It was the Peanut Butter heist that won me over. Everyone watching “Cape Fear” knows what I’m talking about – it’s the sixth-episode confrontation in which Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, tangles yet again with his nightmare neighbors Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson).

Some of you may be thinking I’ve mischaracterized the Bowdens since past versions of “Cape Fear” establish Max as the nightmare. But for all of Tom and Anna’s trepidation toward Max, they do little to thwart him from being all up in their business.

In one scene, Anna discovers Max in her kitchen making a sandwich for her son Zack (Joe Anders). In another, her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) hitches a ride with him. Anna carpools with him too, and Tom joins Max for a few drinks at a local bar. The Bowdens spend more time with their local tormentor than I have ever spent with my neighbors, whom I like quite a bit.

All this happens after Zack turns up with a missing toe, which Anna suspects Max orchestrated. Just like she and Tom strongly suspect Max spiked the family’s iced tea with Tom’s stash of LSD. Why does Tom have a stash of LSD? For microdosing, because Tom is a yuppie who hates his life.

(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Amy Adams in “Cape Fear.”

Anyway, when the couple angrily strides across the street to confront Max, we’re supposed to be in their corner. But Max’s door is open to them, and inside they find him preparing a luxurious meal. Before Tom gives the hardened ex-con an earful of what for, he and Anna are shocked silent when their cat strolls into Max’s kitchen.

“You took Peanut Butter?” Tom yelps in a way that halts Max in his tracks. He walks over to the cat and picks him up, and in previous adaptations of this story, this might signal that a disturbing act of animal cruelty is about to happen.

But Bardem’s Max is a different breed of psychopath from those previously embodied by Roberts DeNiro and Mitchum. “Peanut Butter? Really?” he says. “You’re calling this majestic creature . . . Peanut Butter?” Then he kisses kitty on the cheek and reintroduces him as Maní – the Spanish word for peanut.

“Maní will come home when he’s ready,” he says later. “You can’t force a cat.”

“Cape Fear” has now inspired three screen adaptations – two of them feature-length films that last about as long as the endurance limit most people have for its brand of sadism. In adapting the premise for TV, series creator Nick Antosca dilutes the movies’ naked menace by pouring reasonable doubt into both Max’s profile and that of the Bowdens, the married lawyers behind his downfall.

That doesn’t save “Cape Fear” from being a 10-hour slog set to an imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing score, but it does lend a little intrigue to Antosca and Bardem’s interpretation of Max.

The TV variation of Max Cady is where the classic prestige drama Difficult Man shakes hands with a manosphere cultist’s pent-up aggression. Bardem’s villain is built more like an aughts-edition antihero. He was once a respected celebrity chef who loved his wife even though he cheated on her, and exudes a kind of danger that brings out a touch of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome in horny strangers.

Meanwhile, Anna and Tom Bowden are a split version of the attorney previously played by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden. Their relationship with Max is also much more personal: Anna was Max’s pregnant lawyer in the trial where Max stood accused of killing his expectant wife, while Tom was the prosecutor.

(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”

At some point, Anna persuaded Max to plead guilty even though he maintained his innocence. Shortly after Max’s trial ended, Anna and Tom got married, Anna got sober, and both buried a few secrets. While Max spent 17 years in prison, Anna built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates, while Tom went to work for a fancy law firm.

It’s hard not to feel some kind of sympathy for Max, who sustained a severe brain injury while he was incarcerated that required surgeons to install a metal plate in his skull. As he tells a fellow prisoner in a flashback, he’d never murdered anyone before he killed the men who attacked him. Who knows if that’s true? Then again, Anna and Tom aren’t exactly paragons of honesty either.

Everyone in this series is some shade of awful. Anna’s boss, Noa (CCH Pounder), thinks Max is just the greatest, to the point of gaslighting her unnerved colleague. An unhinged girl who turns out to be his secret daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), has been living in the walls of the Bowdens’ house and messing with their kids. Max even has his own stalker played by Juliette Lewis, who also starred in the 1991 movie.

Still, there’s no getting around Max’s demonic impulses or the Bowdens’ clumsy game of FAFO mixed with “You Started It.” As Anna and Tom keep saying, Max was going to come after them no matter what. But good lord, they are bad at this.

I’ve always understood Max Cady to be a poisonous extension of the male ego, dating back to “The Executioners,” John D. MacDonald’s 1957 book that started it all. Max Cady either validates the paranoia of upstanding men obsessed with protecting or dominating women, or the disdain felt by those whom such men look down upon.

(Apple TV) Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”

Relatedly, his cinematic incarnations have evolved over the years: In the 1962 film, Mitchum’s Cady is a straight-up unrepentant criminal terrorizing Peck’s Sam Bowden by threatening to rape his wife and virginal teenage daughter. DeNiro’s take in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake amplifies Max’s barbarism and Lewis’ Lolita vibe as Sam Bowden’s daughter, establishing her teenage curiosity about Max by sucking on his fingers. (Scorsese is also listed as an executive producer on the series, along with Steven Spielberg.)

Antosca’s choice to leave rape out of the equation in the TV show, then, is a smart one. Instead, he falls back on a tried-and-true fridging: Not only was Max’s wife brutalized to a degree that there were knife marks on her bones, but the killer also cut his unborn child out of her belly.

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By the rule of Difficult Men, if Max does bad things, he has his reasons. And if he does those things to terrible people, they probably have it coming. Unfortunately, one of the people who paid the ultimate price in this feud is Anna’s coworker, whom she couldn’t leave out of her personal problems. He’s currently resting in pieces, poor guy.

The plot of “Cape Fear” dictates that this sporting tale of homicidal pettiness can only end one way. Until that inevitable conclusion, I’ll be rooting for Max Cady’s campaign against the Bowdens’ vortex of selfishness, which is entirely OK to do. None of these people is real, but the irritations they represent – NIMBYism, narcissism and the compulsion to destroy others to build ourselves up – are quite familiar. If the Bowdens were better written, I wouldn’t wish them ill. But I always trust the instincts of a good cat.

“Cape Fear” is currently streaming on Apple TV.

The post This new “Cape Fear” has me rooting for Max Cady appeared first on Salon.com.

When news of Sam Neill’s death at the age of 78 broke earlier this week, much of the public sentiment for the late New Zealand actor revolved around his humor and charm. Neill was a consummate character actor, hard-working and driven by a love for his craft, with a filmography spanning decades and roles that touched countless lives. And as such, Neill was a fount of fascinating stories and notable quotables — products of keeping his eyes open to all of the world’s strange beauty.

The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan reminisced on an interview with Neill from 2022, promoting his return to the “Jurassic” franchise alongside former costars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, in which Neill spun a truly incredible anecdote about his son farting in front of Princess Diana. On X, a user posted a magazine clipping in which Neill revealed how he’d commit a murder. (At the time, he was making the rounds for the BBC miniseries adaptation of “And Then There Were None.”) “I’d use a steamroller,” Neill confessed. “There’s a couple of people I’d put under a steamroller, but I won’t say who they are; otherwise, when they see a steamroller coming their way, they’ll be on full alert. And steamrollers don’t go very fast.”

(Universal/Getty Images) Sam Neill in “Jurassic Park III”

Beyond making us laugh, Neill’s wit was one of those special traits that enhanced all the other aspects that made him so lovable as both an actor and a person. His real-life geniality provides a stark contrast to some of his most famous roles as monstrous men committing equally hideous deeds. His best work tunneled into life’s darkest spaces to excavate ideas about our fears and obsessions, often reflected through dazzling practical effects that matched the naturalism of his greatest feature: a singularly expressive, malleable face. The mixture of satisfaction, excitement and sheer bewilderment that Neill wore in the first dinosaur scene in “Jurassic Park” was so effective that it made viewers feel like they, too, were witnessing something beyond imagination. To convey so much using nothing but the  God-given tools in your arsenal is the mark of a truly great actor.

Though “Jurassic Park” may be Neill’s most loved work, it’s far from his most impressive. To quantify a career like Neill’s is impossible, but “Jurassic Park” points to a trend that spanned his filmography, even defined it. Throughout his career, Neill pitted himself against creatures both real and imagined — or, even more often, somewhere in-between — to reveal humanity’s foibles in the face of the freakish and fantastic. Neill’s penchant for the weird and abstract allowed him to use his unique features and distinct, gravelly voice to create characters who were as devilishly memorable as the beasts they went up against. Few performers could make your blood run cold one minute and have you laughing the next. And Neill relished that ability, returning time and again to characters whose unpredictability mirrored life’s, creating an oeuvre that is both grotesque and supremely human.

It’s telling that Neill’s first major film role outside of a few sleepy Australian movies was as a grown-up version of “The Omen” antichrist Damien Thorne in 1981’s “The Final Conflict.” With his slick black hair and steely gaze, he was practically born for the part. But those features were on far more chilling display — and for a significantly better film — in Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession,” which debuted the same year, making for a pair of roles that supply a sturdy outline for Neill’s career. In Żuławski’s famously imposing psychological horror film, Neill stars alongside Isabelle Adjani as Mark, a young man whose life and marriage are falling apart at the seams after his wife, Anna (Adjani), has an affair and begins to exhibit strange behavior. As the first person the viewer sees in the film, Neill has the responsibility of setting the tone — a nearly inconceivable task for a movie that twists itself into a knot before consuming and regurgitating itself 10 more times. But Neill is up to the task, creating an atmosphere of sheer bleakness with little more than a look that is, somehow, both vacant and teeming with emotion.

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Though many critics and historians have tried, it’s impossible to get to the true root of a work as oblique as “Possession.” There are 100 feasible readings of Żuławski’s film, and just when those all seem to make sense, you could conjure up a 101st. What’s certain is that watching Adjani give herself over to Anna — and the gurgling, tentacled creature that may or may not be a figment of her fractured reality — is one of the most terror-inducing experiences you could have with a movie. But it’s important to note that “Possession” is a two-hander; Adjani’s performance needs Neill’s to sing, or perhaps, screech. He rises and falls at the same pace as his companion in this nightmare, laying the groundwork on which Adjani can create something so enormous. Neill’s performance is as flailing and furious as hers, and together, they turn “Possession” into a radical piece of filmmaking that has deservedly earned its cult following and late reverence. It’s really no wonder that Neill would go on to play characters who echoed Mark’s descent into madness, splitting off into equally extraordinary works of spine-tingling creature feature dread.

(URLI/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neil at the premiere of “Possession”

While some might cry sacrilege at comparing a filmmaker like Żuławski to Paul W.S. Anderson, the man behind such cinematic triumphs as the “Resident Evil” film franchise and “Alien vs. Predator,” both directors knew exactly how to push Neill to his most frightening limits. Like “Possession,” Anderson’s 1997 space horror, “Event Horizon,” took its time becoming a cult classic. Though the film was initially a critical and box office flop, it contains some of the most captivating sequences of outer-space terror you’ll find in any film, largely thanks to Neill’s petrifying turn as Dr. William Weir, a spaceship designer driven mad by mysterious visions. Weir and a small crew are sent on a recovery mission after the lost spaceship, the Event Horizon, suddenly reappears in orbit around Neptune, issuing a distress signal. When they arrive, they discover an inexplicable massacre has occurred, potentially the result of the ship’s ability, engineered by Weir, to fold space-time and travel great distances in a flash.

“Event Horizon” demonstrates a major theme in Neill’s most gruesome creature feature performances: the slow, onscreen transition from good to evil. Though Neill had more than a lifetime’s experience playing characters who were solely benevolent or entirely wicked, he was remarkably adept at navigating the journey back and forth between these two polarities. Even when they were written simply, his characters were never one-note. Neill seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved. Often, it’s trauma that changes us, that pushes us past the confines of what we know to be righteous and toward something cruel and unusual — a picture of ourselves that looks unfamiliar.

Dr. Weir, trying to do good for the world while still grappling with his wife’s suicide, reaches that threshold with unnerving speed (and even a bit of camp). But in “Event Horizon,” Neill avoids hokeyness in what could otherwise be an extremely hokey film, finding the emotional center in a character whose inner demons become real-life manifestations of Hell. It’s rare that an audience will sympathize with a character who is almost too nightmarish to bear, but Neill’s ability to consistently humanize the inhuman is precisely the kind of quality that we go to the movies for.

(Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Sam Neill

Of course, we also go for stories that are larger than life, that traverse beyond this realm into a place that only movies can go. One may argue that “Jurassic Park” is Neill’s perfect example of such a power. But my personal favorite will always be John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” a film that, by its title alone, is so fitting for Neill’s career that it’s almost comical. If you watch any film of Neill’s to pay tribute to a life well-lived and a career well-balanced, let it be this one: a hauntingly prescient, brilliant work of horror that perfectly encapsulates Neill’s most notable characters.

In the film, Neill stars as insurance investigator John Trent, who has been hired by the book publisher Arcane to track down their missing horror author, Sutter Kane, whose next book is hotly anticipated by the adoring, obsessed public. John’s work leads him to Hobb’s End, the fictional town in all of Kane’s novels come to life, where a series of strange occurrences that seem to lead back to Kane are happening more and more frequently. But John believes all of it to be an elaborate publicity stunt concocted by Arcane — or, at least, that’s what he tells himself.

Riffing on the public’s fanatical response to Stephen King’s work with a culty, Lovecraftian spin, Carpenter and screenwriter Michael De Luca craft a fascinating tale of how idol worship alters our collective consciousness, in which Neill is an essential component. As an ordinary man thrust into a world of monsters and maniacs, Neill is inherently playing with ideas about art and celebrity that reflect his own career. “In the Mouth of Madness” ponders just how powerful media — and our relationship to it — can be, and Neill gives an electrifying turn as a man caught up in a myth made real.

Neill said that, in filming “Possession,” he “only just escaped with his sanity barely intact.” And with “In the Mouth of Madness,” he once again evaluates the price of making great art, but this time from a safer distance. One could easily read the film as a meta examination of Neill’s work, of the kinds of characters he was drawn to, the ones that no audience member could soon forget. These men were striking figures, as intimidating as they were irresistible. They were characters who made us remember why we look to certain actors for specific things, and how important it can be to pay attention to the feelings they conjure within us. For Neill, it was the passion for complex, wily characters, and how those types of people reacted in situations that were equally complicated. His performances reminded us how easy it is for a person to lose their senses when they come face-to-face with something spectacular and indescribable. And what is life if not spectacular and indescribable? Through Neill’s work, we could explore our fears about what we can’t always understand. He wore the terror for us, making life’s big mysteries seem just a little less daunting — even if they, like Neill, will always be unpredictable.

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Pete Hegseth has once again decided to humiliate the American military, this time by claiming the troops need more testosterone. But the defense secretary, armed with his perfectly coiffed hair and alleged makeup studio, is ready to restore their manhood. In a video released Wednesday, Hegseth discovered spoke of how “the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting” and “demands maximum psychological and mental readiness.”

His solution? “High-T,” as he put it. Despite his loathing of “beardos,” Hegseth is excited about “fixing” those he deems falling short in the manhood-measurement department. Since he can’t actually pull out a ruler and demand his “warfighters” drop trou, the former Fox News host is doing the next best thing: making testosterone level testing mandatory for all service members over 30. 

The move is just the latest example of a paradox that plagues MAGA men, from Donald Trump down to the everyday Joe Rogan fan posting workout videos in his Oakley sunglasses. Efforts to prove their masculinity are so over-the-top that they inevitably read more as anxious than tough, revealing the deep well of insecurity fueling the movement.

Hegseth is an especially cringeworthy example, with an attitude toward the troops that is less of a leader and closer to a third-grade boy dressing up his G.I. Joes. He’s fixated entirely on superficial indicators of “manliness,” which gets in the way of the concerns that any normal adult would have in the job, such as how to avoid causing wars and proceeding to losing them.

“There is no magic formula that can tell us what level of testosterone best prepares someone to serve in the United States military,” Dr. Emile Redwood, a urologist with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told me. While “there are broad physiologic parameters of estrogen and testosterone that support our overall endocrine system function,” he said, they don’t correlate to “our mental readiness to be a clear and cogent member of a team.”

“Testosterone levels have no place as a proxy for a myriad of physical and mental readiness tests, where capacity and readiness is directly measured,” Redwood concluded.

But it’s unlikely Hegseth understands or even cares about what the actual medical science says. This is the same man who declared in 2019 that he doesn’t wash his hands because “germs are not a real thing.” He later tried to write his germ denialism off as a joke, but at the Pentagon he has ended flu vaccine mandates for service members, calling them “absurd.” This decision is likely rooted in nothing more than a childish understanding of biology, which equates testosterone with being “manly” and therefore assumes the more “T”, the manlier the man. In reality, artificially boosting testosterone, especially if not medically indicated, can shrink testicles, lower sperm counts and even make it harder to urinate. 

According to the New York Times, women will also be tested, even though women typically have much lower testosterone rates than men, which is not a medical problem. But again, this isn’t about science or health. Hegseth’s hostility to women in the military is well-documented. In his book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Hegseth declared that women aren’t tough enough for “the military, especially in combat units.” As defense secretary, he has a pattern of blocking military promotions for both women and people of color. His new insistence that high testosterone levels are necessary to do the job sends an unmistakable message: that women are categorically unable to serve as “warfighters.”

Women have been serving for decades now, including in front line roles, even if they were only legally recognized as combat soldiers in 2013. But Hegseth can’t seem to accept this reality, which speaks to his immaturity and eagerness to bury himself in reactionary fantasies. He’s not alone, either. This juvenile “no girls allowed” attitude has been growing more toxic in recent years, and has been propelled by Republican leaders, from Donald Trump down to the party’s grassroots, who encourage men to believe it’s somehow more “manly” to play-act being tough guys rather than growing up and living in the real world. The vibes are childish, more like those of 11-year-old boys pretending they’re in an action cartoon than adult men who read books and enjoy the company of women.

Hegseth may believe the military has a “low T” problem, but in fact it’s just the opposite. There have been numerous reports of health problems, and apparently even the 2022 death of a new recruit, due to soldiers taking performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone and human growth hormone. In response, the Navy SEALS instituted random drug testing in 2023.

Hegseth insists his testosterone push is “not about artificial enhancement,” but the disclaimer is an empty caveat. Young men are bombarded by advertisers and social media influencers selling shady supplements and drugs that promise to give them an edge. Now, the head of the military hyping testosterone like it’s a magical elixir will only enhance the appeal of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs. 

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times noted on Bluesky that Hegseth “cares more about his 1950s aesthetics than a functional and competent armed forces,” right down to micromanaging facial hair and his unscientific assumptions about hormone levels. The disastrous Iran war suggests that Hegseth is not capable of the real work of a defense secretary, which was entirely predictable considering his only previous management experience was in running two non-profits into the ground. The fixation on appearances, especially on facile and exaggerated gender performance, is an obvious attempt at compensating for his own impotence in the job. 

But Hegseth isn’t alone in this. MAGA loves nothing more than a Potemkin village, and Trump has gotten as far as he has because he’s very good at using TV tricks to create the illusion of strength and competence, especially for those who aren’t looking very closely. The belief that reality doesn’t matter if the facade is showy enough reaches into every corner of modern right-wing culture, especially when it comes to gender. The pervasive plague of MAGA men hope to deflect attention from their myriad flaws with ostentatious but empty pantomimes of alleged manliness. From barbed wire tattoos to oversized pickup trucks to yelling “Michelle Obama is a man” at a UFC fight, there are millions of men like Pete Hegseth, hoping their theatrics will hide the anxious little boy inside them.

Not that any of them deserve pity. There is a way to get off this hamster wheel of trying and failing to prove you’re man enough, and it’s not through testosterone injections. It’s through growing the hell up already, and maybe even doing something as “feminine” as getting therapy. By chasing these silly ideas about manhood, MAGA men are ignoring the more realistic and worthwhile goal of being a functional adult, someone who garners love and respect by being decent to other people and handling their own responsibilities.

Granted, that’s also what mature womanhood looks like, but so what? Only insecure boys need women to be inferior to feel good about themselves anyway. Hegseth proves this every day. He wants you to believe he’s a big tough guy, when in fact he can’t even handle the idea that women, people of color, queer people and even “low T” men are just as capable as he ever was at being soldiers.

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Plenty of people who saw the video of a 65-year-old grandfather being tossed in the air like a rag doll by a bison in Yellowstone National Park last weekend assumed that the man must have gotten close enough to the animal to piss it off. At Yellowstone, which has the largest population of the majestic animals, bison attacks are rare relative to the number of park visitors overall. But the animals often called fluffy cows have also racked up the most human-involved injuries of any Yellowstone resident — and last weekend’s attack was the second this summer.

But Carl McDaniel and his 13-year-old grandson, who visit Yellowstone every year, were abiding by the park’s guidance and giving the animal plenty of space, according to Mike MacLeod, a professional wildlife photographer who witnessed the incident. The same bison had charged through the campground minutes before, sending tourists scrambling, and was resting on a patch of ground when the man and his grandson came into view. “They were walking along the road, quite a ways away from the bison, and it started running at them,” MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily, theorizing that a pickup truck driving into the bison’s sightline at the same moment might have agitated it.

McDaniel told CNN that as he lay on the ground after being flipped by the bison, it stood over him. “He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life, but he did not do so.” Instead, MacLeod and a group of other campers made enough noise to make the bison leave. With one leg broken in 4 places, McDaniel was rushed to the hospital and into surgery. According to MacLeod, McDaniel’s grandson said that his grandfather wanted to see the video to make sure he hadn’t done anything to cause the attack. MacLeod is certain he didn’t. “You can tell in the video it’s not his fault. You can tell from the very beginning.”

Assumptions that the man had breached the bison’s personal space are understandable, given that bison in natural parks are frequently underestimated by visitors attempting to interact with them. A 2024 tweet from the National Parks Service referenced the danger with a message that read, “Believe in yourself like visitors who believe they can pet a bison.”

But despite common-sense warnings to avoid approaching or interacting with animals in the wild, humans continue to press their luck and, in many cases, suffer exactly the consequences you’d expect. In January, a skier in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was mauled by a snow leopard while trying to take a selfie from an estimated 10 feet away; visitors had been warned the previous day about a leopard sighting.

In February 2025, a Canadian visitor to Turks and Caicos attempted a similar stunt with a shark and suffered so much damage to her hands that both had to be amputated. A few months later, a diver and father of four strapped on a GoPro, jumped into the shark-filled water off the coast of Israel and never returned. Not long after that, a Florida man with no permit for shark fishing posed with a recently caught lemon shark and was way too surprised when the fish whipped around and chomped his leg.

And with each visit to the beach town of Hobart, Tasmania’s unofficial ambassador Neil the Seal draws a bigger audience that includes a handful of people approaching him for selfies. The 5-year-old, 2,000-pound elephant seal should be learning how to play-fight with other juvenile males; instead, in their absence, he fights fences and traffic bollards. The people getting within a few yards of him for action shots have Tasmanian wildlife officials bracing for tragedy every time the seal hauls himself ashore. (Neil flerped back out to sea last weekend, presumably to find a less stressful place to molt).

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“Generally, if an animal is alert to your presence, you’re already too close,” says Shervin Hess, conservation manager at Portland’s Oregon Zoo. And because humans have grown comfortable — perhaps too comfortable — around wild animals in the age of social media and smartphones, more often than not it’s the animals who wind up paying for our heedlessness. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you cross paths in the wild.

They’ve already had enough of us

This week, the president of the United States announced a change in the wording of the Endangered Species Act, which was signed into law in 1973. Its original wording defines the word “harm” as “an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”

There have been previous efforts to downgrade “significant habitat modification or degradation,” removing it from the category of “harm” and putting it into more of a “sucks for you” category. But as of July 14, the definition has been altered, and previously protected wildlife habitats are now fair game for developers — which means, among other things, that species and habitat-recovery programs are now in jeopardy. A statement from Bart Melton of the Conservation Association of National Parks noted that the change “defies common sense, science, and paves the way for mining, oil and gas drilling, logging, and development in areas that are crucial to the survival of some of our most vulnerable species. This rule ignores decades of conservation science and could undermine recovery efforts for more than 600 species.”

Infrastructure development, deforestation, pollution and urban sprawl have already caused rampant global habitat loss. Research from the Environmental Protection Agency found that in the United States alone, hundreds of species have gone extinct in the last century. Changes to habitats don’t need to be huge or systemic to have disruptive effects on wildlife, Hess says; in 2021 an illegal drone that crashed into a protected seabird nesting ground in Southern California caused panicked adult birds to flee, abandoning an estimated 2,000 eggs.

It’s important to consider our conservation footprint in addition to our carbon footprint, and part of this just requires paying attention to the wildlife around us in the places we live, and the human impact on it.

Remember you’re on their turf

Golfers at an 18-hole course in my neighborhood regularly find themselves teeing off in the company of coyotes who live in the area, and there’s a tacit agreement between the animals and humans to keep a respectful distance so that both can use the space as they do. When I asked one golfer if he’d ever been tempted to take a selfie with a coyote, he said, “No, because that would be really stupid.”

Human-wildlife coexistence is necessary for maintaining biodiversity, but there’s reason to worry that some animals’ ability to tolerate humans makes too many of the latter confuse coexistence with ownership. Earlier this week, birding podcasters Victor and Ruben Stoll posted video taken in Belize’s Mountain Pine Ridge of one of them chasing and petting a jaguar cub. The tiny Central American country, home to a number of protected species, has dealt with an increase in tourist harassment of its wildlife in recent years. Speaking to a news outlet, Belize Zoo executive director Celso Poot noted that even brief handling by humans can cause long-term physiological harm to wild animals. (“It builds up stress hormones. The muscles lock up, and over time that animal can be affected.”)

These incidents aren’t isolated. The black bear cub pulled from a tree next to an apartment complex by residents who wanted a selfie; the freshwater crocodile grabbed by a Canadian influencer who mocked its cries of protest; the baby wombat pulled screaming from its mother by an American influencer all occurred in pursuit of content and social-media clout. And none of the humans involved, at least so far, have faced consequences severe enough to deter others from doing the same.

“Humans have to remember that we are on their turf,” says Hess, who works with global species-recovery and wildlife-restoration organizations in his capacity as a conservation expert. “When there’s a baby seal sitting alone on a beach, it’s not because it’s stranded, but because the mother has parked it there while she goes fishing.” In other words, just because it’s there doesn’t mean you’re entitled to pet it.

Seriously, put your phone away.

It’s alarming that this no longer goes without saying, but here we are. To be clear, it is perfectly understandable that you want to take selfies with wild animals. “Animals are amazing. Seeing one in the wild is like seeing a celebrity,” says Hess. “And that can make people lose their common sense.”

This is an understatement. The number of people who either take or attempt to take selfies with wild animals grew so rapidly on Instagram in the 2010s that World Animal Protection introduced 2017’s Wildlife Selfie Code, which delivers a pop-up message (“You are searching for a topic that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals and the environment”) to anyone searching the app for hashtags like #slothselfie.

The demand for wild-animal selfies fuels illegal operations like the exotic-pet trade and exploitative tourism-focused practices like Thailand’s tiger-selfie industry. These, in turn, make abuse of the animals themselves routine (tigers are often beaten, starved and drugged to make them docile and photo-ready), but also impede broader conservation projects. “It can be really hard when you see so many other people doing it,” says Hess. “But you can be the person who says, ‘Hey guys, let’s back up, let’s put away the phones.’”

Even when human-wildlife interactions don’t result in catastrophe, the desire to own or claim animals to prove that we have done so isn’t the same thing as loving them. And giving animals space, not demanding their attention and not treating them like props isn’t just respectful coexistence — it can save would-be action photographers hurt and embarrassment. The woman whose hands were bitten off in Turks and Caicos wanted a unique snapshot for social media; instead, she will always be known as the woman who tried to take a selfie with a shark, and there’s no coming back from that.

For Hess, simply being in the presence of a polar bear in the Arctic or an orangutan in Borneo means much more than capturing them in photos. “Wild animals are so awe-inspiring,” he says. “Maybe people should take something from that.”

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On Monday Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ​posted a video on X, the government’s de facto policy platform, explaining that the Pentagon and the Justice Department created a newfangled joint task force to identify and prosecute press leaks. 

The “joint task force” model of all things law enforcement became increasingly popular in the wake of 9/11. Now, under Donald Trump’s administration, it appears press freedom is the new terrorism. 

“George Washington himself battled leaks, insider threats and espionage,” Hegseth noted in the video. However, I’m fairly certain the secretary doesn’t know that a reason Washington disliked leaks was because of the “Conway Cabal” — one of the earliest American political leaks. It involved private letters between two senior Continental Army officers who wanted Washington replaced as commander-in-chief of the army during the Revolution.

If Hegseth dug a little deeper, he would also learn that the Founding Fathers, including Washington, frequently relied on stealth statecraft, planting press stories and other leaky behavior. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and James Madison were colonial cyberpunks who used various encryption methods and strategically used information to influence politics, public opinion and the course of history. Jefferson was quite literally the nation’s OG cryptographer, a master of codes and ciphers that would make modern-day hackers blush. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was America’s first great newsman — a writer, publisher, editor and champion of an unbridled free press.

Hegseth’s “new” anti-leak task force is a dramatic escalatory reincarnation of older censorship efforts that even Washington would have scorned. The move also drips with hypocrisy, irony and mendacity in light of the secretary’s own leaky tenure and the Justice Department’s near-simultaneous subpoenas of five New York Times journalists who reported on Trump’s Qatari-gifted, inadequately secured designer airplane. 

Government anti-leak campaigns have a long and ignominious history, from Richard Nixon’s illegal “Plumbers” (1971-72) and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s expansion of interagency leak investigations (2001-2008) to Barack Obama’s “National Insider Threat Task Force” (2011) and Donald Trump’s first term “DOJ Leak Task Force” (2017). Obama’s group famously pictured my clients Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake alongside actual spies and mass murderers on a “WANTED”-style poster of “Those that have done us harm.” 

In once again teaming up, the Justice Department and the Pentagon can dust off the Defense Counterintelligence & Security Agency’s training courses, tool kits, templates and videos that discourage employees from choosing their conscience over their career. One McCarthyesque poster encouraged employees to rat on one another for “general suspicious behaviors,” including First Amendment activity like “making anti-U.S. comments.” Anti-leak posters featured cutesy slogans like “There’s no delete when you tweet!” and “Every leak makes us weak!” My personal favorite was “Free speech doesn’t mean careless talk,” when that’s exactly what it means. While you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, there’s no Supreme Court ruling holding that “careless talk” is exempt from First Amendment protection; otherwise, Trump’s Truth Social posts and X feed would have been shut down long ago.

I am no stranger to government witchhunts for “leakers.” After blowing the whistle in America’s first terrorism prosecution after 9/11, the Justice Department  investigated me as part of an over-the-top leak probe. Despite years of severe and grueling retaliation — including anonymous government officials publicly calling me a “turncoat,” referring me to the state bars where I’m licensed as a lawyer and putting me on the “No-Fly” list — I got lucky because the DOJ had not yet seized upon using the antiquated Espionage Act as its weapon of choice to go after whistleblowers. All I had to do was clear my name, pay enormous legal fees, miss a bunch of flights and rebuild my entire career.

The next batch of civil servants weren’t so lucky. U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; Air Force whistleblower Reality Winner; CIA whistleblowers Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou; and NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale faced prosecution under the draconian Espionage Act and stared down decades in prison for revealing serious government malfeasance including war crimes, secret mass surveillance, civilian drone strikes and Russia’s attempts at election interference. (Trump was also charged under the Espionage Act in the classified documents case, but U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the indictment. Special counsel Jack Smith appealed in an attempt to undo the dismissal, but once Trump returned to office, Smith dismissed its appeal.)

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In full hair and makeup, Hegseth started his X video announcing the task force with a telling statement: “As you know, we live in a dynamic and dangerous threat environment where access to and accumulation of closely held information is key to understanding our world.” His words sounded shockingly similar to those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who recently testified that secret military information helped “educate people about how the world works so that through understanding we might bring about something better.” I agree with both Hegseth and Assange that secret government information has, in fact, been key to understanding larger world dynamics, especially the global impact of war, mass surveillance, torture and other human rights violations. 

When it comes to the deleterious effects of leaking, Hegseth knows this territory well. He’s led the leakiest Pentagon ever and was responsible for one of the biggest leaks in military history. Early in his tenure, he fired three senior Pentagon officials accused of leaking. Then we had Signalgate, in which the secretary and other principals discussed real-time U.S. airstrikes on Yemen in a Signal group chat to which a journalist was added inadvertently. In fact, the Pentagon’s own inspector general issued a scathing report that found Hegseth had endangered troops and violated department policy by using the commercially-available Signal app for official business. Yet the secretary’s indisputable gift is his ability to fail up in direct proportion to his fireable conduct. 

So what will this new joint task force yield? It’s not meant to yield anything. It’s meant to chill the sharing of vital information. There will be a marked increase of federal reporter subpoenas and search warrants in national security leak cases. There will be an increase in FBI agents showing up on reporters’ doorsteps. There will be more armed raids of journalists’ homes, regardless of whether they are the subject or target of an investigation. There will be even more criminal probes and prosecutions of journalists and whistleblowers. The biggest losers of all, unfortunately, will be the public and its right to know what the government is doing, often under a Reflecting Pool-level film of algaescent secrecy.

While the Pentagon and Justice Department stand up their joint anti-leak task force, they should take a look into why leaks are on the rise despite ever more draconian measures like tracking employees’ computer downloads, restricting reporter access to government spaces and polygraphing ordinary civil servants. Such an inquiry would reveal that leaking is a time-honored practice and safety valve in a democracy, as Hegseth actually acknowledged without even realizing it. That’s something worthy of study by a joint task force of two of the largest departments in the U.S. government.

The post Under Hegseth, reporters are being treated like terrorists appeared first on Salon.com.

People still marvel at Miyazaki’s handcrafted backgrounds and his painstaking dedication to balancing its feather-light score with the melodies of flowing water or the gentle crunch of a child’s footfalls on grass and gravel. But Mei’s first meet-cute with her giant friend Totoro is what got me: she plops on his round belly as he sleeps, waking him up with her laugh as he yawns with a mouth big enough to swallow her whole. But Totoro would never harm Mei. That would break the spell Miyazaki weaves in every frame leading up to that moment.

“Totoro is where my consciousness begins,” Miyazaki once said. “It explains how my mind works.”

In the late 1980s – and certainly today, much more so – urban living distanced millions of people from their close connection to nature . . . and their parents. America had its latchkey generation and, along with that, a growing sense that the world is a dangerous place, especially its wilder parts.

Among the many culturally specific details that distributors feared would be misconstrued by Americans, the sight of a small child tumbling into a troll’s nest in the woods without any element of threat must have been low on their list.

Yet that’s precisely what made my first viewing of “Totoro” so unforgettable: Mei and Satsuki’s safety was never in doubt. Their father doesn’t dismiss their brush with the forest’s spirits as juvenile fantasy, either. Instead, he tells them that trees and people used to be good friends. By rekindling that relationship, the sisters (who are voiced by Dakota and Elle Fanning in the 2005 English language version) gain a huge and adorable new neighbor.

 

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All that said, there were parts of the spirit world that I wasn’t entirely on board with. The Catbus is the movie’s second most popular mascot, but let’s be real — it looks like something out of acid nightmare. The thing’s Cheshire feline grin even made Satsuki a little nervous. Only when it reappeared later to give the girls a ride to the hospital did I drop my guard.

Today we take the hallowed status of “My Neighbor Totoro” for granted. In Japan, he’s a beloved figure on par with any Disney character. Pixar affirms this by incorporating a Totoro cameo into “Toy Story 3.” Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” is said to have been inspired by Totoro, which Studio Ghibli winked at in 2021 by tweeting a version of the rainy bus stop scene that inserted him and his buddy Mike into the frame.

(©1988 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli) Still from “My Neighbor Totoro.” ©1988 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli

“Totoro is where my consciousness begins,” Miyazaki once said. “It explains how my mind works.” Deep observers of his catalog also view it as his most biographical feature, citing how closely Satsuki and Mei’s bucolic retreat resembles a chapter in the filmmaker’s childhood when his own mother was gravely ill.

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But to me, it’s a calm establishment of Miyazaki’s genius, acknowledged by its ranking on many best film lists, including one compiled by the late Akira Kurosawa — the only animated title he included on a list of 100 movies.

“My Neighbor Totoro” is a gateway into a pastoral ideal that still exists in living memory, reviving parts of our imagination that maturity has stifled into dormancy.  And for 86 minutes, it assures us that some of the greatest cinematic treasures are also blissfully conflict-free.

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Remember that scene in “The Lion King,” where Mufasa calls Simba to the top of Pride Rock and tells his son that one day, everything the sunlight touches will be his? Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos must put that scene on a loop every night to help him fall asleep. That way, it’s also the first thing he hears when he wakes up in the morning, ready for another busy day of using his money and power to make virtually everything so much worse. If only he let the scene play a little longer, he’d hear Mufasa’s critical addendum: “There’s more to being king than getting your way all the time.”

Last week, a still-unconfirmed report in Puck stated that Netflix is entering initial talks to acquire Letterboxd, the film-logging and review platform beloved by hardcore and casual cinephiles alike. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Skydance, private equity firms RedBird and TPG, and Reddit co-creator Alexis Ohanian have also reportedly tossed their hats in the ring, setting up early sales meetings with Letterboxd. In April, Semafor reported that Letterboxd was also in talks with Comcast spin-off Versant, which owns Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes. As of now, Letterboxd is majority-owned by the Canadian holding company Tiny, which has a 60% stake, while the remaining 40% is owned by the platform’s co-founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow.

Naturally, the news of a potential corporate sale hit the very active and very opinionated community of Letterboxd users like the two cars that bounce Brad Pitt back and forth between their windshields in “Meet Joe Black.” Each Friday, Letterboxd posts a prompt on its X account asking users to reply with their last four films logged on the platform. Hundreds of people treat the request like religion, posting screenshots of their recent ratings to find new people in the community to befriend and follow. But last week, the replies were inundated with complaints that Letterboxd had defected to the corporate dark side, along with fearful pleas for the platform’s owners to reconsider. An edited screenshot of Letterboxd’s user interface replaced the four film posters with a concise four-word appeal: “PLEASE. DON’T. SELL. OUT,” with the “N” in “DON’T” replaced by Netflix’s unmistakable red logo.

Some may argue that any platform scaling as fast as Letterboxd is bound to go corporate. Since its official debut in 2011, Letterboxd has amassed a whopping 26 million users. At that rate, the stable yet virtually limitless cash flow that comes from selling to a multi-billion-dollar company could be a boon for maintaining consistent growth and usability. (Letterboxd has become somewhat notorious for its extended server outages in the past couple of years.)

But there’s a major difference between Letterboxd selling to a mass-media company like Versant and a glorified porta-potty like Netflix — the dumping ground for all that is lousy and decrepit in film and television. Since its expansion from movie rentals and streaming into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not the art of visual media. For a platform like Letterboxd, which has built its brand on reverence for film and all those who love it, forking over ownership to a company like Netflix would be a cold act of back-stabbing betrayal. And while no brand is exempt from selling out, and tying your affection to a business is a fool’s game in the first place, if Letterboxd must change, the least they can do is change with a modicum of integrity.

Since 2011, Letterboxd has transformed from a simple film-logging platform where you can see what your friends are watching into a full-scale film media empire. The site and app are entirely free, but two paid tiers offer more profile customization, filters and features, all with zero third-party ads. It would be an understatement to say that the site’s library of films available for logging, rating and reviewing is extensive. Letterboxd houses virtually every film you could ever think of: blockbusters, indies, international films, softcore retro porn, short films, TV movies, that obscure film you caught half of on television when you were a kid but never stopped thinking about, and much, much more. A built-in function lets users add films to their watchlist with the touch of a button, and watchlists are easily sortable in case you’re in the mood for something specific.

In recent years, Letterboxd has made a foray into journalism, hiring an editorial team of staff and freelancers, who publish solid film writing on Letterboxd Journal. And on red carpets and film festivals, you can find movie and industry leaders feeding their four favorite films into a microphone emblazoned with Letterboxd’s orange, green and blue dot logo.

But despite all of this swift and massive growth, Letterboxd’s ethos has remained extremely simple: Cinephilia can be a solitary passion, but it’s made better with friends.

I’ve been an active Letterboxd user and one of the platform’s many evangelists for nearly a decade. It’s the only social media platform that doesn’t drive up my blood pressure within 15 seconds of logging on. While some use the site as a social network, I like to think of it as a personal diary. For those who use art to help shade in the textures of their lives — as sticking points to shape a memory — there is no better place to do so than Letterboxd. One of my favorite things about the site is that I can look back at the hundreds of films I’ve logged into one easily accessible archive to see what my opinion was on any given film, or who I watched it with and in what context. It’s an amazing place to keep track of your own opinions and watch how they transform. The first time I watched “Vox Lux” in January 2019, I wasn’t so sure about the Natalie Portman pop-star drama, giving it three stars. By the third time I’d logged it in 2020, “Vox Lux” earned a full, effusive five stars, a heart, and a glowing review.

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Like others, I have my own system of beliefs about how the platform is best used and how films should be logged. That’s one of the great things about Letterboxd: Everyone uses it differently, and those variations reflect a wide array of tastes in film. Some cinema snobs might find Letterboxd a distasteful asterisk on film culture. But if you really adore the art form, Letterboxd’s popularity is a rare net positive in an era when tech is largely being used to pit humanity against art and each other.

So, of course, companies like Netflix, Paramount Skydance and Sony would seek to corrupt that purity in pursuit of power. Netflix and other streamers have already split the film industry down the middle, separating those who venerate the art form from those who venerate the dollar, leaving many Hollywood titans flailing somewhere in the middle. Take Rian Johnson, whose deal with Netflix has led to his “Knives Out” films being relegated to tiny theatrical release windows in limited markets before being tossed onto the streamer. (If the franchise didn’t vie for awards, which require a theatrical release for consideration, it likely wouldn’t play in theaters at all.) Then there’s Greta Gerwig, who fought for exclusive 45-day theatrical releases for her upcoming adaptations of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — one of the first major films distributed by Netflix to break from the streaming model Sarandos pioneered. Sarandos has been openly cavalier about his belief that the theatrical release is “outdated,” going so far as to claim that Netflix saved Hollywood. But with the box office rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting record returns over the last year, Sarandos and all media companies that subscribe to the Netflix business model are desperately seeking new ways to market bad films.

This is precisely why dedicated Letterboxd users fear a potential sale: If Netflix, Sony or Paramount gets its hands on the platform, Letterboxd is likely to go the way of everything else those companies touch. A streamer-owned film-logging platform can kiss objectivity goodbye. Letterboxd’s “popular with friends” feature would likely be littered with streaming slop. The recently launched Letterboxd Video Store — a “rental store built for film discovery,” filled with curated selections and unreleased novelties  — would become a synergistic attempt to get users to pay to rent streamer-exclusive films without a subscription. Letterboxd Journal would be replaced by the advertorial “journalism” of Netflix Tudum, or lame writing about the library of films currently available on whichever streamer or studio makes the shiniest offer. Letterboxd, as we know and love it, would cease to exist, transforming into another nu-media ouroboros. Even if nothing gold can stay, must it always meet such a tragic end?

I wish there were a more pleasant answer. Maybe there’s a chance Letterboxd will be sold to Versant, and the company will integrate movie tickets and Rotten Tomatoes scores directly into its interface — it wouldn’t be the worst fate. But if I could log how many times I’ve seen this sort of film play out on Letterboxd, it would be one of my most-watched. MySpace and Tumblr, once spaces for boundless creativity, died the moment they sold out. Facebook revealed itself as Satan’s playground. Twitter opened a floodgate of Nazis and nonconsensual, illegal AI porn the moment Elon Musk took control.

Letterboxd was once a shining beacon among all of these horror stories, which already had their own unique problems before their formal acquisitions. In its 15 years of operation, Letterboxd has only adapted in ways that better serve its users and the film industry as a whole. Sure, it might be annoying that studios are trying to pass off overly enthusiastic five-star Letterboxd reviews as legitimate film criticism in marketing on posters and in trailers. But that’s not Letterboxd’s fault. The site’s only flaw is being a nice place to spend some time online — interacting with friends while finding new movies to watch and adore or abhor — in an age when online joy is punishable by death.

I guess if Letterboxd decides to sell to a media company and becomes objectively worse, disappointed users can migrate to A24’s physical, paper-bound film logs. There’s nothing unsavory there! Oh, that’s right, A24 just took $75 million of Google money to fund AI development. Pencil and computer paper, it is. If Netflix gets into the office supplies business, then we’re really screwed.

The post If Letterboxd sells out to Netflix, the people lose appeared first on Salon.com.

Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out ...Read More

If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s nontechnical technothrillers. You know the trope: “We’ve got eight minutes to crack this mainframe, but it’s protected with encryption that is rated for ten minutes. We’re gonna have to hack really hard. Come on, hacker, HACK AWAY!”

Technothrillers are consumed by an increasingly computer-savvy audience, which means that the kind of technical elision and corner-cutting that dominates the field grows thinner by ...Read More

If a group of people have been trying to get something done for some time without success, there are two possibilities: Either they’re failing because of bad tactics, or they’re failing because they simply lack the power to achieve their goals. When things start changing in big, dramatic ways, that means that some group in society has either discovered a new tactic, or they’ve found some new coalition partners.

Most ...Read More

In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.

Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their ...Read More

Let’s start with two obvious facts:

That means that every single policy question related to the internet will have:

With that out of the way….

Late last August, Pavel Durov – the billionaire owner of the Telegram app – was arrested by French authorities after he landed his private ...Read More

There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness ...Read More

No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ‘‘enshittification’’ – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) getting (much) worse – to be its Word of the Year. But though the news was a surprise, it was a very pleasant one.

My early writings on enshittification focused on its symptoms, the way platforms decay. The progression of ...Read More

In conflict, we find clarity.

We all hold contradictory views: We love our families, but they drive us crazy. We want more housing in our cities, but we don’t want our property values to decrease with expanded supply. We want better schools, but we recoil from a 0.1% municipal levy to fund them.

It’s normal to hold contradictory views, but when those views come into conflict, how we act shows ...Read More

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in ...Read More

It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people. ...Read More

I was surprised as anyone when I found myself accidentally using a large language model (that is, an “AI” chatbot) to write some prose for me. I was twice as surprised when I found myself impressed by what it wrote.

Last month, an airline stranded me overnight in New York City when my flight to LA was canceled due to an air traffic control snafu. The airline rep at the ...Read More

On June 20, 2023, I will be awarded an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, in Toronto, Canada. The text below is the speech I will give.

Goodness me, it is a gigantic honour to be here today, and to be recog­nized in this way. I’m profoundly grateful to the faculty and administration here at York, and to my friends and family ...Read More

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell’s company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switch­boards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell’s chief engineer described them as ‘Wild Indians.’ The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day ...Read More