’t reflexively defend things that you’re confident you have right, even when others disagree. Secure defense looks very different from insecure defense: someone who is secure has no interest in earning or demanding the approval or changed minds of other people, but may have other reasons for making their case. Insecure defense has a clear emotional tie to the approval of other people, specifically on the subject at hand. It’s much easier to teach yourself to be secure than it is to get people to approve of you all the time.

Defensiveness often looks very silly as it sort of inherently casts about for a referee that doesn’t exist. It tends to have a preoccupation with “haters”, and quickly ends up defining itself by them. A funny thing about haters is that there is no faster way to give ammunition to people who find you annoying than to show them what you’re sensitive about. There is a distinctive energy to defensiveness: others can often tell what’s most psychologically live to you by what you complain about in others. This is a consistent weak point, costly for the owner and sometimes those around: a tendency to tangle itself with what it finds painful and remains unable to transcend it. What you demand people pay attention to says a lot about what you fear and how you can be controlled, specifically. This is doubly true for what you react to, rather than which content you create yourself.

It’s ideal to reduce your need to tell people who you are as much as possible. Let them figure you out without your help. If they learn something you don’t think is true, an open mind may occasionally reveal that they have a point, or at least have noticed something genuine that you’re leaking, even if they interpreted it incorrectly.

Defensiveness on the internet is one of the least useful kinds. You will never have the approval of everyone on the internet, they don’t know you, they have little context for you. Internet defense is kind of pointless in terms of changing people’s minds. If you have an earnest case to make involving meaningful arguments that are important to you to set forth, feel free, but even there, the focus is on you satisfying a desire you have. It’s good to find a better outlet for feeling misunderstood than complaining to people on the internet that you feel misunderstood.

Your reflexive desire to defend yourself has more problems than being revealing, of course - it’s often pretty bad at truth-seeking. If your reflexive desire to defend yourself can identify anything at all that’s wrong in what your critics have to say, it will dismiss them wholesale.

Longtime readers know how I feel about this:

A crowd is not always right, but that is a poor, poor reason to assume that if a large number of people misunderstand you or disagree with you, it is simply because large numbers of people are stupid and/or tribal. Clean epistemology demands closer investigation of unpopular positions to ensure that you are actually more informed and/or less politically motivated than the people you disagree with. Frankly, it requires a more granular awareness of the points of disagreement than a response that focuses on stupidity or tribalism. Epistemic competence requires revision occasionally, and especially updates in the face of new information.

We have a lizard-brained desire for our critics foibles to excuse us in our own. We’re always on the lookout for the mote in other’s eyes, as it were:

It is always going to be easier to jump to “hatred” to evaluate someone who’s angry at you, bothered by you, irritated by you, than it is to grapple with what claims are actually being made and how they’re being delivered. One can even dignify their opponent in many cases by assigning “hatred” to them where “resentment” or “petty frustration” would be considerably more accurate descriptive nouns.

To be repeatedly misunderstood without knowing why is to misunderstand more fundamentally than anyone else. Usually, if people consistently misunderstand you, especially in particular ways, there is a clear reason why. That reason may simply be that you have different values than they do, but only some values differences feel like a live wire. Once you know why you are consistently misunderstood - which you usually cannot do without seriously engaging ideas about yourself that make you feel belittled, insulted, or embarrassed - you have more options to rework what it means to you to be misunderstood. You can always tell when people are hiding load-bearing meanings when they react disproportionately to some stimuli; this applies to you too.

Defensiveness leaves you undefended, psychologically and epistemically. It’s a habit worth transcending, and that starts with recognizing a kneejerk desire to argue with people that you already think are unreasonable - generally a tell of a desire to reconsider, if not discard altogether.

• I love Latin music and Latin ballroom, but I didn’t realize that most of what I loved was just Cuban music

• Do women like being objectified?

• In an adult relationship, there aren’t really “needs”

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Today is an assortment of assortments.

A Vine:

A piece from runways long past:

A Bo Burnham song:

A somewhat underrated YA book series:

A genuinely easy and fast meal:

A section of a Wikipedia post:

A 3Blue1Brown video:

A nonfiction book:

A dance:

A morbid, strange, somehow delightful little game:

A makeup tutorial containing multiple of my go-to techniques:

A cover:

Happy Friday!

Defining Needs

People might instinctively recoil from that reclassification. Of course you have needs in a relationship, you might say. Human beings have needs. They need water, food, shelter, money. They need higher level items: attention, friendship, assistance in sickness, pregnancy, old age. You might ask whether I’ve heard of your good friend Maslow.

Well, yes. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy, however, you’ll notice that these needs are generally things you as an individual seek and qualify for, even when they involve other people. Your ability to receive love and belonging in a friendship, for example, may (and will, if it’s a good friendship) have space for a wide variety of imperfections in you, but it is still contingent on some factors. Not sleeping with your friends spouses, for example, is a fairly typical expectation to receive ongoing love and belonging from other people. This is true for physiological needs as well. Under some circumstances - childhood, infirmity, and old age, primarily - those may be provided entirely by someone else. For a large portion of your life, however, those are needs that you qualify for by active choice.

Relational Needs and Desire

This is also true in a relationship. A relationship isn’t a need-fulfillment transaction, where you secure a proposal, a ring, a marriage license, and then have a claim on your spouse for the rest of your life to give you things that you need, regardless of how you act. For one thing, if it were, a lot of marriages would fail because both parties would try to assert that their spouse had obligations to fulfill while each party individually believed that they had a “need” not to do anything for the other.

You don’t need esteem, sexual excitement, emotional connection, in order to survive, of course. You do in some sense have a need for them, as a member of the human race, in that life is considerably harder without them. The obligation to fulfill that need always lies with you, not with your spouse. Most people reach for “needs” instead of “wants” because they want to take advantage of the very non-negotiable quality of a need.

Needs bring a very convenient framework into your marriage if your goal is “getting what you want even if your spouse doesn’t want to participate.” If you truly need something and your spouse is truly the only person who can give it to you, then your spouse is in the wrong for not delivering it. This raises the stakes of any request, and it often limits problem solving. After all, if a baby needs to be fed, there are only so many solutions for that problem. There are considerably more solutions for most of what we want from our partners in an adult relationship. This is good, too, because the architecture of our desire is remarkably resistant to limitations.

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To some extent men want moral credit for being attracted to women, which is sort of like wanting to be approved of because you experience hunger. This is partially because female attraction tends to travel with moral approval of a kind, whether competence- or principles-based. It’s fine that men are attracted to or horny for women. It’s annoying to engage with people who think of you as a highly animated sex doll and think that you should appreciate their attention because it contains a desire to have sex with you. This happens largely because men have trouble modeling the female relationship with sexual desire. A lot of why women complain about objectification comes from this murky swamp.

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A lot of these directly featured latin ballroom:

Even the ones that didn’t focus on Latin ballroom per se had some imprinting dance scenes. Consider this scene from Step Up 2, which is a really implausible collection of skits set in a place called Baltimore that looks nothing at all like Baltimore, all of which serve truly spectacular dance scenes. I watched this scene over and over and over and over again on Youtube after the movie came out.

Yes, this is Robin Thicke. Unfortunately, Robin Thicke is responsible for some bops, both this and his problematic song. I love this scene. Everyone is jealous, everyone is watching everyone else, there are multiple dudes who can genuinely dance so well you don’t care how corny it all is. It cracks me up every time she says “Oooo, I didn’t know you could salsa!” Like one and a half steps into the simplest salsa step with this guy.

This scene was another favorite. Please appreciate our man Roger from Mad Men playing a disapproving father. Diagnosed with terminal mid-century modern face, apparently. Note as well that before Diego Luna was in Andor, and even before he was in Rogue One, he was in this movie, and for me, this character lives in every character he ever plays. I showed this movie to friends at a sleepover in high school and we replayed the kiss in the above scene like 8 times.

So as a result of my love of Latin ballroom, but as an outsider who doesn’t know anything, over time I amassed an enormous Latin playlist. I thought it had a lot of variety. Technically speaking, that’s true, there are a multitude of styles on this playlist. However, it turns out that when I started going through every song in the playlist and forcing myself to categorize them - dance style if appropriate, country of origin - they are. Ahem. Overwhelmingly Cuban.

Afro-Cuban beats are a foundational part of modern ballroom sounds. Even the ones that aren’t strictly Cuban owe a great deal to drum and rhythm patterns borrowed from West African cultures who lived in the Caribbean.

Cuban: Salsa

First on our list is salsa. Salsa has a classic clave rhythm pattern, often called 2 on 3 or 3 on 2. It’s fast, breezy, frequently punctuated with a piano providing a grounding, repetitive structure with a little bit of improv freedom, and horns playing a melody or something close to it.

This one has a kind of interesting indigenous breathy pipe addition, and is fittingly from the “Prince of Salsa”, Luis Enrique, a Nicaraguan singer.

We of course have to touch on some of the classics, like none other than Celia Cruz. “Quimbara”, with its rapid, light touch drumline over the clave rhythm, is one of my favorites.

Puerto Rican Salsa

So Puerto Rican singers in the US were often heavily influenced by the popular Cuban beats found in New York City clubs, and a surprising percentage of Puerto Rican musicians are playing Cuban-influenced salsa, even now.

Don’t be fooled by the name, Joe Cuba (né Gilberto Miguel Calderón) is Puerto Rican.

Bad Bunny even falls into this category in some cases - NUEVAYol samples one of the more famous Puerto Rican Salsa songs from the 60s, and adds in this crispy percussion and clubbing 4 to a beat foundation. It hits soooo goood. Because those salsa songs borrowed so much from Cuban salsa, the texture overall is significantly Cuban.

I’m sorry to do this to you but we have to include this one from the premier Puerto Rican of our time, Lin Manuel Miranda:

GOD, this song is so good. Those opening horns alone kill me. This piece in particular has more deviations from more typical Cuban salsa than the ones I’ve included so far. A lot of the basics are here - complex shifting percussion, piano backbone (banger piano backbone) holding down a center of gravity, and we do have horns. Typical Cuban salsa tends to use horns considerably more as filler than this one does, brief stabs of color rather than giving real form to the whole piece. These are melody-heavy and even rhythm heavy.

One of my favorite things in any LMM musical is when the horns come in after the chorus has repeated “Vanessa, let me get the next one-”. They change your sense of the downbeat, which until now has been provided by piano and drums. The horns come in on an offbeat, the whole rhythmic axis shifts and your bearings on the original phrasing shift to a new coordinate system. It’s all in service of raising the stakes of the plot beats we’ve been listening to, as well - the music shifts in intensity like we’re headed for a beat drop, and the equivalent of that shows up next, as we hear the main character start hitting on women other than who he showed up with in despair. That’s before we get to the final devolution with measured, stepping piano laced with delirious horn melodies, all adding confusion and tension right before the lights go out. Lin Manuel Miranda absolutely deserves that Pulitzer.

Traditional Cuban Styles

Cuban music outside of salsa has a multitude of different styles, and I’m only going to touch briefly on a few of them. The perhaps best-known player in this scene is Buena Vista Social Club, a group founded in the mid-90s that performed traditional Cuban music, now the subject of a Broadway musical of the same name. A lot of their music in particular is irresistible to me, and my ear recognizes them as Cuban faster even than salsa.

“Candelas” is son Cubano music, late 19th century Cuban music from the eastern side of the island with both Spanish and African roots. It’s my favorite. It’s so quiet, with a whispered quality in the percussion, a humidity in the rounded bass, a closeness in the slowness. It’s so. good.

Another favorite BVSC tune, “El Cuarto De Tula”, a bit more upbeat but with the same compelling sweatiness. The harmonies are a particular favorite of mine here - they move with a pattern that almost sounds like parallelism, which isn’t very common in Western music, and it gives them this really nice pathos against the intimate beat and sparkling dark guitar licks.

Music that builds from this style but modernizes it is everywhere. Consider “Cosquilla” by Spam Allstars. It has much of the same textures, a slowed-down, conversational pace (that burning, fuzzed up bass synth? good lord) and makes it feel like the second-to-last drink of the night. Delicious.

This isn’t traditional Cuban music, but when I listen to it, I hear the genetics of son Cubano throughout - understated, a soft tambourine hit to replace the shaker sound, harmonies to match, and a bit of swampy guitar filling out the sound. Close, playful, languid. The somewhat baffling inclusion of French lyrics throughout.

Boogaloo

I tried to leave out Boogaloo, but ran into multiple problems: boogaloo slaps, and it’s very important connective tissue between mid-century Cuban music and a lot of modern pop music with Latin elements. Also, the old stuff often uses boogaloo in the title, which I think is hilarious.

Boogaloo takes a salsa base - shaker, clave or cowbell, horns, piano - and goes a bit funkier with it. It was the next evolution from the New York salsa scene of the 50s and 60s, going in a bit more of a jazz fusion direction. Take this example, which has a truly delightful vibe organ solo smack in the middle of it that reminds me of a very different music style popular at the same time, groovy and psychedelic offshoots of rock. There’s a faster solo with similar timbre and scale base in “She’s Not There” by the Zombies.

A little earlier than the other boogaloo piece above, this one is also a blend of the big band jazz influences popular in America at the time, layered onto some traditional Cuban set pieces. The brass made it a natural crossover.

Obviously, we then have to talk about:

You can hear the sample throughout, and the fusion of brass and pop music has a somewhat natural development in this form. In researching this piece, I learned that Lou Bega was born in Germany to an Italian mother and a Ugandan father, not a single fact of which I was expecting having read the detail prior, so now you all may share in this knowledge with me.

Although it’s not strictly boogaloo, you can see the same development of Cuban music, fusion of an older tradition with banger pop music and bass, from the African-heavy side. Take Harry Belafonte, a Calypso singer based in New York with parents from Jamaica and Martinique, and the Beetlejuice song (one of the best songs of all time, imo):

And this, which is more of an homage than a sample, because the original song is too good to do too much to.

You didn’t think we were getting through this essay without talking about Pitbull, did you? It is only with extreme self-control that I’m not including about eight more of his songs.

Merengue

Merengue has a much more straightforward rhythmic backbone than salsa, a marching shuffle with an incredibly basic 2 beat pulse. Merengue has a few different varieties, including Dominican and Puerto Rican. These songs are all compulsively danceable, with a shaker or synth hanging onto that driving, direct beat. I particularly like this one from Wilfrido Vargas - the synthy xylophone hits so good over the two-step maraca beat.

The god of Merengue is Puerto Rican: Elvis Crespo. Listen for the piano doing a lot of the same work that it does in Cuban salsa, but here instead of a really janky multiple-measure clave rhythm, we have a shuffle that hits every back beat. Horns for shimmer and shine.

This song has gotten some attention on Tiktok recently because it’s entitled “The Cow”. The chorus lyrics, in English, are: “The cow (moo). The cow (moo). The same cow (moo).”1 The thing about this song, though, is that it is incredible, and it is irresistibly, compulsively danceable. The artist, Mala Fe, is Dominican, and I tend to like the energy of Dominican merengue slightly more than Puerto Rican, on average.

This is not the only song from Dominican Merengue that slaps with no respect for pretentious lyricism. Behold: “El Beeper” (yes), from New York based, Dominican-born group Oro Solido. Sample lyrics: “It’s on. It’s on.” It’s so good.

Musicians from other traditions often borrow merengue structure, as well. Merengue has extremely similar musical structure to cumbia, a tradition common in multiple Latin American cultures with strong indigenous roots, but particularly popular in Colombia. You’ll see a lot of Colombian artists playing merengue or songs within the same sonic space - musicians can take a cumbia song, speed it up, and dress with horns and get something similar to merengue, because the rhythmic bases overlap so heavily. One of the most underrated Shakira tracks of all time, according to me:

So apparently, Shakira’s goal with this album was to create merengue. For me, this song is just a hair slower than what I think of as merengue, occupying a bit of a classic Colombian cumbia sound as well as a merengue sound. This song is incredible. Again. Horns.

Assorted Spanish Bangers

Now to another continent for half the ancestral genetics of some of the music we’ve been talking about. As good a place to start as any is with a well-known Spanish musical tradition: flamenco, the Romani-inflected style featuring clapping patterns popularized by nomadic European cultures. First, of course, a semi-faithful traditional sounding flamenco from another movie featuring a great dance scene:

This movie is so great. Anthony Hopkins. Antonio Banderas. Catherine Zeta-Jones. I remember this dance scene being spectacular when I watched it as a kid; as an adult I notice that they’re not exactly demanding Black Swan-like technical feats from these actors. It still hits. For the music, though: classic features of Spanish music are all here - guitars are doing a lot of our basic percussion work, we’re using more or less traditional keys - but we also have the inclusion of rapid, clapping percussion, a flamenco signature. The music is much more flamenco than anything else, but the dance style suggests to me that they borrowed inspiration from paso doble, a ballroom and military musical genre inspired by bullfighting.

Rosalia, in her song “Malamente”, strips down the rapid guitar beat but keeps the harmonic and melodic structure of a flamenco, with very similar snapping percussion in the background. I love it.

More guitars, of course - Spain is responsible for most of the ancestral guitar handed down via the Western music tradition, and its fingerprints are all over their music, both past and present. “Bamboleo” is a banger that relies heavily on guitar strumming for percussion, a classic feature of Spanish music. (You can even hear the eruption of flamenco-style percussion but totally absent syncopation - all sixteenth notes, matching the guitar strum pattern - near the end).

Another classic from a big name this time: Enrique Iglesias. One of my favorite things about Spanish singers is being able to hear them use distinción - Castilian pronunciation that shifts both written c’s and z’s into soft th sounds.2 You can hear it clear as day on this record in only a few lines - “Yo te miro y se me corta la respiración” ends with “respira-thion”. This song uses a pretty traditional club beat with some sparkling classic Spanish guitar over the top - still heavily strummed and following the percussion over the chorus, with more picking/melodic work on the verses.

Related:

A favorite Spanish artist of mine is Bebe. You can also hear her actually singing with the distinción, and she leans into the speed of traditional Spanish music in lyrics, rather than solely with guitar or percussion. It works really nicely for the following song, about waiting an eternal seven hours until you can be with the person you love. There is a delightful lightness - sunniness - to her style.

Spanish guitar tradition lives on in guitar bangers by artists like Colombian singer Juanes and of course, none other than the GOAT, Carlos Santana.

There are many more - I wanted to talk about the Gotan Project of Argentina, Ana Tijoux of Chile, or Calle 13 of Puerto Rico - but emails and Mondays are only so long. I hope you danced at least a little.

• Biology is hard, and it’s much harder than people think to use biology to kill a lot of people in a novel way

• A collection of my favorite musical selections

• An earnest defense of enjoyment in the idea that some stories are written in the stars

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This one will be loose, and I will almost certainly forget some key contenders, even among my own favorites.

I love the work of J.M.W. Turner, which often contains a remarkably Impressionist sensibility. He painted far too early to be a formal Impressionist - the above work, Fisherman at Sea, is from 1796, while the major Impressionists like Monet were active almost a century later, in the 1870s and 1880s. Fisherman at Sea respects form a bit more clearly than some of Turner’s later works would, but it retains many of his particular signatures: a fascination with the sea, with light, and with the shifting uncertainty built into both of them. As these elements fit neatly into the preoccupations of the Impressionists - like Monet’s habit of painting the same scene, quickly, multiple times throughout the day as the light shifted - Turner’s work seems remarkably ahead of its time.

Sometimes his works veer a bit surprising in their lack of form, even smudgy, but there’s a looseness to them that I like.

I particularly like the emotion in Fisherman at Sea, there’s a real sense of claustrophobic vulnerability in the light of the moon on a vast ocean, intimate, enormous, beautiful all at once. Fisherman at Sea is from the early frontier of the Romantic movement as well - the drama, the fascination with nature and danger and natural danger - but it doesn’t lean in quite the same direction as painters like Delaroche. Somehow Turner’s drama, in its landscape form, always remains a bit restrained and removed. I like him.

Paul Delaroche’s “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” is in the National Gallery in London, and if by chance you happen to go there, it’s worth seeking this painting out in person. Lady Jane Grey was just sixteen years old when she was sentenced to death by Queen Mary I, a daughter of King Henry VIII. Lady Jane Grey was briefly made queen due to a dynastic claim as a granddaughter of King Henry VII, reigning for only 9 days after the death of Henry VIII’s only son, Edward VI. This painting is even more luminous in person than it appears onscreen, you can almost see the girl’s hands shaking. The detail that she had to be guided to find the execution block after being blindfolded is apparently one based on witness accounts. The painting is from the 19th century, a true Romantic composition, full of drama, color, the subject death, a young woman, someone fainting in the background. While it’s easy to poke fun at intentional emotional button-pushing, I find that for some compositions leaning into the feeling of it all is the only way to do it justice. Beautiful.

Albrecht Dürer was a painter of the Northern Renaissance, in my opinion a bit under-appreciated relative to its (also beautiful) Italian counterpart. Durer was German, and the Northern Renaissance, like many artistic movements, was shaped by the intellectual culture it steeped in. Martin Luther’s Reformation is of course a sort of cultural atomic bomb in terms of the ways it changed the world it inhabited. The Reformation itself was of course made possible because of the printing press, around a century prior. The printing press brought a sort of democratic air to questions that had once been gated to scholars and monks in their universities and monasteries, and that laid open gates for new ways of thinking about people. Erasmus, a famous thinker of the same time and place, advocated for Humanism, a secular movement advocating for the dignity of all human beings.

For me, the Northern Renaissance as a whole bears particular fingerprints of that humanist, egalitarian ethos, including those visible in the works of Dürer. He made woodcuts, basically stamps carved into wood that, inspired by and much like the printing press, made his works accessible to a much larger audience than was typical of most art of the time. He was occasionally derided as cheap for this impulse. I see a grounding, earnest humanity in his paintings, and I prefer his paintings to his woodcuts for their use of color. This painting - Wing of a European Roller - has such a tender appreciation for nature, god, and human curiosity and awe, all with a deceptively simple subject. It’s beautiful.

It is painfully basic of me to love Vermeer, but I’m not the sort of person who pretends like the Beatles suck just to be contrarian. The Dutch Masters certainly earned their place in the artistic canon, and as someone who is only occasionally moved by a still life, I’m naturally a fan of Vermeer.

In the 17th Century, the Dutch had enormous colonial power due to their successful trade, itself downstream of absolutely gargantuan market share in international shipping. The Dutch East India Company, one of the first joint stock companies in the world and a behemoth of a company in its own right, won the Dutch Republic substantial wealth and comfort in that century. Its tradition of still life masters is in part a feature of this abundance; noblemen and wealthy merchants who could afford to showcase what they had by commissioning beautiful paintings of it, and the novelty of creating art containing items shipped from around the world.

The influence of affluence can still be felt with Vermeer, particularly in the fine fabrics, made with fine dyes, worn by even the serving people in his paintings. Everyone talks about his appreciation for light, and they’re right to do so - most paintings are a study on an open window, at their heart, including the one above - but he brings out a strange sense of intimacy and emotional awareness in his subjects with the way the light plays on their faces, the way the colors of their clothes reflect subtly on their skin. Maybe I’m just making up bullshit. These paintings are gorgeous and they have a way of making me sense a whole person in an image of a girl at a desk, a woman at a window. They’re lovely.

Georges De La Tour is a French Baroque painter who worked in the 17th century. He has an almost alarmingly modern style, to my eye, a camera-like treatment of shadow. La Tour followed in the footsteps of Caravaggio before him, utilizing a technique called chiaroscuro (painting with somewhat overdramatized contrasts between light and shadow) to showcase his subjects. Caravaggio is a technical master, of course, but his scenes often leave me cold, perhaps because they have a more stylized emotional heart to them, characteristic of the Italian Renaissance tradition he inhabited. La Tour’s subjects always look reserved in contrast, and their affect reminds me surprisingly of the Northern painters despite his French homeland.

La Tour’s paintings are instantly recognizable, almost samey, for their repeated visual language - single flame, widespread darkness - but I love them despite this air of predictability. The darkness has an intimacy and the unforced expressions of the participants has an authenticity that again reads remarkably modern. This is a French Baroque painter! This work is from around 1635, titled The Repentant Magdalen. She feels human, like she might turn her head and answer if I spoke to her. His use of the memento mori here - the foregrounded skull, reminding the viewer of inevitable mortality, blocking out our view of the candle flame - is also somewhat reserved, especially for its time. I love La Tour’s warmth and the inviting quiet of his paintings.

Tell me your favorites too.

The Trojan War began because of Discord.

Eris was, of course, her other name, a minor goddess in the Greek pantheon. Eris was denied invitation to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Relevantly, Thetis the nymph was the mother of Achilles. Later myths say she dipped her son into the river Styx by the heel to protect him after his glorious death in war was prophesied. Eris, like many angry immortals who aren’t invited to important community events, showed up anyway and attempted to ruin it.

There are many things she could have done to this end, of course. She chose a golden apple marked “For The Fairest”. This, as many well-chosen word grenades are wont to do, sparked an explosive and poorly contained heated discourse between powerful figures. The goddesses Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena were all present, all laying claim to the apple as rightfully theirs. Eris knew the power of only a few words to stab vulnerable egos in just the right place to cause disproportionate mayhem and strife.

Zeus, having the good sense not to get involved in a conflict among multiple strong-willed women with power adjacent to himself, and also having a desire to throw a human into a sort of divine rat maze, selected Paris, a prince of Troy, to settle this dispute. The goddesses weren’t content to ask Paris to rely on his lying eyes alone, and made him promises in exchange for the honor of receiving the symbolic apple. Hera promised him power, the lord of an entire supercontinent. Athena promised him victory, in battles both physical and mental. Aphrodite, of course, promised him the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen.

Paris, being a young man, could not imagine anything better than being granted marriage to the most beautiful woman in the world, and handed the apple to Aphrodite.

You may think of her as Helen of Troy, but she was Helen of Sparta at that time, married to Menelaus. Helen was so volatile a marriage commodity that there were extensive rules around her courtship, specifically a pact that all suitors who tried and failed to win her hand would defend the winner, should anyone try to steal her.

Thus, when Paris was granted his reward by the goddess of love, a sea of alliances were set into motion, the catalytic burst that gave way to ten years of fighting. This eventually led to, among other things, the glorious death of Achilles and Paris’s rather considerably more noble brother Hector, with many others. Paris’s apple handoff rivals perhaps only the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in terms of small, well-known events said to bring about violent international conflict.

Rising signs, unlike the sun and moon signs of the so-called Big Three, are calculated using a cardinal direction. The rising sign is computed by drawing a straight line due east beyond the horizon from the exact location of birth. It’s determined by which 1/12 pie slice (one for every sign of the zodiac) of sky it falls into. Rising signs are said to describe initial social posture, the flavor of your public behavior, the way other people perceive you, especially at first glance.

My rising sign is in the Aries pie slice. Aries is a fire sign (as opposed to water, earth, or air), active, expressive, animated, and like their namesake, difficult to contain. The symbol for Aries is a ram, and their typical traits include impulsivity, competitiveness, and combativeness.

Rising signs do actually get more specific than this. At the time of my birth, the exact laser line of my rising sign cut directly through a particular dwarf planet in the same arc as Aries: Eris.

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This follows from some broader principles I consider too often discounted in AI prediction discussions, especially among doomers. Knowing everything there is to know is not the same thing as being capable of doing anything one can imagine. Intelligence, even at extremes, is not equivalent to knowing everything there possibly is to know. You can’t build or direct an agent to become so intelligent as to be functionally omnipotent or omniscient based on intelligence alone.

Bio Risk vs. Other Risks

It’s considerably more plausible to me that AI is a cyber risk than that it could build a bioweapon, especially autonomously. The road blocks to AI writing and deploying catastrophic malware are much lower than those for creating and deploying dangerous viruses, toxins, or bacteria. I’m skeptical that even with 10 years of additional AI development, it would ever make equal or more sense for an AI to pursue bioweapons than it would to pursue native digital weapons. AI’s directed training suggests that the path of least evolutionary resistance is rarely, if ever going to turn an agent toward biology over alternatives, even in a catastrophic unaligned scenario.

Whether we’re speaking of nefarious AI agents or bad human actors, AI can indeed narrow the gap between cyber risk and bio risk scenarios, but that’s a massive friction gap right now. Parts of it are bound by physics that I don’t anticipate AI will be able to undo. I doubt that AI is going to speed up cell division in the next 10 years. Again, intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not magic.

Scenario Possibilities

When it comes to bio risk, publicly available arguments are messy, with multiple scenarios often confused for one another and layered on top of each other as potential dangers from current or future AIs. Some will claim the greatest risk is AI agents making bioweapons or super-viruses by themselves. Others, that AI agents will make bioweapons with human help, possibly agent coercing human, possibly human coercing agent. Some seem to believe that AI will empower individuals to make exotic strains of super-tuberculosis in their own basements.

If I were to try to break out the primary scenarios that laypeople seem to consider potential problem scenarios for AI agents and biology, they are:

• a random person could produce a bioweapon given instructions on how to do so (and no lab access),

• a random person could use lab access to produce a bioweapon without meaningful risk of getting caught, or

• an AI could produce a bioweapon with or without human intervention without meaningful risk of getting caught before deploying.

It takes a lot of time, equipment, and resources to do this for any of these actors, all of which introduce significant risk of being apprehended before completion.

Information and Reasoning Are Not Enough

A major problem here is that people have a big black box in their heads where “biological manufacturing, research, and discovery” lives, and they more or less assume that the inside of that box looks a whole lot like the inside of every other factory. Inside are robots and a conveyor belt and a relatively friction-free process that produces The Desired Product at least 90% of the time. This is an absolutely terrible model of what’s required to make these things.

It’s hard enough to make a meaningful amount of biologically effective proteins or cells with all the resources, infrastructure, and education in the world. Do you think scientists are just hiding functional off-the-shelf CAR-T cell therapies that can perfectly cure cancer for fun, or something? Biology is genuinely very hard. It’s so much harder without the lab, the resources, and the education that usually accompany it. Furthermore, AI is not an education; it doesn’t know how to tell you things you don’t know how to ask, and there are a lot of answers in biology you would never think to ask questions about.

Many bottlenecks in biology are physical rather than informational, tied to resource, equipment, and time constraints and not education. Biological systems are intrinsically noisy, fragile, and context-dependent. Anyone trying to produce proteins, viruses, toxins, etc., will have to get materials, or find a way to derive them themselves. Retailers for scientific reagents are not like Home Depot, they often want to know which lab you’re attached to, which grant you’re using to purchase things. They’re also expensive. If you want an antibody attached to a bead to do a single form of analysis on your product, it alone will set you back over a hundred dollars for around 100 micrograms. An economics question: why does the market for antibodies clear at 100s of dollars per sub milligram if these things are easy and cheap to make, requiring minimal expensive reagents, time, and equipment?

Every step of the process for creating proteins, culturing cells, and more, introduces a point where outside help is needed: reagents, equipment, etc. Every one of these steps, if undertaken by someone who didn’t want people to know what they were doing, could attract attention or get them caught. There are a lot of steps in these processes even supposing that they’re perfectly carried out. In reality, multiple steps have a failure rate above 10%. That - lots of steps, meaningful failure rate - compounds very quickly in time, costs, and risk of exposure.

AI, Alpha Fold, And Genome Design

The primary step people seem to have some familiarity with is protein and DNA design. “AI can design proteins!” and “AI can model dangerous viral genomes,” are both common concerns from educated laypeople regarding biology and AI risk.

To begin with, AI is not nearly so good at modeling these things as you might have been told. Claus Wilke is a professor at UT Austin, working in statistics and integrative biology. Here’s some of his writing on LLMs for biology:

AlphaFold is pretty good. But, in practice, what happens more often than not, is not what I would call the AlphaFold experience.

This is my usual experience: I read about some new computational method that appears to work exceptionally well, I get excited because it’s exactly what I need for one of my projects, I try the method, and results are disappointing. Most of the time things don’t work, or at least not as well as expected. I have seen this play out so many times my default assumption is nothing is going to work. And anything that does actually work is a bit of a miracle. The only successful strategy is volume. If you’re trying sufficiently many things, some do in fact work, and those you can publish.

But even after we’ve accounted for the fact that AI is actually quite a bit worse at designing biological substrate than you may have been told, another frequently ignored reality at this time: AI can model DNA and RNA and proteins. It can’t make them. Making DNA sequences requires synthesis and assembly, expensive reagents and time. It also doesn’t always work the way you imagine - you realistically need to check your construct with some form of sequencing, which gets more expensive the longer your sequence is. Small RNA constructs can be made in the lab right now, but RNA is very fragile, subject to degradation by a large number of environmental agents. Our existing bench science doesn’t allow us to trivially make large quantities of accurate DNA sequences, and it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to do so with really lengthy RNA sequences, due to their speed of degradation.

Suppose you want to make a protein, instead of a viral genetic sequence? More annoying, with far more steps.

Supposing we could do that already, however: I could pour you a glass full of the genetic material of the most dangerous viruses known to man suspended in buffered water and have you drink it and more than 99% of the time, it wouldn’t do anything to you at all. I don’t think that people understand this. DNA is fragile when it’s just out there helixing aimlessly in buffer. RNA is even more fragile. Your saliva alone is armed with enzymes that can make quick work of these things, and that’s before we get to the rest of your digestive system. We can go further: I could inject you with that DNA or RNA and it wouldn’t hurt you in the vast majority of cases. Your cells don’t like unadorned DNA or RNA anymore than those constructs like to exist unprotected; cells have a bunch of pathways designed to rip them apart because either one in the bulk of the cell signals something has gone wrong.

Basement Wet Lab Scenario

So let’s imagine what it would actually take to produce a viral product at home, with no special equipment. Suppose you somehow successfully make a viral genome using, what, your at home PCR machine? That you also got for very cheap or made yourself? You need to actually get it into a format that will allow it to exist in the human body. You could make lipid nanoparticles and use your Kitchenaid to blend them together. But if you want it to work, you’re probably not going to get away with not culturing cells in some fashion. You need to order cells from a bank, or you need to figure out how to take cells in your environment and turn them into cells that grow on their own in a dish.

I’ll grant that you could probably build a makeshift BSL2 hood without that much difficulty. If you could build your own -80 deep freeze, you are going to need some weird crap and awareness of how to build two refrigeration cycles with different refrigerants. Purchasing those that might raise some eyebrows and bring some inconvenient attention your way. Otherwise that’s going to set you back a cool ten thousand dollars or so and again, more scrutiny from vendors and neighbors alike.

You’d also need to build, repurpose, or buy an incubator in which to keep your cells, one that can maintain not only temperature but oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios within a very narrow bandwidth. It’s also going to be ideal if the doors seal particularly well, to reduce your odds of contamination. DNA is fragile under the best of circumstances, as are cell cultures. This equipment is specialized, it’s not expensive for no reason, and it’s not easy to produce yourself or to do any kind of biological work without.

Existing Lab Access Scenario

Let’s make it harder and say you already work in a lab. You can’t just use the lab’s money to buy things without explaining it to anyone, at least not in a bare minimum functional lab. You can’t just use lab equipment for any random task, especially not for months at a time, in part because if your lab isn’t literally already in the business of making functional viral particles or proteins or specific dangerous bacteria, you will need to order weird things that you shouldn’t need to do your job! People will notice, and they will ask questions, because these materials are extremely expensive, for the most part.

But even supposing you do that correctly, you then have to grow up your cells, make your DNA, transfect the cells with the DNA, expand them, test them for efficacy, all without suffering a catastrophic contamination event that wipes out all of your progress, and get all of these steps and iterations and trouble shooting done over a time scale and with oversight that is designed to catch much more mundane forms of rebellion than this. AI doesn’t really make avoiding detection so much easier as to remove this as a major limitation.

Notice something else: the sorts of people who are in any way positioned to be a risk based on lab access are rare to begin with, and they’re embedded in systems where they’re unlikely to be able to get away with it. Furthermore, people who have access to a lab generally could already try to do this if they felt like it, with or without AI. AI is unlikely to be the dominant bottleneck here, because information and training are not the bottleneck.

Consider, for example, this scenario presented this week by Noah Smith, a typically very sharp commenter on economics, geopolitics, and tech:

So Eric gets a jailbroken version of Claude Code, and tells it to design a version of Covid that’s very lethal and has a long incubation period (so that it spreads far and wide before attacking). He tells his jailbroken Claude Code agent to find a lab to make him that virus and mail him a sample of it.

Now Eric, the angry teenager, has an actual supervirus in his bedroom, with the capability to kill far more people than any nuclear weapon could.

Ideally, having gotten this far, you already know what I think is implausible about this scenario. To begin with, civilians don’t just call up labs like some kind of make-your-own-virus delivery service. Secondly, if they could, it wouldn’t be cheap, and it wouldn’t be fast. Recall that a single traditionally sourced antibody costs over $100 for less than one milliliter of substance. Even if you could find a lab to make you a particular virus modeled by current AI agents without asking questions, it would cost quite a bit more than even a reasonably wealthy teenager could afford to have this done, due to the man hours, reagents, and specialization required. If you assume that the lab knows/is capable of figuring out that this is a mega virus, you’re talking about even more specialized equipment to contain risk for those who work there - BSL3 hoods, expanded protocols, masks, and more.

Supposing that Eric manages to scrape together both the lab that would take this order and the unlikely amount of cash necessary to buy this product, he’ll still have to wait at minimum a month or two for this to come together, and possibly longer. Creating a novel virus involves the steps we’ve described so far - sequence creation, verification, cell culture - and some additional steps we haven’t discussed, all of which take time, risk considerable failure, and require verification. Teenagers who want to destroy the world are famously patient. Once it arrives, I don’t know how Eric is storing that supervirus in his bedroom without liquid nitrogen tanks or a deep freeze, neither of which tend to be particularly low profile purchases or easy to keep around without attracting attention. Eric won’t know what he doesn’t know when it comes to storage, thawing, or deployment, and he won’t know to ask. Even if he does, competence barriers remain: is Eric going to successfully thaw this virus the first time around without killing so much of it that it becomes functionally useless?

But most of all, if we assume anyone can just call up labs and order viruses according to their own specifications, Eric the angry teenager can already do that without AI. AI did not make that kind of lab spring into existence, and it will only marginally reduce the barriers to finding one and securing its services, if it exists. In short, Noah Smith’s fear scenario assumes a lot about lab work, viruses, and AI capability that have some meaningful holes. And his is one of the better ones I’ve heard!

AI Laboratory Scenario

What about the AI run lab idea?

You need one of two things for an AI run lab to exist at all. 1) Humans who take orders from an AI. If the AI is going to get away with something humans don’t want it to, these humans must either not have oversight and never realize that there’s no oversight, or they must themselves avoid ever getting caught by other humans. This version of the scenario requires an extremely implausible expectation of human competence and secrecy. It’s not literally impossible, but it’s not likely, either, for all the reasons we’ve discussed. There are too many resources, equipment, and time involved to make it probable to pull off end-to-end success with humans in the mix without getting caught.

2) The AI does everything with robotics. The reagent and equipment problems are still major issues here, as are the failure steps. Removing human intervention from biological work flows will not make necessary iteration disappear. Zooming out, however, the oversight question applies here too: AI can do a lot of things, but I would be very impressed if it were able to construct or take over an entire plant without human support or awareness, and then conduct experiments in that plant also without human intervention or awareness. These things require so much time and resources that it’s hard to do anything you’re not supposed to be doing without someone realizing it. Biology has physical constraints, not just knowledge ones, and AI, either alone or with human help, won’t make those dissolve no matter how smart it is.

A Large Product of Numbers Less Than One

Both the human and robotics lab scenario, like the rogue human scenario, require accepting a lengthy product of improbable events multiplied together. It’s not like you truly cannot imagine any of these entities doing all of this without getting caught. It’s just that once you start suggesting probabilities for every single step of this process -resource acquisition, equipment acquisition, culturing, transfection, expansion, and so on - and multiply all of that by the probability of doing it for the amount of time it actually takes to do every one of these tasks, including iteration and reorders, all without getting caught, you’re looking at a very low probability indeed. Biology is not an easy problem that falls short of its goals for lack of compute. The thinking is really not the hard part, even if extra thinking would help on the margins.

Doom Scenarios

For the absolute worst case scenarios - the case in which we imagine that AI on its own decides to harm humanity and/or cause major destruction or death - I am most skeptical of all about biology as the chosen vector. Humans, being irrational, love the drama of a pandemic. An AI, at least if left to its own devices, has a different rationality, and is less likely to bother with something so messy, inefficient, and failure-prone as biology when there are far easier and cheaper and faster ways to kill people and sow panic or do both at the same time. A human, being failure-prone and slow, is not likely to be able to do it solely because AI access made it possible, not without high risk of getting caught and low risk of producing something dangerous to large numbers of people.

It’s Not AI That Makes Biology Scary

I think biology has the lowest probability of true AI Doom approaches of any of the ones I’m aware of, and I think there’s some distance between it and the next least likely. For cases outside of doom, I think AI risk from biology is entirely prudent to build guard rails around (and/or to strengthen the ones that already exist), but hardly reasonable as a top of mind threat posed by the technology. It’s technically possible that a rogue dude could do some damage making a virus or toxin in his basement. It’s just also theoretically possible that a dude could acquire uranium, build a centrifuge for enrichment, and then successfully build and deploy a nuclear bomb. You’re assuming that a lot of nontrivial resource acquisition - much of it highly controlled - followed by production quality that’s difficult to attain without formal equipment are going to be surmountable problems. In reality, the size of this risk is incredibly small. Worth making some rules, regulations, and modeling scenarios for, sure. But not the most likely negative outcome from AI.

This is in part because AI is not at all likely to be the key difference in any biological scenario that poses a risk to other people. Lone wolves have already existed, and we’ve built safeguards to prevent, say, another anthrax incident. AI may increase the number of people who know how to do this on the margin, but it on its own does not erode these guard rails or make the actual biological work easier. Another risk scenario that is concerning involves a country intentionally using its own facilities to create and deploy a bioweapon. This too is not likely to be prevented by changing AI: it’s already possible right now. This is also true of anyone with lab access writ large: AI can make it easier in multiple ways, and that will matter to some degree, but not enough to majorly overhaul how we think about risk of bioweapons right now. Most of the biologically related risk scenarios people talk about with AI that have some plausible likelihood of happening are about equally plausible right now, and were about equally plausible five years ago.

What AI Does Change

From where I’m sitting, there are some things AI could make easier that have relevance to biological risk factors. It can help troubleshoot experiments, explain protocols, and lower some informational barriers to entry and procedures. Anyone who works in biology or has should know that being given a protocol, reagents, and equipment is the beginning of a sometimes very long, error-prone process, which sometimes doesn’t work out at all. The people making these arguments seem to think the protocol is all anyone needs to make smallpox from scratch. I can’t tell you how many graduate students and scientists wish that this was true.

Maybe there are better arguments than these, people in secret rooms discussing more pressing and likely scenarios than these. I’m writing this post because all the AI bio risk arguments I’ve ever seen seem to come from people who don’t.

I suspect that AI bio-related risk is meaningfully less likely than the next most likely form of harm from AI. While resources should be expended on preventing AI bio risk, I think returns will mostly come from keeping existing institutional barriers in place. I’m glad that AI companies themselves are thinking about and planning ahead for biotechnology related risk scenarios, but I’m extremely skeptical of lay people who consider AI bio risk to be one of the most serious risks posed by AI developments specifically. Fundamentally, biology is an experimental problem, and that means resources, equipment, and time. AI makes experiments slightly easier to do and troubleshoot. It doesn’t change the complexity of cellular life.

First, of course, this week on Eurydice Lives:

• Monday’s post on the physics and a bit of the mathematics of sound and music

• Tuesday’s post on the similarities between avoidant attachment and conflict avoidance

• Yesterday’s post on what cancellation is really for, and some local news.

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Today, I’m going to return to the great well of fragrance recommendations, totally undeterred by my lack of taste and qualifications, as with last time. If you haven’t seen my previous post on fragrances, So You Want To Smell Like Vegetation, that could be a useful primer for what we’ll do today. That post covered a lot of scents that I genuinely like, but recognize are variably appealing depending on the type of person you are and the venue in which you wear the scent.

Today, I’m breaking with full appeal as the threshold and simply talking about formulations that I find daring and surprising and challenging, some of which I like, some of which I do not. I’m not really a perfume head the way the true greats are; I am a chronic sampler and dabbler who examines things out of curiosity. When I find something offputting in an unusual way, a part of me respects the creator, in fragrance as I do in fashion, art, and architecture. This loose, less than academic approach means that I will not promise that these constitute the bleeding edge of fragrance innovation. Many of these are from very famous houses, none of them are considered absolute insanity - those perfumes do technically exist, but I haven’t bothered to try to explore them in depth. I’ve assumed that I’d find fewer things I end up liking with that kind of selection effect. With that in mind, take a brief tour of some of the more memorably offbeat perfumes I have sampled.

High Desert, Boyds of Texas

When I moved back to the southwest after years on the east coast, I found myself newly surrounded by the sharp, heady scent of desert plants that I’d memory banked and forgotten about. Smells travel so differently in free, open, dry air compared to humidity, feeling a bit thinner, wiry, built for dexterity. Full of risky possibility, somehow? I had been searching for a while for a perfume that smelled like a plant I walked past almost every single day since moving back, a plant that I believe but am not certain is tulbaghia violacea.

High Desert was a thrilling opportunity when I heard about it in print and looked it up; perhaps at last I’d get the uncompromising dusty herbal scent I’d fallen back in love with so recently. I was technically disappointed, but in a thoroughly interesting way. High Desert is a gunslinging western scent, much more of a movie set than anything I’d recognize as a perfume or cologne out of context. It’s atmospheric, smelling like clay, smoke, and dry, red, splitting cedar wood. I can’t wear it, because I feel like it makes me smell like I fell out of Back to the Future 3, in a manner I assume would genuinely confuse everyone around me. Possibly like I picked up a nicotine habit on the way. It’s a hell of a ride, though.

I Am Trash, ELDO

This scent is actually created from discarded elements from other processes in ELDO’s manufacturing stream, I believe giving it its name. It’s not nearly as daring or strange as you might expect from that and the title, given that it builds its scent largely from apple, cedar, and rose elements. It has an overall pleasant, wearable scent, and I have and do wear it out and about from time to time.

There are several perfumes in which I detect scents that are not in the notes or the accords, which probably just means my nose is dogshit, but I enjoy the surprise (and mystery) of trying to figure out why this array of ideas turns out smelling like that thing to me when it’s not present. This one smells, to me, like you took a light, inoffensive floral scent and added a ripe to the point of browning banana to the background. It is sweet in a way that seems a bit rounded, uncertain of itself, and off kilter in a way that makes me appreciate its pleasant qualities all the more. It’s not that subversive, despite its marketing (Fragantica notes this itself), but the idea of a fruity floral scent with just a bit of overripeness lingering somewhere in the base notes is delightful to me.

Crush Balls, DS&Durga

DS&Durga sometimes produces a “you son of a bitch, I’m in” fragrance, and this is one of them. Note that the top accord is what it says on the tin: tennis balls. I’ve never smelled anything that smelled so synthetic. Usually when perfume people tell you something smells synthetic, they’re praising a clever use of a particular olfactory chemical (“a cyberpunk neon rose confection!”) or criticizing a poorly executed one (“cloying and artificial”), but as I am using it right now, this scent is literally like manufactured rubber and tennis ball colored fuzz.

It’s delightful. It dries down relatively quickly to something less interesting than tennis ball, which I was disappointed to discover - it rounds out to a sort of inoffensive preppy thing after not very long. That’s fun too, but I was hoping to keep smelling surprising all day, and was disappointed. I love the concept here too much not to try it, and it’s fun even if it isn’t quite as true-to-concept as I hoped. Tennis balls lowkey do smell good, how did they think to try to bottle that? I love a perfume that tries to do something fun and silly.

La Fin Due Monde, ELDO

Perhaps my favorite perfume to wear on this list, the notes are bonkers, and on the skin it’s surprising and rewarding. Prominent notes are listed as popcorn, gunpowder, and iris - flowers and tinkling empty shells on baking asphalt at the end of the world, as the perfume’s name implies.

On me, it smells like a rather sunny popcorn with some depth, and complexity, definitely buttery. It’s such a bizarre direction for a perfume given how fun, warm, and cheerful it smells in execution, at least to my nose. Whatever the intent or imagination behind this perfume was, it makes me think of a dystopia that’s more compatible with a sun-baked, Fallout style southern California than a gritty or grim dark one. Big purple flowers behind miniature popcorn explosions.

I have no idea what it’s like to smell this on me, either. Sometimes I can guess what energy particular perfumes bring to a room, how they interact with how I come across. With this one, I’m not sure at all. I wear it because I like smelling it on my wrist.

Sublime Balkiss, The Different Company

To my nose, this one is like a bromine salt backyard pool. Somehow it’s transportive, like I just rolled out of someone’s pool onto concrete, lying face down on now damp stone with the sun drying the skin on my back. Somehow I’m also 10 years old. Salt and rock, mineral on mineral, elevated and austere in some ways but it’s both of those things in the sense of having your first meditative or philosophical thoughts as a child. There’s something innocent to its marble nature, a curiosity that I like about it.

It’s a bit soapy, full disclosure, but I like that too, something that perhaps in an uninspired way adds to the innocent childlike summer days sense of it. I’ve never smelled a perfume quite like this one, even though I’ve smelled plenty of clean or soapy or restrained things that hit a similar set of notes. It’s not fun or shocking, with subtle, challenging elements the way I like some of my perfumes to be, but it has an elegance in its wet eyelash beauty that I like anyway.

Basilica, Milano Fragranze

I’ve been to mass on a Sunday in Siena, Italy. It smelled - and I promise I’m being entirely serious - exactly like this perfume. Perhaps there’s something boring about that, about an effort to capture the incense on stone scent of a traditional Catholic service. I don’t wear it very often, and when I do, I pair it with something either salty or woody to roughen the rather High church essence it otherwise has on me. I feel like an imposter simply smelling of incense, like it’s false advertising to put on a pretense of holiness with scent.

It’s very lovely with a sea-forward smell attached, I like Imaginary Authors Falling Into The Sea as a pairing. That direction makes it seem more like a rocky cliffside - a natural church of God, if you will, rather than one constructed by human hands. I’ve experimented with mixing it with (yes) Santal 33, the Le Labo fragrance everyone’s been sick of for half a decade now. This is my favorite pairing, making the incense notes come out like bark and dim light, and flakes off the rather well-pruned facade of Santal 33 into something a bit more adjacent to actual flora.

It’s not a scent I hear about from perfume heads - perhaps because neither the concept nor the house nor the execution are too far out of the ordinary - but it has more than meets the eye.

Oud Sinharaja, Bortnikov

This one is, I suspect, well known, and it is ridiculous. I love this scent, and I feel like I’m putting on culturally offensive drag when I wear it (complimentary). This has not stopped me from wearing it. I don’t know how or why, but somehow this combination - a rather chaotic mix according to just about anyone - dries down to a smell like marshmallows burnt just a little bit over a cedar wood fire. I love wandering around smelling like sun golden marshmallows on a backpacking trip through Asia.

The initial scent is juicier, floral and citrus laid over a languid dangerous dark wood background. In both ways, I find it exciting, almost funny to wear. I seem to remember mentioning that I’d worn this at work once or twice and getting somewhat horrified looks. In my defense, if you go easy with it - a light dab here or there, no sprays - it’s not the kind of unignorable, room-filling, gate-breeching behemoth that something like, say Baccarat Rouge 540 is.1 I like to think it lends a bit of mystery that rounds out to something like a cedar closet, rather than a distracting blast of tropical redwood, which it might be with a spray or two of wear.

If you have favorite strange scents, please share them in the comments!

This tweet sparked considerable pushback; the vast majority of responses are negative or voice disagreement, as does my own. Most of that pushback was from a particular principled stance: a tendency in EA and related rationalist circles to believe that anything similar to intentional ostracism for stated beliefs is a profound moral wrong.

While I’m sympathetic to some of the underlying ideas driving that belief - for example, it’s very easy to silo yourself into a container where your ideas are never challenged if you just stop talking to people you disagree with - I definitely do not share the belief that it’s wrong to “cancel” people for any reason. I was surprised to find that I did not agree with Andy here, especially as someone who thinks Yarvin is (as is disappointingly characteristic of our currently political moment) both less intellectually qualified than he is often considered to be and concerningly politically influential given the former. Why did I disagree, and if I disagree, what do I think cancelling is for?

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Anxiousness usually gets all the flak for outsourcing all of its relational problems. Of course, you know how I feel about asking other people to rescue you. Avoidant people are less likely on average to get into attachment theory in the first place, but when they are aware of it, they may do some of their own convenient moves. They may try to use avoidance as a shield to avoid breaking up with you because they don’t like you that much; they may even avoid admitting to themselves that they don’t like you that much. Avoidance does demand quite a bit of other partners; it just does so with the pretense that it’s not happening. Avoidance simply hopes that problems unaddressed will go away, and sometimes loses valuable relationships, even jobs, with this style.

Surprisingly, conflict avoidance is also a form of avoidance. It’s not often categorized this way because it shows up in people we understand as anxious or closeness-seeking, but the approach uses precisely the same logic as that of avoidance writ large: as long as I’m not the one saying anything, I can’t be held accountable for what happened here. While anxious people are often very conflict-averse - which is itself evidence that these constructs aren’t always neat - avoidant people are plenty conflict-averse themselves. As with attachment styles writ large, and avoidance in particular, conflict avoidance has a suspicious way of providing excuses to ignore its own costs.

Conflict Aversion and Intimacy

Conflict aversion is often a self-fulfilling prophecy stemming from a deep-seated belief that many if not all differences and disagreements are existentially personal and impossible to negotiate without threat to the self and/or the relationship. It often backfires despite having a reputation for being superior to high conflict, especially informally. Excess conflict avoidance often produces a relationship that ends explosively, when a powder keg of avoidance goes off all at once, or in a relationship that fades slowly. Sometimes both in sequence, like dominoes. Conflict avoidance is a good way to experience your conflict in a reliably more uncomfortable and unpredictable way than being direct.

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