Hey guys and gals, it's July and thus time to enjoy some summer jams, BBQ, and family time ahead. And of course getting into the "Summer Musings" season here on the blog!Let's "shoot the breeze" and talk about a couple of things in this post related to discussions over the last while with room treatments and acoustics you might want to consider for your own space.First, as you can see in the
Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper.
“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land.
Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.”
In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written.
The other canon
The body of American literature is vast and weird, and making it into the great American novel conversation is a matter of luck and timing as much as it is of merit. So I asked all the experts I spoke with to recommend a book that A. was not on our main list and B. expressed something interesting about America. Here are the novels they told me about.
Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown (1799). The title character goes looking for the murderer of his sweetheart’s brother in the gothic landscape of unsettled Pennsylvania.
Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1872). The first English-language novel by a Chicana woman skewers the hypocrisy of American liberals.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952). A perennial pick in the great American novel discussion, Ellison’s debut tracks its unnamed narrator through ever more surreal misfortunes as he navigates the corrupt institutions available to Black Americans.
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973). Ambitious and sprawling, paranoid and kaleidoscopic, Pynchon’s World War II tale follows an American intelligence officer who discovers a shocking connection between his erections and Nazi rocket strikes.
Two Wings to Veil My Face by Leon Forrest (1983). One of the books Toni Morrison edited at Random House, Two Wings uses the story of one steel-eyed survivor’s life to delve deep into the history of Black America, all in sumptuous, jazz-inflected prose.
The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018). Powers’s lyrical Pulitzer-winning novel follows nine people struggling to save America’s wilderness.
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2018). Makkai bears witness to the early years of the AIDS crisis in this gripping, thriller-like novel.
There There by Tommy Orange (2018). The urban Indians of Oakland, California, can’t bring themselves to believe in their own Indigenousness, but in Orange’s taut and disciplined debut, they’re trying anyway.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021). Lockwood turns the experience of being extremely online in the late 2010s into a Joycean stream-of-consciousness parable with ravishing, extraordinary sentences.
Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title — books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of “recipes” that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are a “democratic collective that’s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.”
I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell’s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is.
Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they’re united on one thing, it’s the idea that America is not an innocent country.
The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American origin story
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. “It first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American,” said Buell.
TheScarlet Letter tells the tale of virtuous adulteress Hester Prynne, forced by her 17th-century Puritan neighbors to wear a red “A” forever to mark her for her crime, even as she insists on her own dignity and integrity. It is endlessly useful as a metaphor for talking about American tendencies toward mob-mindedness and our prudishness around sex, a censorious impulse that keeps recurring — and, on the other hand, for talking about Hester’s very American independence and self-determination. With its early colonial setting in the first days of Puritan Boston, it speaks to an America that had not yet become modern, and it functions as a kind of origin story.
What the novel seems to insist upon most strongly, though, is the gloomy, dour Puritanism that began the American experiment. “The founders of a new colony,” Hawthorne wrote in the opening paragraphs, “whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” In The Scarlet Letter, that is the United States: a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.
To say that The Scarlet Letter is the great American novel, then, is to fear that our Puritan roots are inescapable, that we can never transcend the tomb and the penitentiary — and to hope that we can still, like Hester Prynne, redeem ourselves from our sins.
Moby-Dick (1851): A democracy at sea
Herman Melville was close friends with Hawthorne, whom he considered a mentor and to whom he dedicated his 1851 opus, Moby-Dick, the story of a sea captain obsessed with the titular white whale. Yet, Melville, unlike Hawthorne, was not revered in his own lifetime.
Moby-Dick wouldn’t have its revival until the 1920s and ’30s, when critics at Columbia University took it up. “Melville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet,” said Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. With its swirling, perplexing structure of digressions and asides — some chapters rendered as theatrical scripts and others as encyclopedia entries full of whale facts — Moby-Dick hadn’t made much sense as a 19th-century realistic novel. But it made a lot of sense to ambitious, boundary-pushing modernists.
Greiman argued that Moby-Dick’s late adoption speaks to what is so American about it: the way it seems to have been written for a time that hasn’t yet arrived. “It’s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that’s going to come in the future,” Greiman said.
Also distinctively American is Moby-Dick’s crew, made up of white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. They make their collective fatal mistake early on in the novel, when Captain Ahab informs the men that he has no plans to fulfill the ship’s mission to harvest oil from whales. Instead, Ahab said, he wants to enact vengeance against Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took his leg — and the crew willingly signs on to his monomaniacal quest.
“It’s often read as a democratic tragedy,” said Greiman. “Because you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.”
In the crucible of Moby-Dick, we see the weakness of democracy under the sway of a charismatic despot. We see the enormous and chaotic forward-seeking ambition of America, and the possibility that it may yet find that its great experiment is impossible, and its quest will end in tragedy.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Taking on America’s original sin
Like The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an immediate hit. Twain was a literary celebrity, and his books were widely popular. But Huck Finn, the tale of troublemaking 13-year-old Huck rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway enslaved man named Jim, wasn’t considered especially important. “It’s not singled out until after his death,” said Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.
It would be Ernest Hemingway who enshrined it in the canon, writing in 1935 that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” By the 1970s, said Seybold, it had become “probably the single most assigned work of literature in American classrooms.”
Today, Huck Finn is assigned less often, especially at younger grade levels, Seybold said, in large part due to Twain’s frequent use of the n-word. Yet, it remains active and alive in the American imagination, enough so that Percival Everett won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his 2024 novel James, which re-imagined Huck Finn from Jim’s point of view.
Huck’s relationship with Jim is, for most readers, the heart of the novel. Huck believes it to be his duty to return Jim to the elderly woman who enslaved him, but he also loves Jim and wants him to be free. In the novel’s most celebrated passage, Huck decides to go against what the world has taught him is right and help Jim escape, announcing boldly, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”
Seybold said this scene is frequently read as “America overcoming the sins of its inception;” Huck’s redemptive love for Jim is enough to help him transcend the hypocritical moralism of the slave-owning south where he grew up. But, Seybold notes, Huck Finn doesn’t end with that glorious moment. It goes on for another 50 pages and features a lengthy episode in which Huck toys with Jim’s freedom as though playing a game, while Jim is re-enslaved and dehumanized.
Seybold agreed with Toni Morrison’s read of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction — the promise of freedom abruptly reduced and turned into something contingent. Twain, Seybold said, was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech in which Douglass describes sharecropping as being nearly as bad as slavery.
In this context, Huck Finn is a bold statement on one of America’s great failures. “Twain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,” said Seybold. “That’s also America, right?”
The Great Gatsby (1925): A bleak look at the American dream
Like Hawthorne and Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. When he published Great Gatsby in 1925, it was a critical success, but its sales were modest. “I always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13,” said Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, Georgetown professor of literary criticism, and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
It took steady campaigning from Fitzgerald’s friends and publisher for Gatsby to be remembered. It started to become an institution during World War II, when the US army shipped copies of the book out to soldiers for morale and, then, was further bolstered by its widespread adoption as a high school text. Now, generations of American school children have grown up reading about Jay Gatsby, the poor boy who became a millionaire by mysterious means, all to win the love of the untouchable Daisy Buchanan.
This was around the same time that academics stopped talking about the idea of the great American novel singular, but it remained an effective marketing tool for publishers and an aspiration for authors, said Buell. Gatsby benefitted greatly from that marketing tool, in large part thanks to its status as a book that took seriously America’s class divides.
In The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell writes that the idea of the American bootstrapper stretches back to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby makes that ideal sinister through Gatsby’s mysterious and ill-gotten gains and hollow as untouchable Daisy proves unable to live up to Gatsby’s image of her. Yet, Fitzgerald’s writing is at its most lyrical and lovely when he describes Gatsby’s longing. One of the indelible images of the novel is that of Gatsby standing alone at the end of his dock, stretching out his hands toward the green light of Daisy’s house. You know the things Gatsby is working for aren’t worth it, but Fitzgerald makes it beautiful to watch him try.
“It’s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,” said Corrigan. “This is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.”
To say Gatsby is the great American novel is to say that America is a place of capitalist striving and that the dream of striving is beautiful. It’s also to posit that there is no clean way to make money, and whatever redemptive power you think you’ll claim at the end of your hard work will disappoint you.
Beloved (1987): The haunting of America
Starting in the 1960s, rebellions from within the academy started to break the canon apart. Feminist scholars were pushing for recognition of books by women; scholars of African-American culture were pushing for recognition of works by Black people. “That theory of a canonicity being bogus really gets rolled out in the 1980s,” said Buell.
Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, a Black woman who made it impossible to interpret her writing as an apologia for America.
In Morrison’s books, it is clear that America has never overcome its sins. Never is that more the case than in her 1987 novel Beloved, about a formerly enslaved woman who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery.
Beloved was published to enormous acclaim, but it did not win that year’s National Book Award, despite being a finalist. The Black literary scene rallied around Morrison in response, with 48 critics, writers, and activists publishing an open letter in the New York Times in praise of Morrison’s accomplishment and registering their disappointment with the National Book Foundation. Later that year, Morrison would win the Pulitzer.
“For a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters,” said Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers University. “And in Morrison’s case, this happened relatively quickly.” In 1993, five years after Beloved was published, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. That, said Lawrence, is when Beloved “starts to be considered the classic work of the late 20th century.”
In Beloved, Morrison was able to “unpack the difficulties of slavery…in so many different ways,” said Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard University. “It showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.” Morrison depicted the way slavery left scars on both Sethe, her heroine; on Sethe’s entire family; and even on Sethe’s enslavers. Even the land seems haunted. There is not a part of America that isn’t damaged by the horrors of both slavery and by the effort to disavow, deny, and forget it ever happened.
“Ultimately, I think it also forced us to think very seriously about how we have articulated humanity in this country,” added Williams. “Like who’s alive, who’s dead.” Sethe is based on a real woman named Margaret Garner, whose case involved a debate over whether to charge her with murder or destruction of property for the killing of her baby. “It really did question: What is humanity and who has the right to it? Who has access to it?” said Williams. “Is it really an unalienable right?”
Part of Morrison’s project is to show that slavery has haunted America’s legacy from the beginning — that no matter what we say about ourselves, we are not an innocent country. In Beloved, that becomes painfully, inarguably clear.
Closing the book
Let’s return to Buell’s idea that the great American novel is often about a democratic collective in peril. In the books we’ve talked about here, the threat is always a problem embedded in America’s national character: a mob-minded censoriousness; a weakness in the face of a charismatic leader; the sin, trauma, and whitewashing of slavery; the emptiness of capitalist striving. These are texts that tell us that America is a nation of ideas — beautiful ideas — and that it constantly struggles and fails to live up to those ideas.
“The novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,” Williams said.
But what’s sort of lovely is that, as critical and merciless as they can be, and as imperfect as America still is, these books are still the ones we have enshrined and celebrated and cherished over the past 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. We make sure that our people know about them, are warned at an early age that America’s innocence is a farce.
So, perhaps, the great American value that these novels enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing and empty puffery, especially around an occasion like the 250th anniversary of one of its founding documents. But it’s comforting to know that the centuries-long American quest to define our national identity through texts has led to a canon of novels that tell us the ugly truth about who we are.
Derek Lam has more than 31,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 40,000 on X as of this writing. He is shirtless a lot, he dances a lot, and he is shirtless dancing a lot, which may explain how he got so many fans. His comments are filled with compliments (“beautiful”) in different languages (“hombre bello y sensual”) and superlatives (“this might be the finest man on the internet”) accompanied by different emoji (red hearts, crying laughing, lips). Their responses make it seem like Derek Lam is the first and only beautiful man they’ve ever seen, which may explain why he is also selling “exclusive,” seemingly adult, content.
He is also, possibly unbeknownst to his many admirers, AI-generated.
To be fair, there were some signs that this man was not real: Despite the multiple videos, Derek never speaks. His videos are also rather brief, just seconds long. A real hot person probably would have parlayed a following of this size into brand deals or “get ready with me” videos. And the selfies on his X account show a completely different man just three years ago.
Still, the followers of Derek I talked to didn’t even notice he was AI because he seemed to blend in so seamlessly with the other hot men on the internet.
Derek isn’t the only AI thirst trap showing off defined abs for likes and money. He’s one of an increasing number of completely fake, AI-generated figures sinking their fangs into the real models, influencers, and porn stars who populate our feeds, sucking up their beautiful faces and bodies, and using them to profit, without a penny going to the real humans they fed from.
When it comes to the damage AI could wreak on society, an army of Dereks tricking horny people into giving him likes — or, worst case, money and Amazon gift cards — doesn’t exactly sound like the singularity doomsday scenario that we’ve been warned about. It’s clearly unfortunate for the adult entertainers competing with deepfakes and a fraud risk for their fans, but one might believe if they don’t fall into one of these two groups, they’re relatively safe and unaffected.
But there’s something more going on here. History shows that porn and sex drive innovation in the tech industry. The way tech platforms treat sex workers is typically a glimpse into the future, and a warning about how tech platforms will eventually treat all of us. If human desire demands the capability to steal, loot, and turn anyone and everyone into something for sale — possibly into hot Dereks — is anyone safe?
The Dereks of the internet are a bleak look at what’s happening in the real world: nothing belongs to us anymore — not our looks, our beauty, our sex, and our art. Our most human desires are slowly being synthesized, with or without our consent. And AI is making it all possible.
Deepfake technology has gotten alarmingly good in recent years
Artificial hots like Derek are considered “deepfakes,” an umbrella term for AI-generated media (audio, video, or both) that resembles a real-life person.
When deepfakes first started appearing in late 2017, they were fairly low-quality, making it easy to tell when someone had used a rudimentary app to paste a celebrity or politician’s head onto a different body. Still, it wasn’t very long until people started wielding this technology to be nasty.
“The first set of deepfakes were actually used to create pornographic videos. They replaced the subjects in those videos with the faces of celebrities,” Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies digital forensics, told me.
Because the quality of those videos was bad and the content was often absurd or unrealistic, it was easy to tell they weren’t real. Those clunky apps needed a lot of data — videos, images, etc. — of real people to produce crappy videos; Lyu explained that this is why you mostly only saw deepfakes of politicians and celebrities at the time.
As the technology got better, it became less reliant on having a huge amount of data. Instead of needing a whole archive, the new versions of these apps can pretty much run on nothing. “They do not need that much data to train a model anymore. Some of the most recent algorithms just need a single picture — just a single picture of someone,” Lyu said. And the quality is better too. Lyu said that there are AI programs that can now change a person’s appearance and voice in real time, like in Facetimes and Zooms or on live broadcasts.
Given how many of us are constantly posting photos and videos online, it is now extremely easy to create a convincing social media presence for a person who is not real, and to use it to catfish unwitting people on the internet.
“This is the problem. It’s becoming more and more challenging to visually tell deepfakes apart,” Lyu said. “Seven years ago, when I started working in this area, checking them was not this difficult,” he added.
Lyu is an expert in digital media forensics and machine learning, and he went through one of Derek’s videos frame by frame and pointed out some obvious AI tells. There was a distorted watchface with weird swirls instead of numbers and a moment in the video where all of Derek’s fingers on one hand were the same length. Lyu also pointed out that Derek’s chest hair fluctuates, appearing dense in one frame and then dissipating in another.
Through social media, I attempted to contact the owner of Derek Lam’s account with evidence from Lyu that these videos are artificial; I did not hear back.
During my deep dive into Derek Lam’s social media presence, I looked at the accounts he was following. I noticed that of those accounts, someone who goes by the name Vance Ford also had tens of thousands of followers and had nearly identical videos to Derek. The flexing, dances, movements, and music they were set to were all the same, but with what appeared to be a different man performing them.
I attempted to contact Vance through DMs on social media and did not get a response. I also e-mailed two models who appear to be the actual people that the Derek and Vance AI personas were trained on, but they didn’t respond.
I sent two of Vance’s videos to Lyu, who analyzed them manually and with AI-detection software. He confirmed that “their movements are nearly identical — consistent with generation from a shared motion source,” and noted that the Vance videos had moments of distortion, unintelligible text, and facial warping.
“Wow I’m a boomer,” said Patrick, one of Derek’s followers on X, after I told him that he might be following an AI-generated thirst account. (Vox agreed to let Patrick, and Derek’s other followers, use a pseudonym so they could speak frankly about being thirsty for a fake guy.) Prior to our chat, Patrick had no idea Derek was likely a deepfake, and maintains that he didn’t even know he was following the account. Patrick is 33 years old, roughly 30 years younger than the youngest boomer, but being fooled by a hot AI man has made him feel old and vulnerable, susceptible to scams and perhaps light financial crime.
“This was probably some smut account I followed before I moved all that over to an alt,” Patrick said, noting that in daily life, he’s only ever used AI to help organize and write emails. Wielding AI to create fake videos and photos does not thrill him, nor does the potential of seeing more of Derek.
How to spot a deepfake, especially when they’re hot
If you’re following someone extremely attractive online and found yourself wondering if they’re perfectly hot or simply an AI generated to be perfectly hot, deepfake experts and adult entertainers say there are a few things to check to see if your crush is an actual human:
Look at logos or objects with text, like clocks and posters. As good as AI is getting, some apps still struggle with rendering text, numbers, and patterns. Instead of distinct text or numerals (e.g., the 12 digits on a watch face), it’ll look like a distorted jumble.
Is the background consistent? If the background of a video or photo has an unusual blur to it, that could be a sign that a program was having difficulty creating the video.
Is this person on OnlyFans? OnlyFans, as adult entertainers told me, has a set of rules regarding AI, along with an ID verification process — essentially, OnlyFans is where real creators are (at least for now). Smaller, less mainstream creator sites may not have the same kind of rules and guardrails.
Is this person asking you for gift cards?“I don’t need an Amazon gift card,” one exasperated adult entertainer told me, pointing out that anyone asking for one-off, off-platform payments should raise suspicion. Other red flags also include asking for private information (like your bank account information or passwords).
Are they too good to be true? Sometimes a fake hot can be “too perfect,” a digital forensic scientist told me. It’s worth asking yourself why that very handsome person is essentially shirtless on a plane in economy class, asking if you want to be his airplane crush, and thinking about how little sense taking this photo makes in the real world.
“A person being real, someone you could run into at a bar, is half the fun,” Patrick told me, explaining some of the accounts he follows. “AI porn is not of interest, to me, anyway.”
Not being able to tell the difference between the real beautiful men on the internet and the AI-generated beautiful men on the internet not only makes Patrick feel old, but also a bit “hollow.” The fact that the people we are attracted to are so unrealistically hot, so perfect, that machines can step in for them and go relatively undetected is a reflection of the current state of unattainable desire, which is just as scary as how good these programs have gotten at mimicry.
“Black mirror shit,” Patrick said.
The guys I DMed about Derek felt ashamed once they found out the truth.
“It’s embarrassing and he’s not my type,” said Chris, 33. “I’ve come across several AI accounts, and this one is really good, I have to say. But you can see there’s like no life in his eyes.”
Chris made clear to me that the humiliating thing isn’t that he follows attractive men on the internet. That isn’t a big deal.
What irks him that he got duped. Chris works in digital marketing and has seen AI used professionally to tabulate calculations for campaigns, and has used it privately for silly things like memes. “AI can do a lot of things, things we probably should not want it to do,” he told me. “I think what’s also scary…is that everybody has access to it. And yes I already unfollowed this person.”
Chris believes there’s something more nefarious afoot. He thinks that whoever is running Derek may have hijacked the username (i.e., the original person Chris was following) and then populated it with AI to drive up follower counts — a scam he’s seen online before.
“This is super concerning and super scary because you eventually could be texting with this person,” he said, describing a hypothetical situation where unknowing users could be lured into subscribing to fake content and, ultimately, giving the account their personal information, whether that’s photos or perhaps even passwords.
“This person could be selling your nudes,” he said, explaining one extreme end point of a possible scam. “But you were like jacking off to AI content and that’s embarrassing.”
AI deepfakes are bad for real thirst traps too
While flirting with or masturbating to a fake person is awkward but ultimately manageable and private, Cherie DeVille has an even more complicated problem with AI manipulation. If DeVille is scrolling social media, there’s usually a chance that she’s running into an AI version of herself saying things she’s never said and doing things she’s never done.
DeVille, an adult star who calls herself “The Internet’s Stepmom,” has roughly 4.5 million followers on Instagram. But her account is often down, which she says is the work of fraudsters that are determined to send traffic to DeVille’s AI imposters and get her actual account removed.
“It’s almost always the fake accounts of me reporting me,” DeVille said. “They want to be the biggest me. They want to be the biggest scammer. They want to use my altered AI images to scam fans without my real account getting in the way.”
DeVille and others I spoke to explained to me that deepfakes have been an annoying reality in the adult entertainment industry for years. The way the scam goes is that someone would fake photos or videos of DeVille (or any star), create an impostor profile, and then trick DeVille’s fans (e.g., through social media DMs) into following that copycat. Later they’d squeeze them for money, payments through Paypal, or Amazon gift cards, perhaps by offering unique content.
“If you made a fake me and I don’t do double anal, but my AI can, they could have all kinds of ‘exclusive’ stuff,” DeVille said, explaining that double anal is grueling work.
The lack of protections becomes even clearer when you consider that not every deepfake is a carbon copy. Some personas may borrow a face from one actress, a torso from another, or a pair of legs from a different star. This can make fakes tougher to track down and prove, and more difficult to fight from a legal aspect.
“Who owns your face once it’s scraped into AI systems? Who profits from your digital clone? How do performers protect themselves from unauthorized replicas or manipulated content?” Rachel Steele, an adult star and the CEO of Red MILF Productions, said to me in an email. “Those questions are still very unanswered.”
Like DeVille, Steele worries about how many of the people using AI to create and consume content don’t seem to consider the artists, models, writers, performers, etc. that these engines have been trained on. It’s bad enough to watch AI slurp up and regurgitate your written work or your digital art. Some people also have to contend with LLMs that have been trained on their own faces and bodies.
“Real creators are competing against characters that can be flawless in every image, never age, never have bad lighting, never get tired, and can appear available 24/7,” Raissa Bellini, an OnlyFans creator who touts gymnastics and firebreathing among her unique skills, told me of the impossibility of keeping up with a machine. She explained to me that she’s seen people create AI-generated personas with the looks of popular models or influencers, only tweaking small details like hair color or eye color.
A spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vox via email that the company’s terms of service prohibit deceptive or inappropriate content, and said that all content posted on OnlyFans must belong to a verified 18+ OnlyFans content creator: “This means that you can only share content which has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI if it clearly features the verified OnlyFans creator and the user can tell that the content has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI.”
Bellini explained to me that while OnlyFans has measures to protect its creators, some smaller subscription and adult-content platforms do not have the same kind of guardrails. She also noted that most social media sites do not have strict rules or enforcement when it comes to AI, and that she’s seen the algorithm appear to favor AI over human creators.
“AI raises questions not only about competition, but also about likeness rights, authenticity, audience expectations, and what happens when fans can no longer easily tell the difference between a real person and a generated character,” Bellini added.
What’s stopping a stranger from creating an AI thirst trap of you? Nothing, really.
For Deville, Steele, Bellini, their cohort, and even you and I, there are minimal protections stopping someone creating an AI us and making money off of these fake variants.
According to Jason Schultz, a law professor and director of NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic, humans have, for the last couple of centuries, generally been protected by copyright and right of publicity laws.
AI obviously didn’t exist when these laws were written, and courts now have to interpret the laws in the context of all of this new technology, in combination with other existing rights (like free speech). Schultz told me that there are more than 100 current cases pending about training AI with copyrighted material.
He also explained the difficulty of determining whether or not an AI-generated persona constitutes a violation of someone’s right of publicity. It’s more clear-cut when the human involved is a celebrity, because their public persona and appearance is so distinct. It gets murkier when the humans aren’t well known, and the AI creates a persona that’s more of an amalgam than a one-to-one copy.
“It would raise this question of whether these avatars are based on a particular entertainer, or are they more of an aggregate?” Schultz explained to me. But even if courts side with the humans whose likenesses are being used to create fake personas, Schultz cautions that the technology will always accelerate faster than court decisions are handed down. “I think that the thing that worries me a little is we’re going to get these sets of decisions in two years, but we’ll be dealing with the next three generations of technologies,” he said.
DeVille, who has been working in the industry for nearly two decades, told me that without better legal protection, she isn’t hopeful for the future of porn or, more broadly, any type of art.
“If my income started tanking and their theft was at the point where I couldn’t compete with literally myself, there might be no choice but to retire,” DeVille said.
But she also wants to make it extremely clear that she isn’t against AI; she would just like to be in control of it. That means being able to own her likeness, her voice, her image, and the ability to choose whatever she wanted to do with it — or at least get some compensation or have some legal protection if someone’s using Cherie DeVille without her permission.
“It would be a beautiful way to extend my career beyond what my knees can take,” DeVille told me. But, she added, “if someone’s making an AI of me doing double anal, I should be making the money.”
After writing the articles looking at room acoustics over the last month, I thought this would be a good time to discuss another observation about the psychology and culture of the audiophile hobby and some of the claims that people make.As I noted last time, room treatments like the IKEA Mittzon absorption panels are far from the exciting products highlighted in magazines each month or even
Last time, we talked about Seoul's Yongsan ETLand, so moving along in my Asia trip, let's check out another audiophile mall, this time in Southern China, in the city of Guangzhou. I've been in this city before (as per 2016 post) but not at this exact location, the Highsun/Haiyin (name used interchangeably) Plaza.It looks like in the last 10 years, this place has really become quite concentrated
Object permanence: Neither arphid nor RFID; Gor novel sex slave cult; Violent economist sex criminals; Vade et caca in pilleum et ipse traheatur super aures tuo; "We Stand on Guard"; Healthy FLOSS; Lawsuits 2.0; CDC v zombie apocalypse; Gandhi's speeches; Apple v games about Palestine; Second Life chuds v Bernie; UK was never a "white" country; Dead, broke; Who Broke the Internet? (III)
Upcoming appearances: Hay-on-Wye, London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average, which means that when we vote with wallets, a billionaire's vote counts 100,000 times more than yours:
The idea of voting with your wallet is fundamentally antiprogressive, and not only because wallet-voting favors the wealthy. The ideological basis for voting with your wallet is the belief that politics are slow and unresponsive, while markets dynamically optimize for human wellbeing. By voting with your wallet, you are supposedly injecting information about your preferences and dispreferences into a vast, distributed computer we call "the market," which uses "demand signals" to decide how we live our lives.
This belief is incompatible with the idea of politics – that is, the idea that our lives can be shaped by representative democracy, deliberation, and/or solidarity. It's a nihilistic view that insists that the only nice things we can have are the things that "the market" chooses for us. If "the market" doesn't decide to swap out fossil fuels for cleantech, then that's that – any attempt to draw down our carbon emissions through regulation will only "distort the market." If you're roasting in a drought, drowning in a flood, or being incinerated by a wildfire, your only move is to go shopping and hope that by buying a Tesla, you will emit a "demand signal" that "tips the market equilibrium" to "not killing you and everyone you love."
Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping.
This isn't to say shopping can't improve your life! I am a materialist, and having nice things is nice. If there's a lovely independent coffee shop in your neighborhood where the baristas are treated well and the coffee is delicious and the vibes are impeccable, then by all means, get your coffee there. If you love the staff and selections at your neighborhood indie bookstore, then you should buy your books there. If you love the discourse on Mastodon or Bluesky and find yourself feeling sick and angry when you use Twitter or Facebook, then ditch the legacy social media and take up residence in the Fediverse and/or Atmosphere.
But don't kid yourself that this is politics. No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter. Going vegan won't make the meat industry treat animals better. Taking the bus won't induce improvements to your town's public transit network.
Having nice things is nice, and the more nice things you have – good food, good health, good books, good coffee, good social media and good transit – the more space and energy you'll have to devote to politics.
But what about boycotts? Surely the Montgomery bus boycott, the anti-Apartheid boycott, the California grape boycott and the BDS movement were politics, right?
They sure were. But they weren't shopping. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 382 days, during which time organizers worked with bus riders, cab drivers, the UAW and community groups to provide material and legal support and alternatives like car pools, all while communicating about their specific demands. After 382 days, the courts ruled in their favor, their demands were met, and Montgomery's buses desegregated:
That wasn't "shopping." The bus boycott didn't consist of a bunch of individual choices to walk to work, repeatedly made by a city full of Black people and their allies. The shopping part was the least important part of the whole matter, and the meaningful part of the shopping was never individual. If the boycott was nothing more than shopping, it would have broken as soon as individual people found themselves unable to convince their bosses to tolerate their late, sweaty arrival at work, day after day. The boycott worked because it was politics.
And because the boycott was politics, it left behind a movement: the boycott brought people into solidarity with each other, and when they comprehensively defeated their political adversary – National City Lines – they went on to form the backbone of the civil rights movement, going from strength to strength.
Of course, shopping is part of a boycott. It's the individual part that each participant in the boycott undertakes. But without the collective, organized part, shopping is no way to effect change.
Is voting politics? Well, sure, but voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts. For several decades now, most voters have been asked to chose the lesser of two evils (and now they're asked to choose the significantly lesser of two evils). Voting can change things, when there's something good to vote for, or something very bad to vote against, and when lots of people show up at the polls.
But to make voting effective, you have to do politics. You have to get involved in the primary races that select the candidate. You have to go to candidates' meetings and ask tough questions. You have to ring doorbells for your chosen candidate, volunteer to take your neighbors to the polls and volunteer to defend the polls from chuds and ICE fascists. The part of voting that takes place in the booth is the least important part of politics.
It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. You don't have to convince anyone else to do them with you. You don't have to argue about them or justify them. They are zipless fucks, a source of satisfaction without connection, compromise or complication.
Of course, that's also why voting and shopping make a poor substitute for politics. All the retail therapy in the world can't lift your spirits the way that solidarity and community will. Doing politics creates solidaristic ties with the people around you, who might help you if you lose your job and can't buy groceries, or break your leg and can't get to the grocery store, or if ICE fascists try to kidnap you while you're out shopping.
Solidarity gets you through times of no money way better than money gets you through times of no solidarity – just ask the psycho billionaires who wanted Doug Rushkoff to invent a system of bomb-collars that would keep their post-apocalyptic mercenaries from whacking them and stealing their bunkers:
Last weekend, I walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of coked-up fascists in central London on my way to meet up with 250,000 comrades marching for an end to genocide in Palestine and a new British social compact based on mutual aid, pluralism, and care. Walking through those flag-draped chuds was incredibly demoralizing:
But when I got off the tube at South Kensington and found there were so many of us we were backed up all the way from the every street entrance to the bottom of the escalators, my morale surged. Hours later, when we all reached Pall Mall together, I was ready to take on the world. That's what politics does for you: it makes you feel like you belong to a polity and that together, you can really change the world.
Politics runs on solidarity, but shopping destroys it. Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong.
In politics, we build bonds of mutual regard and understanding that we use to navigate our differences. But when you vote with your wallet, all that's left is the endless policing of your allies' consumption choices, endless scolding for their failure to leave Twitter, or give up meat, or eschew chatbots. Shopping for change ends up replacing politics with petty snooping and endless sniping and attempts to bully or shame people into consuming different things.
If "the personal is political," then every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects. If you let yourself get tricked into organizing your life around "living your politics" – that is, giving up on nice things in the hope that this will make politics change, and then getting mad at people who consume different things from you – then you will end up sucked into the stupidest fights imaginable with the people you need to get along with in order to do politics.
Once again, this isn't to say that you shouldn't choose to have nice things. Buy stuff you like, shop at places you like. And when circumstances allow all of us to start making consumption choices in unison – as when Comrades Trump and Putin stage an orgy of demand-destruction for fossil fuels, catapulting the world into the Gretacene – then by all means, take the win. That is one of the rare instances in which we can do political change with consumption!
And there definitely are times where a single individual can intervene in the system in a powerful way that really fucks up the worst actors in our society:
These usually involve using technology to "move fast and break things," which is fine, actually! It's fine to move fast and break things belonging to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or some other monster. Indeed, it's practically a moral imperative:
But even in those highly leveraged, highly individualized opportunities to make a dent in the universe, you'll make a bigger dent, and have more fun, if you do it as politics, with a big group of people, in bonds of solidarity.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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I don't know about you guys, but I'm like one of those husbands/boyfriends/partners who sit outside surfing the web at women's clothing stores. So while "the girls" were out shopping and getting pedicures in Seoul, I decided to take a couple hours' detour to the Yongsan ETLand which is about a 10 minute walk away from the massive Yongsan subway station (take Exit 3).I suspect in the
In the post "What are the most important audio components?" a few years ago, I said that we need to understand the various audiophile "domains": audio hardware, room acoustics, quality of your music, and of course personal mental engagement. Each of these have a part to play in the achievement of and personal judgment around sound quality.Of those domains, it's hard to speak about personal mental
Hey everyone. I'm still waiting to finish the measurements and write-up of the USB DDC boxes discussed last time (a few things I need to double check on!). In the meantime, I thought I'd share some thoughts and pictures with you of a visit I made to a friend, Paul's, place. You'll see that he is much more of a "subjectivist" than I am.Above, we see his listening room which is capable of
It's an interesting experience I think to pop into local "brick and mortar" audiophile stores when traveling (like this, this, this over the years). This past week, I've been in San Francisco visiting family. We happened to stay within walking distance from what I think is the most well-stocked audiophile gear store in the city - Audio Vision San Francisco - located in the Nob Hill
Let's have some fun this week on miscellaneous topics.Occasionally, I'll highlight items I've either written or found on audio discussion forums I think would be good to share. One reason I decided to start doing a blog beyond just contributing to forum discussions was precisely because while the public forums are great for interactions with community members, meaningful posts often become
Hublot Big Bang Unico, ~US$20k+ depending on model.Hey everyone, I just got back from the wonderful trip to
Central Europe and figured I'd extend some thoughts expressed in the previous
article: The Luxury of Sound and Time: Audiophile products, the Rolex and Timex Analogy.That article went online October 12th and I was
surprised to see Stereophile posted their article “In Defense of
Left: This certified authentic Used Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Watch, with the Model Number: 126598TRU, has a Yellow Gold/Diamonds 40 mm Round Case with Screw Down Crown and a Gem Set. This Men's Rolex Cosmograph Daytona has an attractive Diamond Pave Dial with Gems Dial Markers. The certified Swiss tested Rolex Automatic Movement will keep perfect time for you. The elegantly designed Rolex Yellow
As you can see through my posts, I'm obviously not averse to trying out "cheap audio guy/gal" products. 😏 I trust that this is completely consistent with my perspective on audio hardware for the most part being mature technologies, refined over decades already. For the high-fidelity audio reproduction pursuit, we can achieve excellent quality at very reasonable prices. Many (not all of course)
David Vestal once said photographers are "professional noticers." I notice things all the time that most people pass by blissfully unaware. Constantly looking. Constantly noticing.
I can tell when I get in "photographing mode" because I just start seeing pictures. As I go about my life in the world I'll think to myself (does that expression strike anyone else as singularly dumb? "Think to myself"? How else does anyone ever think?)—anyway, I'll think to myself, that's a picture right there or there goes another one.
And there are a thousand ways to miss a picture. Which, I suppose, is why it's most satisfying to go out photographing with a singular purpose—equipped, attentive, undistracted. Mainly, you drive past it. Or you don't have permission. Or it's fleeting, a momentary juxtaposition of moving things. Or the light changes. Or you don't have your camera with you. Or the thing you see suits another camera you own, but not the one you're using right then. Or I'll see four possible pictures and stop and get out of the car for the wrong one, the one I've taken before and seen before. The list goes on.
You've got to be prepared and ready, willing to stop, willing to do the work of getting the shot, because otherwise the missed opportunities will mount up and the whole experience will tip over into becoming too frustrating, too weighted with failure. You need to try hard to succeed because you need to succeed enough.
I've written in the past about some of "the ones that got away" (the expression comes from fishing). Most of them don't hurt.
Some hurt.
As you might know I'm between cars. I have a new bus; a friend will arrive today to pay me a wad of bills for the old sheet metal, and I'll be sorry to see it go. It's been a great little car and I've always liked it. In the new car, I've been carrying my camera. So, on Saturday, the magic happened. Picture the scene: a 1950s convertible, top down, parked in front of the backdrop of a big, hulking old stone church. A bride and groom in the front seat. Gathered around them, a semicircle of smiling, dressed-up wedding guests. In front of the car, a number of people raising phones in the air to capture the moment. And they're all just... there. I mean the scene is stable, not shifting or moving or dissolving. And right across the street, the grocery store parking lot. Where I can park within mere steps of the perfect standpoint to get a shot of the whole scene, with nothing to worry about but passing traffic possibly getting in the way. I'm thirty feet from the entrance and coming up on it. Perfect, perfect, perfect. I stand a real chance to get this one. And the sequence in my head goes: omigod perfect; they're not moving; camera's right here; I can swing into the parking lot and be right in position in like a minute.
And then...oh no, wrong car! I was driving the old Acura because I was going to the house of the friend who wanted to buy it so he and his wife could take a test drive. The camera was sitting back in my garage, eight miles away, in the other car. "Hold it right there! I'll be back in 25 minutes"? Arrrgh.
That wedding scene was one of the three best pictures I didn't take since 2022 when I got my current camera. Pure luck. Pure gift from the cosmos, the Universe, the gods. Missed it.
The part of the brain where guilt resides I think I've now written about all three. (I guess doing so makes me feel a little better.) The first one was a breathtakingly picturesque thunderhead on the other side of the lake, with the sun behind one side casting out strong and dramatic crepuscular rays. I was out walking the dog, and was passing by a spot where the property owner has explicitly given permission for me to go on to his property to photograph the lake. And, setting out, I had considered bringing the camera along, and then had thought (to myself): why bother? I'm not going to see anything I haven't seen a million times before.
Well, I did.
The second was when a neighbor had the Mennonites clear half an acre of trees up on the hill, with front loaders and backhoes. The great heap of felled trees sat there for half a year, drying, and then one day I passed by and the Mennonites had built a giant pyre for burning, maybe two and a half stories high, interwoven, almost sculptural, as if it were crafted, with a giant stump like a crown on top. It was mystical, magnificent. I drove by that again and again, each time thinking (right, to myself) I've got to get a picture of that. With darkness coming and a brooding overcast gray sky, it looked fantastical, like it could have been raised by primitive Vikings or Druids a thousand years ago. Enigmatic. Architectural. Mysterious. Did I stop? No. Again and again, no. I was always rushing out or rushing home. The last time, I think I even thought (...), this looks fine, and I have my camera with me, but you know, to really get "the" shot I might have to come back again and again, photograph it in different light and at different times of day. Like that should stop me; why should that stop me?
And then came the day when I drove past and it was a heap of smoking ash.
All three are seared on my brain. The part of the brain where guilt goes. Of course it's a natural part of photographing; Ansel almost missed "Moonrise" and Eddie Adams clicked the shutter before the fatal shot and the Marines at Iwo Jima raised the flag a second time for the press cameras. Buzz and Neil didn't have the camera set wrong when they were hopping around on the moon. But every photographer misses shots too.
Fishing, you do usually catch a few. But oh, those ones that get away....
Mike
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...It's that portraits have more or less gone away. At least in my little corner of existence. Portraits used to be a mainstream thing—understood even by the general public as one of the basic purposes of photography, a major category of subject matter, the subject of books and exhibitions, and something that photographers big and little could sell and that normal people routinely hired photographers to do for them.
It used to be that if you offered to do a portrait for free, it was welcomed as something of value. Now if I offer to do a portrait for free it's more often looked upon with puzzlement, if not something less welcome, as if to say, "Why would I need you for a portrait?" If you ask an acquaintance or a stranger to pose or model for you, young women (if you're a man) as often as not assume you're being lecherous and parents of children are as apt as not to view you with suspicion. (Maybe part of the difference is that I used to be a handsome athletic young man and now I'm an older man. Another part of the problem is that I'm an introvert and have difficulty putting people at ease, although I'm certainly not averse to engaging strangers in conversation.)
There might be another factor that hasn't changed since the old days but might have gotten worse—people are worried about how they'll look. It's not like this is new; people were shy and reticent about having their picture taken the whole time I've been doing it. But with today's pitilessly sharp lenses and resolution that's greater than that of the human eye, sometimes it's like a photo of yourself was calculated to make you look as bad as possible. People are leery. And have grown more so IMO.
(I'm especially amused when gearheads online ask the question "what's the best portrait lens?" and everyone proceeds to discuss the sharpest, most corrected lenses. Hmm. They haven't looked at a sufficient amount of successful and beautiful portraits from the past. Sometimes extreme sharpness works in a portrait—Karsh, for example—but more often it's a liability. During the peak era of photographic portraiture, photographers fanatically sought out lenses and techniques that gave just the right degree and type of softness.)
This is my great-aunt Christine Love Johnston, my father's father's sister, who died (like a rock star) at age 27 in 1922. We don't know why or how; her story is now lost as far as I know. Note the balanced and well-judge unsharpness—that was by design, not because of technology limitations at the time. She would have gone to a photographer's studio and commissioned this portrait, or her mother Lucy did. The photographer would have been a portrait specialist or at least a photographer who did portraits often. It had to have been taken in the nineteen-teens or early '20s. She would have dressed nicely—note her beautiful hair—and he would have had a studio setup all worked out. Such a portrait might have been a middle-class or better convention, but it was certainly a common thing to have done then.
And it wasn't only photographs. My grandfather had his portrait painted. When I was young I sat for an artist who made a portrait of me in pastels. Now lost.
Portraits—photographic ones—were something I was good at and liked doing. At the peak of my photo business I got $675 for a sitting and $100 per print, and that was in the late 1980s and early '90s—get out your inflation calculator! Good money for a schlub. I still do a portrait from time to time, and I can't say I work hard at figuring out how to do more. But when I do occasionally try, it usually falls flat. These days, people take their own portraits. Selfies. They also see lots of pictures of themselves taken by others and all they have to do in that case is say, "I like that one! Can you send me that?" Done. Maybe it wouldn't make a print, but who needs prints? Family albums aren't made of paper any more.
I'm not saying all this is bad. More people than ever are taking pictures of their kids and loved ones and having fun with it and often doing quite well at it, too. Look at the title of the post again...the thing I miss. The way it was is just something I miss, is all.
Niches I wonder what it's like for portrait "collectors." By that I mean photographers who deliberately set out to make a body of work of portraits of people who are eminent, interesting, or accomplished in some way, in general or in some specific field. That's one little particular niche of photographing. Recently, most people who do that try to create an archive of "celebrities," which has a specific circumscribed meaning in contemporary culture, meaning mainly actors, singers and athletes—"stars." There's no real definition of "stars" but we all kind of know who is and who isn't. That's only a subset of prominent people, of course. Any of the great portrait photographers you might name have a certain sort of person they sought out to photograph—rock stars, the rich, politicians, scientists. Photojournalists might accrue a body of portraits of people who do something newsworthy. One subset-within-a-subset I've always been interested is people who photograph photographers! My friend Arnold Crane was one of those, although he's not known now. So was Bill Jay, who was always self-deprecating about his own work but who created a fine lifetime project of photographer portraits. Of course you could photograph interesting people in any field and it would be interesting to somebody. Writers, physicists, artists, socialites, dancers, inventors, tech bros, race car drivers, rock climbers. Could be anything really. Heck, Robert Bergman, one of the rare true "colorists" in my opinion, created his body of work making portraits of homeless people! Time was when a great portrait photographer might seek out someone famous and request their cooperation to make a portrait of them. It usually worked because the famous person was aware of the value of cultivating their "brand" (as the common parlance puts it), and the photographer was interested in cultivating their portfolio, so a kind of symbiosis of interests applied. Are photographers still doing that? They must be, but I don't really know.
There's no celebrity like a niche celebrity. I recall a physics professor who went to a big international conference. He described it to us by saying it was like all the very biggest celebrities in the world were gathered in one place. All the biggest names. His excitement was off the charts. Of course they were nobody you or I would have heard of, but to him they were as famous and dazzling as Taylor Swift to a tween girl.
If you were a portrait photographer and wanted to create a body of work of some group of people or other, who would they be? What kind or type of people most interests you?
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Charlie Dunton wrote, yesterday: "Now that I am in the middle of my 7th decade, I've found another good use for my iPhone. When I find myself standing in front of a food vendor and his menu is too far away, or otherwise too difficult to read, I pull out my iPhone and snap a picture of the menu. I can then quickly zoom in and read it with ease."
Mike replies: I wonder what a list of "all the things we use cellphone cameras for that aren't photography" would look like. I recall years ago seeing a young woman behaving strangely. She was waving her phone high in the air and posing like a model, her free hand flicking at her hair. It turned out she had the camera on her phone reversed and was using the phone like a mirror, fixing her hair.
I use the phone to read very small text, especially when the text is molded into same-color plastic, which I have difficulty seeing. The "magnifier" mode is accessed by clicking the on/off button three times quickly. In the past I've used it to see things I can't get my head in position to see, for instance the back panel of my computer. Lately, when I suspect that a cashier might dispute the price of a sale item, I snap a quick picture of the shelf label so the clerk doesn't have to "go check" when I tell them what the item was supposed to cost.
Sometimes things sitting right above a pricetag of $39.98 have
morphed to $48.98 by the time they get to the cashier.
And of course I use it for copies—I sent in a water testing sample this afternoon and snapped pictures of the documents before I enclosed them in the package. I use it for notes, like ads, phone numbers, cards on community bulletin boards, etc. But I'd guess we all do that. Around here, I actually find tradesmen by noting the names on the doors and side panels of trucks, which I'll then snap a picture of.
What else do you use your phone camera for that isn't pictorial photography? Anything else you can think of?
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Mike Plews: "My bank app lets me deposit checks with my phone camera. Handy."
Dave Hsberman: "Frequent use for iPhone: Taking photos of books so I remember to see if our library has them."
Marc (partial comment): "I live on 300 acres of mostly bushland, and use my phone's camera for GPS coordinates of maintenance jobs. For example, I'll note holes for repair along the western fenceline, where the electric deer fence runs, where deer, wallaby, kangaroo and wombats have found a way to push through to avoid the zap. Also, for summer weed spraying, I'll note small outbreaks of St. John's Wort for attention (or horehound, or mullein, or thistle, or...but mostly wort)—it's as easy as just taking a photo.
"(Nothing stops wombats—they are the D9 tractor of the marsupial world. But I persist.)"
Ken Royce: "When at the market and am unsure exactly which brand or size or a product my wife requested, sending a quick text with a photo of the choices quickly resolves the matter...."
Rick Popham (partial comment): "I work in hospital maintenance. When we go into an office for painting, new carpet, etc., I take a picture of the walls so all the pictures and diplomas are put back in the right spot and any books are put back on the shelves in the right order."
Ilkka (partial comment): "The later model iPhones can see in the dark. It can be helpful if for example planning to make repairs in a dark place. I remember taking some pictures of a false ceiling to see how the wires and pipes went."
Henry White (partial comment): "Many younger travelers use their phones, in conjunction with Google Translate, to read signs in other languages with a quick conversion to English. Very helpful when visiting places like Japan and South Korea."
hugh crawford (partial comment): "Back in 1996 I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus D300L with a whopping 780,000-pixel sensor. Among other things, I used it to take pictures of expense receipts for a project at IBM that I was a freelance contractor on. It took about a week for them to figure out how to deal with them. I may have been the first person to submit digital photos of receipts at IBM. It hadn’t really occurred to me until now."
Albert Smith: "Parking space recall: in large lots or multi story garages, you can avoid an entire episode of Seinfeld by snapping a photo of Orange 43. Unless you like carrying a heavy air conditioner for 23 minutes. 😉 "
Bob Keeferdoes the same thing with trail photos, to help him find the way home again. —Ed.
Kodachromeguy (partial comment): "I use the phone camera to document parts of the house before going to the lumber yard or building store. It helps me explain a repair or project."
Sean (partial comment): "I travel internationally. Instead of carrying my passport, which I can safely leave in a hotel safe, I take shots of the current visa and other pertinent pages."
The Whole Foods Berry Chantilly cake might be the most viral cake on the internet. It's been a hit since its first release in 2002, had a few big shoutout moments online in 2021 where people raved about the dessert, and, more recently, sparked outrage when the supermarket chain changed the original recipe. Supposedly, they replaced the cake’s fresh berries with frozen berries and fruit jam, and Chantilly cake loyalists were not shy about expressing their disappointment. Fast forward to now: Whole Foods released a Berry Chantilly-flavored iced latte, and suddenly cake is once again culturally relevant.
Mini cakes!Photo by Anna Arriaga
I have to admit something: I’ve never tried it. I haven’t been able to justify buying the entire cake because I don’t love berry flavored desserts (I’m much more of a chocolate kind of gal). However, after my feed became flooded with people trying this new latte, I felt compelled to recreate the flavors of the original cake, but in a smaller and more shareable way. To me, making an entire cake is usually not worth it unless it’s for an event like a birthday party. There’s always too many leftovers. So, I set out to make little shareable cakes with all the same berry Chantilly flavors: a light, yellow sponge cake, a Chantilly frosting, and fresh berries (NOT frozen).
Dinner in Paris generally starts at 8 pm, especially in restaurants, and I get ravenously hungry between lunch and dinner.
Parisians do dine rather late – often not until 9:30 pm or later, and that’s an awfully long stretch. So French people visit their local pâtisserie for an afternoon snack, known as le goûter, although nowadays Parisians often call it le snack.
Le snack is often nothing more than a buttery financier or a tender madeleine. At home, French children at home are often given a split piece of baguette with a bar of dark chocolate tucked inside to keep them happy until dinner.
But my snack of choice is invariably les chouquettes: Cream puffs covered with crunchy nuggets of sugar, then baked until golden-brown. The eggy, pillowy puffs are piled uneventfully behind the counter and sold in crisp little paper sacks, each one holding about 100 grams, or about 10. I found that engaging the counter person in a few words of niceties will often mean that before the ends of the bag are twisted shut, an extra puff will be tossed in as a little gift for l’américain.
Nothing is easier to make than chouquettes and you can bake them right with ingredients you likely already have on hand. The only thing you’ll need to find is pearl sugar, which gives the puffs their signature crunch. Some tell me you can buy it at Ikea stores, or you can find it at King Arthur or on Amazon. If you have sugar cubes, you can crush those up into rough chunks and use those, although they’re not quite the same. And if you’re like me, and like chocolate, you could press some chocolate chips into a few of the puffs before baking.
This is one of my favorite of all French snacks and I can polish away a whole bag, or tray, in no time. These are best made and eaten right away, or later the same day – if they last that long!
From The Sweet Life in ParisShaping the mounds of dough is easiest to do with a pastry bag, although you can use two spoons or a spring-loaded ice cream scoop.Pearl sugar is available in the U.S .from King Arthur and at G. Detou in Paris, and is also available from French companies such as Daddy (called perles de sucre) and Vahiné (sucre chouquettes). You can approximate pearl sugar by crushing sugar cubes in a sturdy zip-top freezer bag with a rolling pin or hammer.
Course Dessert
Cuisine French
Servings 6servings
Ingredients
1cup (250ml)water
1/2teaspoonsalt
2teaspoonssugar
6tablespoons (90g)unsalted buttercut into small chunks
1cup (140g)flour
4large eggsat room temperature
Glaze:1egg yolkmixed with 1 teaspoon milk
Pearl sugar
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees (220 C.) Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. (Depending on the size of your baking sheets, it may take two.)
Heat the water, salt, sugar, and butter in a small saucepan, stirring, until the butter is melted. Remove from heat and dump all the flour in at once. Put the pan back on the heat and stir rapidly until the mixture is smooth and pulls away from the sides of the pan.
Allow dough to cool for two minutes, then briskly beat in the eggs, one at a time, until smooth and shiny.
Using two spoons, scoop up a mound of dough with one spoon roughly the size of an unshelled walnut, and scrape it off with the other spoon onto the baking sheet. You can also use a pastry bag fitted with a plain 1/2-inch tip and pipe them.
Place the mounds evenly-spaced apart on the baking sheet(s). Brush the top of each mound with some of the egg glaze then press the pearl sugar over the top and sides of each mound. Use a lot. Once the puffs expand rise, you’ll appreciate the extra effort (and sugar.)
Bake the cream puffs until puffed and well-browned, about 25 to 30 minutes. If they get too dark midway through baking, lower the heat of the oven to 375ºF (190ºC) and continue baking. (If you want to make them crispier, you can poke a hole in the side with a knife after you take them out of the oven to let the steam escape.)
Notes
Storage: The cream puffs are best eaten the same day they’re made. Once cooled, they can be frozen in a zip-top freezer bag for up to one month. Defrost at room temperature, then warm briefly on a baking sheet in a moderate oven, until crisp.
It’s interesting how many views of Paris there are, which you notice if you follow the variety of voices that write about life in the City of Lights. (A mistake some writers make is to call it the City of Light, and ‘lights’ in actually plural.) I tend to find all the quirks and report on the sardonic side of things, which for some reason, always find their way into my life. But the main reason is that I live in Paris full time and don’t just get to sampe my way through the lovely pastry shops and meet chocolatiers, but like most Parisians, I also spend a fair amount of time wrestling with perplexing bureaucracy and other idioms of life in the City of Fight Light.
For example, last week I went to the largest fabric store in Paris where I always buy étamine (cotton gauze), which I couldn’t locate so I asked a salesperson to direct me there. He was having a nice chat with his co-workers but was kind enough to take a moment to tell me “Non”, they didn’t carry it…and went back to his conversation. After I raised an eyebrow and asked a few more times, just be sure, he and all the others in the group shook their heads, confirming with absolute certainty that they definitely did not have that in stock.
Because I was absolutely certain that they did, I went down one level and, of course, found a huge bolt of it right on top of the pile of other rolls of fabric. C’est comme ça…
Having a French partner helps, and he also helps me in the kitchen, like when Romain arrived with a bag of apples from a friend’s farm in Burgundy. Some were dinged up a bit, as they weren’t from the supermarché, but French apples are delicious for baking, where bumps and bruises magically disappear.
So to keep things in perspective (as best I can…) I like to read other voices from Paris, such as Dorie Greenspan, whose book, Around My French Table, is a hefty collection of her favorite recipes and stories about Paris. She lives on the opposite side of the city, in a different neighborhood. And where I am sometimes defeated by city life, as a “part-time Parisian,” as she often calls herself, she manages to see the good in everything.
This is a very typique French recipe for home cooks, made with not a lot of ingredients, relying on no special techniques or hard-to-find equipment, and loved by all. The cake is easily mixed up in a bowl, scraped into a cake pan, and in less than the time it takes to run to the pâtisserie for a store-bought cake—or a seemingly simple length of fabric—you can have an authentic French cake…right from your own oven.
When a journalist interviewed me for an article about her, she ended the interview with; “So David, what is it like to sit around Dorie’s French table?”
I sat there for a few moments scratching my head to remember, then not sure of what to say, I finally replied, “I’ve not sat around Dorie’s French table.” Which was true. When she comes to Paris, we generally go out exploring. The idea of sitting indoors while Paris awaits just isn’t as interesting to me as sharing pastries on a park bench or hitting an outdoor market with her.
If you want to sit at Dorie’s table, the line starts here. However while you wait, you can feast on her recipes, just as I’m doing.
Adapted from Around My French Table by Dorie GreenspanDorie doesn’t specify any type of apple but instead advises that you should use a mix of them. I don’t know what kind mine were since Romain brought them to me. The rum is really a great flavor in this cake, but if you’re avoiding alcohol, you could double or triple the vanilla to compensate. I also like this recipe because you can make it with ingredients easily on hand. Being American, I was tempted to add a dusting of ground cinnamon to the apples, but then it wouldn’t be authentically French. Hence I often decide to add a dollop of crème fraîche alongside, but it's wonderful just as it is.The original recipe uses a springform pan but if you don't have one, you can use an 8-inch (20cm) cake pan, buttering it well and lining the bottom with a circle of parchment paper before adding the batter. I've also make it in a 9-inch (23cm) cake pan and it works well, although it won't be a high.
Course Dessert
Cuisine French
Servings 8cake
Ingredients
3/4cup (110g)flour
3/4teaspoonbaking powder
pinchof salt
4(about 2 pounds, 1kg)large applesa mix of varieties
2large eggsat room temperature
3/4cup (150g)sugar
3tablespoonsdark rum
1/2teaspoonvanilla extract
8tablespoons (115g)buttersalted or unsalted, melted and cooled to room temperature
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350ºF (180ºC) and adjust the oven rack to the center of the oven.
Heavily butter an 8-inch (20cm) springform pan and place it on a baking sheet.
In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Peel and core the apples, then dice them into 1-inch (3cm) pieces.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs until foamy then whisk in the sugar, then rum and vanilla. Whisk in half of the flour mixture, then gently stir in half of the melted butter
Stir in the remaining flour mixture, then the rest of the butter.
Fold in the apple cubes until they’re well-coated with the batter and scrape them into the prepared cake pan and smooth the top a little with a spatula.
Bake the cake for 50 minute to 1 hour, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. It may take less time, depending on the apples, so check the cake 5 or so minutes before the recommended baking time. Let the cake cool for 5 minutes, then run a knife around the edge to loosen the cake from the pan and carefully remove the sides of the cake pan, making sure no apples are stuck to it.
Notes
Serving: Serve wedges of the cake just by itself, or with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream.Storage: The cake will keep for up to three days covered. Since the top is very moist, it’s best to store it under a cake dome or overturned bowl.
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