121. Whatever career missteps and misfortunes you may have experienced, at least you’re not Daisuke Inoue, who invented the karaoke machine but neglected to patent it; Pete Best, the Beatles drummer for two years who got replaced by Ringo Starr right before they hit it big; or Ron Wayne, who co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak but quit two weeks later because he felt he was too old (in his early 40’s) for the demands of startup life (Jobs and Wozniak were both in their 20’s). Wayne sold his 10% stake to the two Steves for $2,300; as of this writing, that stake (discounting dilution) would be worth just under a half-trillion dollars.

     Not B, as in billion.

     T.

122. Those remaining carwashes where you can stay in the car.

123. Those remaining drive-in movie theaters.

124. That Maria Elisabeth Bach née Lämmerhirt and Johann Ambrosius Bach, with seven children already, decided, What the hell—what’s one more? (Was zum Teufel? Was macht schon einer mehr aus?*) (*From actual audio of their discussion.)

125. It’s great to have that second lung, in case.

126. Same with kidneys.

127. Comfort food generally does not cost more than non-comfort food, and often less.

128. If you have to fill out lots of forms, be glad you’re not from the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. (True, it’s also known as Llanfair PG. Whatever.)

     

129. Binge-watching streaming TV is likely less damaging than bingeing numerous other things.

130. Modern plumbing. (Seriously: modern plumbing!)

131. The opening sentences of great novels. One example: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” - Albert Camus, L’Étranger (“Mother died today; or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.” - The Stranger)

132. A belt hole that’s in exactly the right spot.

133. That “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” works so nicely.

134. Whose woods these are I think I know.

135. People who are very successful in obvious ways and seem to have it all, don’t. They just don’t. Because no one does.

136. Whatever you multiply by 9, if you add the digits of the total, then add those digits, and so on, until you’re left with a single digit, that remaining digit is always 9.

137. Classrooms with student-to-teacher ratios of under 10:1.

138. It’s awe-inspiring how spiders spin their webs, and the beauty of those webs.

139. More often than not, Duke University does not win the men’s NCAA basketball championship.

140. The vertical equal sign just beneath your nose and above your lips: “philtrum.” The hard plastic wrapping around each end of a shoelace: “aglet.” You’re welcome.

101. Kids who play a lot in dirt early in childhood may be healthier and happier than those who don’t.

102. Seurat’s dotted picture frames.

103. Each day we age at a slower rate, relative to our age.

104. The apple has been called nature’s toothbrush.

105. If there are 23 people in a room, it is likelier than not that two of them share a birthday. (Sounds unbelievable but it’s true.)

106. Slinky, Silly Putty, Corn Flakes, fireworks, potato chips, popsicles, chocolate chip cookies, Velcro, ice cream cones, and LSD were all invented by accident.

107. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward hit it off.

108. Thankfully, Max Brod, who was instructed by his friend, Franz Kafka, to burn Kafka’s unfinished manuscripts (including several novels, Amerika among them) upon Kafka’s death, defied his friend’s wishes and instead had them published.

109. Kids mostly ask great questions.

110. Someone (or maybe a team of people) thought up the sign “Wet Paint”—and ever since, its astonishingly persuasive ability to steer us away from shiny marked-off areas has been one of the smashing successes in signage history; indeed, in the history of human beings looking out for each other.

111. Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

112. The Mediterranean Diet can be followed without much trouble or expense, is incredibly healthy, not insanely restrictive, and somehow very tasty, too. (No, I do not own shares in the Mediterranean Diet. And I should follow it more than I do.)

113. The umlaut, ^.., the most adorable of accent marks. (But why doesn’t the umlaut have an umlaut?)

114. In a world dominated by the white envelope, the Manila has managed to carve out a very respectable, honey-mustard-colored niche for itself.

115. The spelling of the word “rhythm.”

116. If you have a toddler: the moment right after they’ve been bathed, and put on their pajamas, preferably footed, and they’re all ready for the next activity.

117. The mere addition of a slice of lemon or lime makes a glass of water an order of magnitude more elegant.

118. If you had a third row of teeth, you would have 50% more teeth to clean and worry about.

119. Most teachers, whatever else they must deal with, are living meaningful lives.

120. There’s someone out there for you—maybe not your soulmate but at least someone who would make a really great friend.

It’s as memorable and thought-provoking as two-word sentences get. (Though I guess “Jesus wept” maintains the top spot for another thousand years.) He was undeniably right, because he was talking about modern culture, and what technology has done to us, particularly lately, speeding everything up to make us all dizzy, with some nausea thrown in. It can all feel like an amusement park ride—maybe a merry-go-round, maybe a Tilt-a-Whirl—where a nefarious someone loosened the bolts of the undercarriage, sending the whole spinning platform off its mooring and careering toward the Ring the Bell Test Your Strength stand and the quaintly curlicued cotton candy cart and maybe a couple of occupied porta-potties, too. Wait, how did I get here? Oh, yeah, what it can feel like nowadays, with everyone in their screened electronified airbudded world except for the stray 80+-year-old woman on the subway, looking up briefly from her well-worn bible and shaking her head. Please don’t look at me like that. You, not her. Alfred Hitchcock thought of it first.

Change changed, wrote my father. Sure, the wheel, invented more than 6,000 years ago somewhere north of the Black Sea, changed everything about labor, productivity, and boundaries. The stirrup, invented in India somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500 years ago, changed warfare. The movable-type printing press in the 1440s changed everything about communication, education, the public square, religion. The electric motor, invented in 1821, eventually changed everything about intimacy, the family structure, our relationship to nature, the climate, etc.

I left out a thousand important breakthroughs, but the point is: We have experienced convulsive changes before…but generally gave ourselves a few centuries, or at least a couple generations, to adjust to that new world, to live in it, maybe even to get a little too acclimated to it. That’s right, I just described human history as a series of baths we slide into, and who doesn’t like a bath, once you’ve adjusted to the temperature? Today, it’s more like following ten cold plunges with a thousand more cold plunges.

In fact, back in the day, we took our time so much that the wheel was probably invented closer to 7,000 years ago, not 6,000, except it was largely used for potter’s wheels. That is correct: It took an entire millennium before someone looked at this thing in the same shape as the sun and decided to attach it to a vehicle. (I wonder how many centuries it took before someone added a second, third, or fourth wheel.) It took a half-century from the time of Gutenberg’s press before anyone thought to number the pages.

Now, the rate of change has accelerated so much, we don’t even have the span of a biological generation to catch our breath and adjust. The personal computer appears roughly in the mid-1970’s and profoundly changes the world. Twenty years later, the internet explodes. Roughly ten years later, e-commerce and social media do. A couple years later, the smartphone arrives. Five years after that, CRISP gene editing. Six years after that, TikTok. Four years later, Chat-GPT and GLP-1s. All the while, drones become ubiquitous in warfare.

Each of those is transformational—even TikTok, I’d argue, for the sheer scale of its use. Together, they have changed the way we communicate (or don’t), think, find common ground (or don’t)…and yet there’s barely any chance to take a breath and adjust to the new reality. Techno-lovers and entrepreneurs shame those of us who complain, or even question, as if they don’t also have a lot to lose if the culture changes so violently in so short a period of time. Yes, the human endeavor—the living being endeavor, up and down the brain size/food chain—is inherently about change, constant relentless change. And yet aside possibly from the mayfly (average lifespan: 24 hours) and certain unicellular organisms (average lifespan: under 10 minutes), we expect to be granted at least a little bit of time and grace to accommodate the change, then live in that new, slightly changed world.

That’s the way it generally was. As one Reddit commenter wrote, “Really much of human history would have been monotonous for the average everyday person and would have consisted of hard work, brutal poverty and early death with no knowledge of any other type of life.”

Fair, though at least they didn’t have Real Housewives.

It’s always going to be hard to tease out what has fundamentally, spiritually changed in the world, and what just seems to have changed because you have. Does the world really get noisier, for example, or is it just older people getting cranky and lamenting their sensitive hearing? Or is it that one’s own very personal circumstances—not just aging but one’s closest relationships, the state of one’s health, financial security, etc.—have changed significantly enough that one’s perspective lightens or darkens so much, and carelessly (generously?) takes the whole world along for the ride?

These are things that have changed, I’m told, using some objective measure (but even the phrase “objective measure” is either more or less objective than it once was, objectively):

Standardized tests have gotten harder. Getting an A is easier.

Weed is stronger. We drink less, at least in the U.S.

Antisemitism has once again changed for the worse—but then, since it’s been around for thousands of years, the change is just that it’s opened the front door again and poked its head out to see if the coast is clear, which apparently it is.

Car ownership among the young has fallen off a table. We’re having fewer kids. We’re living longer—or were, until Covid messed up that stat—so we also have a lot more old people needing joints replaced and other support to stay alive.

Teen pregnancy and violent crime are way down. The percentage difference between what the average worker and the average CEO each makes has gone way up.

Has racism (should I say anti-racism?) changed for the better or worse? Depends who you ask. Is it possible it never really changes that much and just manifests itself—cloaks itself—differently?

Boy, don’t invite me to a party when I get going like this.

Do men and women noticeably get along better today? Girls and boys? Or do we/they get along worse? That lots of people reading those sentences think they know the answer, quickly and certainly, might not bode well.

Changed…COMPARED TO WHEN?

You’re absolutely right. That’s the diabolical, infantile, non-verifiable trick of the MAGA slogan: Just say something and don’t ever get caught defining your terms.

Has change changed? The rate of change? I never particularly appreciated the French saying, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”—“The more things change, the more they stay the same”—but it’s probably true.

But then it also undermines my father’s point that change changed, if change is not a variable but a constant.

Wait, did I just write this whole thing to prove that 2+2 = 5?

I remember, many years ago, a blackboard in high school having this unattributed quotation written on it, as we entered the classroom: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders…Children no longer rise when elders enter the room…” We students were asked to guess how recently those words were said or written. Right away, you knew it was a trick question, but no one got that it was Aristotle, more than two millennia earlier (though it may have been Socrates via Plato, or Plato himself). Supposedly, it was the ultimate in “nothing ever really changes,” though I’m not sure, in that moment, it made us seventeen-year-olds smile.

Who’s right? Or is it a “Both things can be true at the same time!” argument? Is it that essence doesn’t change, on the one hand, and, on the other, all the things that do change are mere trappings? That the once-upon-a-time universal yearning for meaning is still there, burning strong, and it’s just always seeking different avenues for fulfillment?

Either we each have an essential soul and all the rest is just sound and fury; or we don’t have an essential soul; or some third option I don’t know. Or some fourth (or non-fourth) option that defies logic.

Maybe the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, who devised the concept of the “hedonic treadmill,” planted a firm answer to the question, “Has change changed?” (No, it hasn’t.) Their experiments suggested that, but for a truly catastrophic event in one’s life, one really just doesn’t change that much, ever. A change occurs, a fairly significant one…one changes in response…and then, in shockingly brief order, one returns to one’s previous state of hedonism or lack thereof.

There are fewer people who use the phrase “lack thereof.” There’s a change I can state with confidence.

Of course I don’t have the answer. Like my father, I’m more interested in posing what I hope and consider a meaningful question, and see what comes of it.

I may have nothing profound to assert about change, certainly nothing non-accidental, so I’ll just leave you with this:

81. Dolphins really have saved the lives of humans in jeopardy, often forming circles around the person to prevent sharks from attacking.

82. If you don’t understand the difference between term life insurance and whole life, or nuclear fission and fusion, or silicon and silicone: Most of us don’t.

83. Sunsets are free.

84. It’s cool that pickup basketball games often get formed by players “picking up” strangers to be their teammates. Apologies for putting quotation marks around the phrase “picking up,” as if you wouldn’t get the point.

85. How was the microwave invented? A researcher with a chocolate bar in his pocket walked by a radar tube. The chocolate melted.

86. One good thing you truly can’t plan for: spontaneity.

87. Someone takes away your garbage, often more than once a week. Hauls it right on out of there for you. Incredible, no?

88. The sound of a grade schoolyard at lunchtime, outdoor recess, or dismissal.

89. The kaleidoscope.

    

90. Almost everyone misspells “ophthalmology.” Now, you no longer have to be one of them.

91. Looking at the horizon usually calms the person, or gives them welcome perspective.

92. There is zero evidence that cracking knuckles causes or worsens arthritis.

93. Placebos often work.

94. Tourists, especially those who do not speak the language of the country they’re visiting, are almost always grateful for help.

95. Chewing gum is an easy way to appear relaxed even when you feel incredibly anxious.

96. Water slides.

97. Saying “Bless you” or “Gezundheit” to a sneezing stranger forges an immediate, non-creepy bond between people.

98. Wolves each howl a different pitch when howling together.

99. John Kelly—father of the late Princess Grace of Monaco—was refused entry to the 1920 Diamond Sculls at Henley, England, because it was ruled that, as a bricklayer, he enjoyed an unfair advantage in developing bigger muscles than his gentlemen competitors. Kelly would go on to win three Olympic rowing gold medals. Because fuck them, you know?

100. The sound of a passing train, still.

61. Remember the time you were driving over the speed limit and that police cruiser, lights flashing, was coming up fast, faster on your tail, oh shit, I wasn’t going THAT fast, OH SHIT!...then sped by, in pursuit of someone else?

62. The sense of respect, discipline, and tradition fostered by the martial arts.

63. The dumbness, often breathtaking dumbness, of most criminals.

64. The drop, in EDM.

65. How a long bar of dozens of staples can maintain its structural integrity, as you transfer it from box to stapler. (If you have never used a stapler…I don’t know what to say.)

66. From even a hundred yards away, you can recognize loved ones by their gait. There’s something irresistible about our innate ability to do that.

67. It is incredibly satisfying to know how to build a good campfire or fireplace fire, and not hard to learn.

68. No one doesn’t find February 29th amusing. That includes eventual 52-year-old Bar/Bat Mitzvah boys and girls born on that day, and 60-year-old and 64-year-old women who can finally enjoy, respectively, legit Quinceañeras and Sweet Sixteens.

69. Dipping your toe in the hotel pool and discovering it’s exactly the temperature you would have it be.

70. The opening line—“Stop all the clocks”—of the poem, “Funeral Blues,” by W.H. Auden, as well as every one of the 15½ lines that follows.

71. Pretty much all human skin colors have an equivalent popular ice cream flavor color: vanilla, chocolate, coffee, mocha, butter pecan, strawberry, Neapolitan (no one looks like that but many of us look like one-third of it), chocolate chip, cookies and cream, vanilla fudge ripple, praline pecan, cherry, chocolate almond, rocky road…you get the idea. Conversely, ice cream flavor colors that have no human skin color equivalent (e.g., pistachio, blueberry sorbet, the six (6!) grey flavors you can find at a Melbourne, Australia, ice cream shop) are never that high on the list of favorite flavors.* (*If you’re thinking: Your whole premise is flawed because pistachio and especially mint chocolate chip often crack the Top 20 of favorite ice cream flavors in the U.S., all I can say about the latter flavor: You like taking perfectly good chocolate and adding toothpaste. Who needs to explain now?)

    

    @goodfoodauEmma Breheny tasted six different shades of grey ice-cream in Melbourne to test the idea that we eat with our eyes – and why this bizarre sweet treat exists in the first place. Find the full report at theage.com.au/goodfood #goodfoodau #melbourneeats #icecream #melbourneicecream #greyscale

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72. The word Mamihlapinatapei (from Yagan, indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego), which is defined as the meaningful look shared by two people who wish to start something but are equally reluctant to do so.

73. The word Jayus (Indonesian), meaning a joke told so badly, making it so unfunny, you have to laugh.

74. The word Dépaysement (French), meaning what you feel when you are not in your native country.

75. The word Komorebi (Japanese), meaning the way sunlight filters through the leaves.

76. The word crestfallen (my own single favorite word in the English language).

77. In some countries, badminton is played professionally.

78. If you take off a very static-y sweater in the pitch black, the person for whom you may be removing the sweater can see flashes of light.

79. And while it’s pitch black: Place a Wintergreen LifeSaver between your teeth with most of it visible to that person, or yourself looking in the mirror. With lips apart, bite it. It gives off sparks.

80. You haven’t wasted tomorrow. (Yet.)

My introductory post suggested I was going to spend most of this Substack in lamentation rather than celebration, given how easy it would be to do the former.

But there’s so much to celebrate, too, and I don’t say that to trick myself into feeling better. I say it because it’s true. I think. (No, really, it is. I think.) My first regular Friday feature, To Feel Slightly Better, 20 Things to Consider, at least acknowledges the positive—granted, slightly positive—that’s around us.

There are, of course, much bigger, unassailably beautiful things in the world than the slightly pleasant. I mean acts and gestures and choices I find utterly beautiful—by which I mean expressions of unadulterated, uncommercialized respect, empathy, sacrifice, and/or love by one toward another, or both toward each other. I would like to share five that have stayed with me, but I warn you: I am a mushball. I tear up at a well-done Goodyear tire commercial in which tragedy is narrowly avoided, so my threshold may be lower than most. But I stand by these five: one is between husband and wife; one between mother and daughter; one between sporting rivals; one between friends, after the passing of the more revered of them; one between non-humans and us. I’m glad each emanates from a different type of relationship, confirming that such beauty can come from anywhere, so long as there is deep feeling.

Before I dive in, I must acknowledge a few of the many more, almost unbearably beautiful acts available to move us or buck us up:

· the million small and big moments in any pediatric oncology ward, at any hour of the day and night;

· this Tom Waits song, especially the climax starting at 4:00 (I could have picked any of 20 of his songs but I’ll go with this one);

· the life and teachings of Jesus;

· the Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations at Yad Vashem;

· the millions of sacrifices made in war by comrades to help or sacrifice for another;

· notes left in lunches by parents for their kids;

· the work of firefighters;

· this scene from It’s a Wonderful Life (0:22…)

· mothers in childbirth who sacrifice their lives;

· the comments under songs on YouTube that mean so much to the commenter, and which may have been played at the funeral of a parent, a partner, a sibling, God forbid a child.

That list is laughably incomplete. I realize there’s so much beauty inside people, and many of them don’t know how to express it. Many will. Many won’t.

Anyway, my Big Five:

1. This one I discovered years ago, when researching a sports book (co-authored with my friend, the great sportswriter Larry Stone): With Jesse Owens, a Black American, one foul away from being disqualified for the final in the long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Luz Long, his German competitor and main rival, introduced himself and gave Owens a tip: Make a mark several inches before the takeoff board and jump from there. Owens did that and qualified easily. He went on to win the gold—surpassing Long on his next-to-last jump—and was congratulated first by Long, who won the silver, in full view of Adolph Hitler. Hitler’s hope to use the whole competition as a master race master class was punctured in large part by the transcendence of Owens, who won four gold medals. Owens later wrote, “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have, and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-carat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment.”

2. I have not been able to verify this one, about the late singer and talk-show host Dinah Shore, but heard it told—and am confident neither of the participants would object to it: Shore, who suffered with polio when she was a girl, and was often mocked by schoolkids for being unattractive, once said that, when she was growing up, her mother told her every day that she was beautiful. “When I was finally a grownup, I realized that what she had told me was a lie,” said Shore, “but by then it was too late.”

3. In the Pantheon in Rome, one can find this inscription, possibly written by Cardinal Pietro Bembo, on the tomb of his friend, Raphael, the Renaissance era painter:

ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL TIMVIT QVO SOSPITE VINCI / RERVM MAGNA PARENS ET MORIENTE MORI.

“Here lies Raphael, by whom Nature herself feared to be outdone while he lived; and when he died, feared that She herself would die.”

4. (I would say “spoiler alert” for this one but I believe in a statute of limitations for works more than a century old.) “The Gift of the Magi,” the 1905 short story by O. Henry, features one of the most famous reveals in all of literature, remembered because it’s also one of the most beautiful: On Christmas Eve, a young wife and husband, with little money, each struggle to afford the present they want for their spouse. Della, with beautiful knee-length brown hair, has only $1.87, but buys a platinum fob chain to replace the worn leather strap on her husband Jim’s beloved watch—with the $20 a wig maker pays her for her hair. Meanwhile, Jim can afford to buy decorative combs for Della’s beautiful hair only after selling his watch. Today’s readers and consumers of story are more cynical and savvy (can you imagine Sophocles debuting the plot of Oedipus Rex now?), so maybe they would spot the climactic Christmas Eve gift-giving scene a mile away. I stand by it. “Of all who give and receive gifts…they are the most wise,” wrote O. Henry. “Everywhere they are the wise ones. They are the magi.”

5. There are variations on this next one, but a fine version can be found on the website, The First Gates, written by Morgan Mussell. I’ll let Morgan take over: “I am reminded of a story I heard so long ago that I cannot even remember its source. My best guess is that it is either a plains Indian legend or that it comes from the Pacific Northwest. ‘...When the earth was young, humans and animals were natural allies, and the friendship of the animal tribes made us very powerful. So powerful, in fact, that gods were worried…The gods decided to separate the human and animal nations, so they opened a chasm between us in the earth. From a small crack it grew deeper and wider, the animals on one side, people on the other. At the very last possible moment, Dog jumped across the gap to stand with humans, and that is why dogs have been our special friend ever since.’”

I just realized something: In most of this post, wherever the word “beautiful” appears, I could simply replace it with “humane.” Swap out “beauty” for “humanity.”

Huh.

41. Technically, we are all made of stardust.

42. A pig orgasm can last 30 minutes. How exactly does this benefit you?

    It does not, at least not obviously. But you will file it away and share this fact with someone in the next month.

43. The word SWIMS is the same when backward or upside down.

44. You needn’t be nimble-fingered or crafty to wrap a gift that looks pretty good. And if it doesn’t, it will look as if you tried, and the effort is worth more the result.

45. Pinecones are structurally remarkable.

46. When the chapter you’re reading comes to an end sooner than you expected.

47. Salads have gotten more interesting over the last generation.

48. There’s an actual language called Tagalog, an actual animal called a screaming hairy armadillo, and an actual fruit called ugli fruit.

49. Some people still secure business deals with a handshake.

50. Life is a near-death experience the whole time you’re alive . . . yet here you are.

51. You have at least one facial or body feature that at least one person envies.

52. If you’re over, say, 40: Close your eyes. Imagine you are one year older than you actually are. Think about what you might be doing, how you might be feeling. Really imagine it. Now open your eyes . . . you’re one year younger than that!

53. Drawing Snoopy well is fairly easy even for those with almost no artistic talent.

54. If you forget where the utensils go (as I do, all the time): SPOON (5 letters) and KNIFE (5 letters) go on the RIGHT (5 letters); FORK (4 letters) goes on the LEFT (4 letters).

55. Watching bread transform into golden toast.

56. When Lang Lang was nine years old, his piano teacher kicked him out of the studio for “lack of talent.” Today he is probably the world’s most celebrated classical pianist.

57. Most exits are clearly marked.

58. Air is still free, for now. (And will probably remain so for at least the next five minutes, maybe more.)

59. Though we are an incredibly divided country, there are four things (often referred to as “The Big Four”) about which we all agree:

    · the Mona Lisa is overrated;

    · the four railroads and two utilities in Monopoly are incredibly meh;

    · Starbucks’ cup size names (tall, grande, venti) are as stupid today as when they were introduced years ago;

    · and, of course, whenever a character in a movie or TV show gives out a phone number as “555-xxxx” rather than a number with an actual working prefix (because some bored viewers might start calling that number repeatedly), it kills our suspension of disbelief.

    We all agree on these four things. In this, we are united. There is hope.

60. The pillowness of clouds.

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We know AI has its predictability. It loves sycophancy, hallucinating, em-dashes, and the rule of three. Long walks on rainy autumn evenings.

But can’t its most fervent supporters come up with a fresh argument?

Yeah…no. Never mind which reasonable skepticism you express. You know what’s coming.

Also, China.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: It’s the end of the world as we know it.

THEM: Oh, stop. AI is going to solve the climate crisis.

YOU: You do realize that we have all the information, right now, to solve it—right now, along with most other global problems—but we haven’t because we lack the collective will…yes?

THEM: Nah, AI will save us from ourselves. And it’s only getting better.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: It will lead to massive job loss, which leads to social upheaval and chaos.

THEM: Where have I heard that before? New jobs will be created, like always happens with new tech. Horse-and-buggy to the car. Broadcast TV to cable. Print to digital.

YOU: Sorry but historical precedent doesn’t hold here. This is the first time in human history where the link between organizational value and human labor has no significant correlation.

THEM: Well…we can’t worry about that. We have to forge ahead because if we pause for even a second, the Chinese will overtake us. And bad actors. Also, AI is only getting better. Did you see what the latest version of Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok can do?

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: However biased the world is, LLMs will learn from it and amplify it.

THEM: Stop. For the first time, we have the opportunity to eradicate all the “isms.”

YOU: I don’t know…human beings caused all the isms in the first place. Human beings are the engineers behind AI. Don’t you think AI will just replace old isms with new ones?

THEM: Ahhh…but it’s only getting better. Also, China.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: We’re stealing other people’s creativity, with no respect for copyright, ownership, any of it.

THEM: Oh, come on…fair use! Every time you do your Christopher Walken imitation, aren’t you stealing? From him? His imitators?

YOU: Creatives should own what they make. And get paid for it.

THEM: Look who’s a capitalist now! Shame on you and your protectionist attitudes. Also, AI is only getting better.

*****

At least Jack had variety in the spacing and margins.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: We’ll lose our privacy even more. I didn’t think that was possible.

THEM: No time to worry about that. If we don’t let AI companies learn on everything, America will lose out to China.

YOU: Shouldn’t we have some rules in place before things get out of hand? We forgot to do that with the Internet before it was too late.

THEM: You sound like a European. Also, this is the worst AI will ever be. It’s only getting better.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: It will make us less smart.

THEM: No, just the opposite! It will free us from mental drudgery, enabling us to create amazing things.

YOU: Um…but when people have free time now, they mostly play Candy Crush. Or watch porn.

THEM: Never mind that. AI is only getting better.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: It hallucinates.

THEM: So? Human beings hallucinate.

YOU: Actually, some of the newer, “better” versions hallucinate more than previous ones, and the engineers can’t explain why.

THEM: AI will figure out how to fix AI. That’s what AGI is all about! Trust me. It will keep getting better. It only ever moves in one direction. Also, China.

*****

THEM: Why so nervous about AI?

YOU: It will worsen economic inequality. Data centers are insanely expensive. Taxpayers shoulder most of the burden, while the owners and their privileged circle reap an insane chunk of the profits.

THEM: Are you kidding? AI is the most democratic invention in the history of humankind. Wheel, printing press, refrigeration…nothing compares to this.

YOU: You do realize we have tech leaders with net worths in the twelve digits, and one of them just hit thirteen. So much of that wealth has exploded with AI. And they’re totally banking on AI.

THEM: Today’s CEOs and founders are nothing like the robber barons of the past. I’m offended on their behalf. Shame on you for questioning their motives.

YOU: “At the peak of the original Gilded Age, the top 0.00001% of the wealthiest households held wealth equal to roughly 4% of the national income. Today, that exact same ultra-elite slice controls more than 12% of the national income, with the top 0.1% controlling over 18% of total U.S. wealth.” By the way, AI told me that.

THEM (pause): Exactly. AI isn’t perfect. But it will keep getting better.

*****

The only AI answer I fully trust:

21. Every city has at least one beautiful stained-glass window, and often many.

22. How much harder would life be without hangers?

23. Whatever their other issues, Uber, Lyft, and other rideshare services have kept many people from causing drunk-driving accidents.

24. The alphabet has enough nicely dispersed rhyming long ‘E’ letters to make it easier for little kids to memorize it pretty quickly.

25. The Venus flytrap actually exists.

26. Seahorses. (Everything about them: their shape, how they move, their wild colors, the male carrying seaponies in his pouch, the mating dance which includes the male and female intertwining tails and swimming as one.)

27. The irresistible pop-ability of bubble wrap.

28. How weirdly perfect is it that “dirty room” is an anagram for “dormitory.”

29. Not all hail is the size of golf balls.

30. Not all tumors are the size of grapefruits.

31. You can get to your desired video in 5…4…3…2…1 Skip Ad.

32. Neil Armstrong surely had many, many opportunities to become a huge asshole…and did not.

33. Gummy bear prayer circles, with a candle in the middle, so they eventually all genuflect.

34. Most of us are evolutionarily bred to know when to cry “Uncle.”

35. New Orleans.

36. To do a passable Michael Caine impression, simply say, “My name is…my cocaine.”

37. Sunlight on your face, for even a half-minute.

38. There once was a Clown College (run by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey), and there still is a Hamburger University (a McDonald’s training facility).

39. Although Anna Christina Olson, the subject in the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World,” was physically limited (likely suffering with polio), so that she could be seen to be crawling across the field, Wyeth (who first spotted her from his window) captured instead her elevated spirit—and managed to do so from behind. “The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless,” he said. It would become one of the most reproduced paintings in America.

40. Phosphorescence in the ocean is a thing.

Feeling dazed by the state of the world or your own, probably both? The items below (to be a regular feature) will do almost nothing to undo those feelings. If you’re on medication, continue taking it.

Death and taxes. Rust never sleeps. Gravity and chaos are freaking relentless. Many pundits feel we’ve hit Peak Crap. Pundits.

And that doesn’t even account for your own private problems, the majority of which are problems we all struggle with. Not that that makes them much easier to face. It doesn’t.

I’m hardly the first to point out uplifting things, to myself or others. Gratitude journals. The Broadway show Every Brilliant Thing. Whatever endeavor Gretchen Rubin’s got up her happy sleeve. Barbara Ann Kipfer’s impressive output. Oscar Hammerstein’s delightful reminders that living in pre-WWII Austria wasn’t all bad.

I was preparing a whole book of these when I decided, Why wait? So here, my modest gift: Statements that will make you feel slightly—just slightly—less unhappy than before.

1. Hitler did not have children.

2. Smiling strengthens your immune system.

3. How easy the 11’s multiplication table is through 99.

4. Sea otters often hold hands when they sleep, so they won’t drift away, alone.

5. You can quickly learn to juggle with three thin scarves.

6. There is no point to giving a student an F-.

7. Virtually no one pickpockets as easily as they do onscreen—see Oceans Eleven, Oliver!, Focus, etc. (Then again, parking is harder in real life than in the movies.)

8. John Lennon and Paul McCartney hit it off.

9. The kindness of “spoiler alert!”

10. If you have nothing to lose, then . . . you have nothing to lose.

11. At this very moment, you almost certainly do not have poison ivy on your face.

12. Just about anything in super slo-mo.

13. Dolly Parton.

14. For males aged 12 and under: Uranus is the actual name of an actual planet.

15. Sledding is a thing.

16. If you’re gay in America: You’re not gay in 1952 America.

17. Even those of us English speakers who are pathetically unilingual (Americans, take heart) can figure out what certain “foreign” phrases mean—La Révoluçion Francaise (French), basebaru (Japanese), vocabulario (Spanish), oranje (Dutch),

    Karpaltennelsyndrom (German), and more—so long as we don’t have a large steel nail driven through our cerebellum (tserebellum, in Filipino).

18. Employees must wash hands. (In theory, anyway.)

19. Wind chimes.

20. Most scars do add character.

    More to come . . .

1. What if we made it against the law for anyone to be CEO of a public company if they’re bad at sustaining eye contact? And have no discernible, authentic, active sense of humor?

2. What if a military draft started with the top income level—no exceptions, no deferrals, no bone spurs, no letters from family friends who are US Senators, no fucking around, nothin’—and worked its way down, nice and simple, until the need was met? Would that be it for war?

3. What if compassion were actual currency? I don’t mean metaphorical currency; I mean translatable to actual commodity-/service-purchasing currency? The kinder you are, the richer you are?

4. What if the rules of Major League Baseball—governed by insane payrolls and obsession with victory—were swapped completely and forever for those used by the Savannah Bananas?

@thesavbananasDon’t think we’ll ever get tired of these mid-pitch dances. Sorry not sorry🤷‍♂️ @BazalaBall @TheGloveMagician @Jackson Olson @reesealexiades #savannahbananas #bananaball #dancing #trending

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5. What if all universities and colleges were run by people who had once desperately wanted to go to college but couldn’t afford to and/or family/health/nation-at-war obligations got in the way, and they still made their way in the world? Might they create a college environment more connected to what goes on after graduation?

In fact, what if we legislated taking more seriously the ideas and utterances of people who did not go to college, and not overconsider the thoughts and statements of the many-degree’d?

6. While we’re on the subject: What if we had a quota on the number of US Supreme Court justices with undergraduate or law school degrees from the Ivy League? How about a quota on those who went to Harvard or Yale? (Currently 8 of 9 do; only Amy Coney Barrett, by way of Rhodes College and Notre Dame Law School, has no H-Y education.) Seriously—there are no brilliant jurists from all the many great state law schools out there? The many other fine law schools? The not-so-great law schools?

If such a quota seems undoable, then at least let’s rename it the “United States Supreme Court, sponsored by Harvard^®/Yale^©/Columbia™.”

So much for diversity. This is frankly embarrassing:

The HYC Stranglehold on the USSC

7. What if every elected US officeholder had to wear on their clothes the patches (a la NASCAR drivers) of any company or organization that donated more than $5,000 to their campaign—as suggested by former Minnesota Governor and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura (and others)?

@grahambensingerJesse Ventura on wishing presidential candidates would have to wear NASCAR type suits #jesseventura #wwe

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8. What if everyone who supports a political candidate has to start any discussion or even mention of the candidate by first saying something negative and true about the candidate, which would automatically confer more credibility on the speaker? E.g., from a Republican: “Ronald Reagan, whose maniacal support of the ‘free market’ led to grotesque encouragement of greed and ultimately paved the way for much of the income inequality we suffer from now, was a steadfast voice encouraging the tearing down of the Berlin Wall . . .” From a Democrat: “Bill Clinton, who promised supporters that NAFTA would help the working class but instead contributed mightily to the hollowing out of American cities, was uniquely talented at balancing the federal budget . . .”

You get the point.

Below, an attempt. Though I credit the questioner, Carl (Karl?) Becker, more than I do either of the respondents:

9. What if we woke up tomorrow to find that “Puritan work ethic” meant the opposite of what it has come to mean? That is, what if laziness was now a virtue?

10. What if entire families shared one phone, or all the housemates in a residence shared one, or all the students on a dorm floor? Crazy, right? Thoroughly, totally impractical, personally and professionally, right? Why would we try anything that asinine and backward? Once upon a time, in buildings that were home to working-class and poor families and individuals, often immigrants, there was one communal phone, usually on the ground floor, and whoever was nearest would answer when it rang, find out who the call was for, then yell or climb the stairs for the person to whom the caller wished to speak. Annoying, right? No chance for privacy, intimacy, secrecy. For doing things in your own time. About as primitive as having to build a fire every time you wanted hot food.

On the other hand, how deeply might a one-telephone setup imbue an inescapable sense of community and shared experience? For dozens of people at once? If everyone was all up in your business and you were all up in everyone else’s?

You know what? Never mind. The telecoms wouldn’t like it. The phonemakers would actively discourage it. Mark Zuckerberg would start to cry. Forget I ever brought it up.

11. What if, just as an exercise, everyone who lived in Silicon Valley who has a portfolio that exceeds eight figures and who has attended at least one social gathering that Elon Musk may have attended, has to come up with an idea that could not possibly scale, and could not possibly be monetized? Just as a bit of funny-fun-fun.

12. What if every social media platform disallowed traffic from bots? If they wanted, they could stop a majority of it. They really could. They so could. If they wanted.

Start holding your breath . . . now.

13. Okay, fine, what if we just move the NBA 3-point line back 15 inches—which would eliminate the corner three, but also restore other elements to the game of basketball that were lost because of the obsession with “the three”?

Honestly, this is the only what-if that has a prayer of a chance—and, granted, for some it would make no difference:

. . .

For those interested in origin story, here are five observations, over the years, that inspired me to make the above list of 13 what-ifs:

(a) In October 1966, US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara—graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (Class of 1937); Harvard Business School (’39); “Whiz Kid” CEO at the Ford Motor Company; one of “The Best and the Brightest”; years later, president of the World Bank—believed that one way to improve American fortunes in the Vietnam War was to send more troops, so he lowered the IQ threshold for draft eligibility, including “those unable to speak English, those who had low mental aptitude or minor physical impairments”—in essence, sending young men into combat who were previously thought to be significantly hampered to serve and survive; lo and behold, “these men fought and died in disproportionate numbers.”

As my mother likes to say, there were Nazis who enjoyed listening to Beethoven and reading Goethe.

Maybe the wrong people are in charge? What if we didn’t use the usual metrics for “success” and “smarts” and “worth listening to” for our “leaders”?

(b) “Pundits” (“experts,” “talking heads,” “gasbags”) across all areas—stock market, political races, sports outcomes, are-we-going-to-war-or-not, etc.—love making predictions, yet rarely lose their jobs for getting things wrong, which they do so much of the time. Several years ago, I bought the URL pundidiots.com ($20, since lapsed), for a planned website to keep track of the (laughably bad, I predicted) prediction record of the experts, so there might be some accountability, however tiny. (As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson once said, Wall Street analysts have “predicted nine of the last five recessions.”)

Crowdsourced prediction markets seem to have rendered some of these expert predictions pointless . . . yet Jim Cramer still walks the Earth! And Mike Francesa still wears a headset!

(c) The Martin Amis short story, “Career Move,” which imagines a world where poets enjoy the prestige and earning power of top Hollywood screenwriters.

(d) It has long bugged me that certain people who shouldn’t be bathed in glory, are; while others who aren’t, should be.

Quick, name the war hero:

One of these two men joined the US Army Air Corps in World War II, was stationed in Italy, and “earned a Soldier’s Medal for stopping a fire in a plane that was being refueled”; in so doing, he “saved the lives of the men boarding the burning plane by driving the fuel truck away, returning on foot to the plane, and then putting out the fire by rolling over the flames with his body in uniform.”

The other man did not serve, and his movie studio successfully won him a deferment.

Having trouble?

Marty Allen, the man with the bird on his head, is the correct answer to the first.

John Wayne, the man in combat gear, is the answer to the second.

(Not only was Wayne not the war hero he play-acted in movies, but during the making of the 1966 Western, El Dorado, starring Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan, “Wayne, Mr. Caan said, cheated at chess games during breaks in the filming.”)

(e) Finally, this thought once came to me: What would it be like if things of consequence and those not were switched—we mourned lost socks, while we treated the death of a loved one with barely a shrug?

. . .

There you have it. I’m sure the list of 13 above could be extended by several million possibilities. For now, 13 will do.

The plumbers don’t talk to the bankers. The bankers don’t talk to the rappers. The foodies don’t talk to the stay-at-homes. The campus organizers don’t talk to the ROTCs. Vice-versa everything I just wrote. The ER nurses and schoolteachers barely have energy to talk to anyone outside of work. No one really takes the time to talk to the actuarials and the nail salonists, though they understand things as few others do. The politicians and the influencers talk to lots of people, then kid themselves that their conclusions will survive the next cycle. The Chick-fil-A’ers want nothing to do with the Burger Kingers, which is insane, since Burger King has chicken options. The tree-huggers and the oil lobbyists wish the other ones didn’t exist. The atheists and the true believers feel they have nothing to learn from each other, and in many cases they’re right. The opera lovers and the hockey fans probably have more in common than they know. And who talks to the dietitians from the Benelux nations, the K-Poppers who retire early to study hydroponic farming, the whittlers? No one, that’s who.

In so many parts of our blue-green-brown-white pea—

—we are a world of plenty, which, sadly, has translated not into a better World of One (or a better World of Two or Three, tops) but a World of Too Many. A world of fragmentation. Of sub-sub-sub-Reddits. Of “there-are-enough-of-me’s-so-fuck-everyone-else”-ism (known more familiarly to sociologists as TAEOMSFEE Syndrome). It’s one thing to decide who you are and who you are not; it’s another to decide who you can reasonably talk to and listen to and who you won’t. Or don’t. The Won’ters won’t talk to the Don’ters; the Don’ters don’t talk to the Won’ters. Identification and tribalism and partisanship are out of control. Overchoice is ruinous. How do we possibly get to a better place when confronted with this?

In no world are all these flavors needed. Walnut raisin: yes. And lox scallion. Obviously plain. But the rest can go. Though—not gonna lie—sundried tomato sounds intriguing.

Once upon a time, there was little choice, even no choice. What choice there was was reserved for the men, the white, the straight, the narrow, the thin, the two-legged, the Northern Hemisphered, the hirsute, etc. Choice was a dream for the rest. But a dream realized too much and too well becomes a—

No, I was not going to write “nightmare.” That’s what AI would do.

—a dream realized too much and too well becomes an overripe cantaloupe: It looks good but really isn’t. It looks like the Earth—it truly is orange-colored—yet it’s just a rotten piece of fruit. I am no longer talking about dreams but fruit. To stay one step ahead of AI, I have chosen to chase metaphors down dark alleyways until they smash against walls, like splattered melons.

Where were we? Yes, overwhelming choice.

There is too much in the world or there’s not enough that’s good in the world, or both. It is my deeply held, if legitimately rebuttable, belief that it often feels that there’s not enough that’s good in the world because there’s too much in the world. Who am I that you should care what I think? You shouldn’t unless and until you do. To this moment, I’ve written a couple dozen books, often with, for, under, or four feet to the left of interesting people, on all kinds of subjects (maybe too many?), and there are numerous books and “pieces” (in what used to be called “magazines”; ma·guh·zeenz) with my name on them, where my worldview no doubt bleeds through. But I’m starting this Substack to tackle, among other things, the above-mentioned and odious too-muchness, because it’s at the heart of so much of what ails us. Too much stuff, too much information, too much certainty, too much partisanship, too much “progress” (with no definition of what is progress, and if it actually makes things better), too much mindless cheerleading, too much self-dealing, too much repetition, too many photos, too many ways to be exploited, too many buttons to push, too many prop bets, too many cop procedurals, too much denial. Too much to choose from.

Is it a good thing that sixth-graders each get to choose a book to read for the month of October . . . or that they all read the same book so they can discuss it together at month’s end? Is the former really a better situation?

(*You in the back? Yes, you are correct: Having more than two major political parties to choose from in American elections would almost certainly be a better thing. I don’t have a good response. May I continue?)

(*And yes, it’s true, technology and ideas improve through iteration, which is essentially making choices again and again. What do I say to that? I say . . . may I continue?)

We kid ourselves, I believe, in thinking that more choice makes us more interesting. And interested. My guess is it makes us more confused.

Hold on, I hear you thinking. I happen to like chipotle bacon cream cheese. What are you even talking about?

Stop already with the cream cheese. This is about so much more than cream cheese.

If it sounds like I’m a cynic, a white guy, a two-legged hirsute Northern Hemispherer, let me be clear: I am not hirsute. I’m an idealist because I don’t believe this is the best we can do. I just don’t. I think most people agree, whether they say it aloud or not. I think our imaginations have been stunted because so many of us are overworked, overstimulated, underslept (feature bug of the system, to enlist the cliche).

I believe there’s a path to what we do need more of—meaning, purpose, reason, sanity, clarity, delight. There has to be, right? I do not believe things can’t but be this way. I do believe they’ve been normalized, so we’ve all been “my sister-my daughter”-ed (nod to Chinatown fans) into believing it.

I think “Too _____ to Fail” Syndrome is mostly bogus. I believe shrugs are the paltry “gift” we’ve been given to respond to the disappointment in the way things are. (The Lord gave us shoulders; thank the Lord!) Oh, and Matthew 5:5, one of the great grifts of all time. I can’t stand the mind-numb of “it is what it is,” the supposed apex of all human wisdom. Or “whatever, whatever.” Mediocrity quietly becomes quality, then special, then genius . . . when all along it was just mediocrity. Okay, maybe I’m an idealist and a cynic.

I may turn out to be wrong. If I am, then all I will have done here is add one more idiotic, unhelpful voice, turning what was already too into too + 1.

Not everything in this Substack will be about that. My own obvious hypocrisy comes from the fact that I have written and worked on a wide range of things, maybe too many, because I’m interested in a wide range of things. Sports. History. Business. Medicine. Death and life. Pop culture. Games and puzzles. Music. Baby animals. Inventions. Technology. How human beings do or do not relate to each other. Success and failure. Where do I get off saying there’s too much stuff, when I could have made a very comfortable living just writing about the professional badminton circuit, or evolutions in chip technology? Nor are my positions exactly pure: I “consulted” (hideous term, agreed) for two AI companies, while making a movie about the downside of AI. Conflict-of-interest much?

I’m not a Puritan, not an ascetic; as a writer, I’m no minimalist. I’ve been working on a second novel for more than a decade and a half, and it’s currently over 900 pages with no ending in sight. Who am I to make a “less is more” argument?

I like thought experiments, and hope to include a bunch of them here to serve my argument. I’m partial to lists. (Two of my books were essentially just lists.)

I don’t consider myself a born-and-bred contrarian. I like to believe there are a whole bunch of very obvious things we already solidly agree on (e.g., Dolly Parton is the greatest, dogs are better than people, BMW drivers suck, etc.).

If it matters, some things to know about me:

I grew up in Flushing, Queens, and wore that identity like a badge of honor rather than something to mask, as too many people do from too many hometowns. (Though I give a pass to those from Mianus, Connecticut, and Fucking, Austria. Not “fucking Austria”; “Fucking*, Austria.”)

(*Poor people. They changed the spelling to “Fugging” in 2021.)

I think we live in bubbles, including (especially?) those who like to think they don’t:

If you can’t laugh at the next one also, then you probably live in a different bubble:

Nothing is more important to me than fatherhood. The best thing I ever wrote was a diary of the cute, funny, deep things my kids said as they were growing up. (Strongly recommend it.)

I don’t believe I’m a typical consumer—to the extent that such a person even exists. (And yet they do.) I find it hard to believe that having a celebrity do a car commercial has even an iota of effect on whether someone buys that car. (It’s about increasing awareness, not buying decisions, I can hear the ad exec who persuaded John Krasinski to take Hyundai’s money telling him or herself. Whatever.)

I believe cousins don’t get the props in pop culture—and often in life itself—that they deserve, including 2nds, 3rds, and the removeds.

I love math. I love movies. I think comedians—not novelists, not filmmakers, not AI prompt engineers, not Substackers—are the philosopher-kings and -queens of our age.

I don’t understand how we got to the point that so many people make fun of teachers, or think it’s justified that they earn as little as they do.

I believe every politician should have to ride the bus—in disguise, so they don’t have a passel of security—at least twice a week.

I find it funny that girls and young women clutch the end of their long sleeves at seemingly pivotal moments.

This is my favorite site on what was once called “the web”:

The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)

I consider this composition one of the high points of human achievement:

And this performance:

I watch this at least once a year:

As well as the first 30 seconds of this:

I believe there should be a Museum of Smells, open only to dogs, and it should be larger than the largest AI data center.

If I could do anything like anyone, it would be play the piano like Oscar Peterson.

I’m a sports fan but a weirdly ecumenical one; as much as I (and anyone within shouting distance of Queens) have suffered*, I believe it’s only fair that the Buffalo sports community enjoy a championship soon, with Cleveland Guardians (née Indians) fans next.

(*This paragraph was written before the New York Knicks won the 2026 NBA championship in spectacular fashion. I have no standing to complain anymore, or for the next 53 years, whichever comes first.)

I know there’s a lot to read and consume and experience out there. Too much. Way too much. I hope my interests and arguments occasionally resonate with yours. I want to get to a better place and imagine you do, too. Everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pollyanna to Steven Pinker to Molly Brown to every (pre-IPO/stock-options-not-yet-vested) AI evangelist might disagree/have disagreed with my fundamental belief that things are not quite going in the right direction. Also, Buddha. I guess I hope they’re right and I’m wrong.

If you find something you like here, please subscribe and share with others. Maybe “like.” Or comment. Thanks for reading. Life is very busy.