Today’s episode is a talk with Vinson Cunningham about his new novel GREAT EXPECTATIONS which came out yesterday and is in bookstores everywhere.
It’s everything you would expect from Vinson: beautiful sentences, long meditations on hoops, the church, and love, and a engrossing storyline that follows a young man who goes to work on the campaign of a certain senator from Illinois during his first presidential run.
Today, we talk to two people who have been thinking about reporting about AI for quite a long time: Repeat guest Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and Karen Hao, a journalist who has written an excellent series of pieces for the Atlantic. We talk to Ben about SORA, OpenAI’s video generator that only exists in trailer form so far and what might happen if it’s actually good. (We don’t think it’ll be good. At least yet.) And then we talk some philosophy.
There’s also a surprise at the start of the show.
And then we talk to Karen about the massive amount of water and energy that AI might consume in the near future and why everyone seems to want massive, cumbersome and expense-heavy giant tools and not the smaller, more streamlined tools that might actually create something of use.
On today’s episode, we talk about Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty Air Force twenty-five year old who self-immolated in Washington, D.C., the history of the act and how it has been seen in different eras and different contexts. We compare, for example, how Barack Obama talked about the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor who is credited with sparking the Arab Spring with how much of the liberal commentariat talks about Bushnell (largely in terms of mental health). And we try to make sense of what demands this act places on the public and how it could be understood.
We also talk about this:
We also talk about Jay’s recent article about Pretendianism in the New Yorker and Tyler talks about his own experiences as a minority in the academy.
Today, we talked about a topic that we’ve been circling around for a while — the minority vote. We now have months of polls all pointing towards the same trends in terms of Black, Latino and Asian voters all moving towards the right for a variety of reasons, most of which are left unexamined by many in the mainstream presses.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that we don’t hear about the “Black vote” or the “Latino vote.” We do read the polling results and see charts detailing the shift. But that second part — the explanation for why — almost never gets voiced for what I imagine is the very simple reason that most campaigns, pundits, and the like don’t really know the answers.
We talk about all that on the show and give our own thoughts about why different groups of people might be leaving the Democrat Party and what implications it might have not just on 2024, but for the future of progressive politics. Can the Dems hold together their coalition by just screaming at minorities that if they don’t show up, they’re going to be living in a fascist state?
Thanks for listening and as always, if you’re receiving this email and haven’t subscribed to the show, we would greatly appreciate your support to help us keep the lights on here.
Today’s episode is an interview with Carrie Sun, whose memoir PRIVATE EQUITY came out yesterday. (Buy it here!) The book is a memoir about the time Carrie spent working as the right hand for one of the country’s most famous billionaire hedge fund managers. We talk about the allure of finance and Wall Street, Ishiguro and restraint in writing, the ways in which political awakenings can sometimes be quite mundane in their origins, and a lot more about this wonderful book. If you’re a fan of everything from Ishiguro to Michael Lewis, this book is worth checking out, especially if you want to see what its like to work in a place where there are daily exploitations, insane expectations, but also sometimes there’s a bag on your desk and there’s a $2000 pair of leggings inside.
Enjoy!
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Today, we talk about the Apple Vision Pro and its grim vision for how you should be spending your time. Also, we talk a lot about Jaron Lanier’s most recent essay about the Virtual Reality in the New Yorker, specifically the question he poses about how technology should fit into our lives and whether tech can just create things because they’re cool without affixing their products to some greater mission for humanity.
The Apple Vision Pro doesn’t come with any story about how its going to change everything or even a particularly great series of launch apps that feel revolutionary. It just kinda is a VR headset that asks you to wear it around all the time. Lanier’s essay, as we discuss, asks whether “all the time” technology actually makes sense.
ENJOY!
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This week we have on Musa Al-Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. We talk a lot about “kids these days” and the tendency for all sorts of reactionaries to blame them for everything that’s wrong with this country. Don’t like illiberal attitudes on campuses? Blame the kids. Do you think free expression is at risk? Blame the kids. Feel like democracy is on the brink of collapse? Blame the kids.
(As always, if you’re reading this and not subscribed to our substack or Patreon, please consider supporting the show at goodbye.substack.com. It’s just $5 a month and helps us keep it going.)
Musa’s work is a critical intervention into all this kid blaming and we talk about the actual problem: Adults these days. We also touch on teachers, peer review as gatekeeping, and much more!
Here’s some info on Musa’s upcoming book from Princeton University PRess, which I encourage everyone to pre-order.
A piece he wrote outlining the problem with people saying “the kids these days” are responsible for everything that’s wrong with the discourse.
This week, we talk about the big Polyamory article in New York Magazine and the proposition that breaking the bonds of monogamy might be a political statement, one that frees both sides from the constraints of marriage. Are we just reinventing ways to justify selfish behavior? And why does every personal decision in the lives of upper middle class, well-educated people need to turn into some movement that promises nothing?
We also continue our ongoing talk about visions of the climate future with a conversation about “Psalm for the Wild Built” by Becky Chambers, which, in turn, led to a longer conversation about surf movies and Tyler’s hobby of fishing at 3 AM in a wetsuit in the cold unruly waters of coastal Maine.
Enjoy!
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In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about visions of climate apocalypse and how Butler, through no fault of her own, might have created a hegemonic vision of a warmed earth, one that has become almost cliche in the thirty years since Sower’s publication. Why don’t we have other, new visions for climate death? What would those even look like?
We also get a bit into a recent article in The Atlanticabout Butler and her use of “historofuturism” in her work.
And we talk a bit about the state of the Black quarterback and muse on why Lamar Jackson might get a more traditional, sports-talk-racist treatment than other Black quarterbacks in the league.
We will be continuing our look into extinction literature next week with a look at Becky Chambers’s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built.” If you’d like to read it before the show, please do so!
As always, if you’d like to upgrade your subscription and help support the show, we rely on your contributions to keep it going. Please click over and help us for $5 a month!
— TTSG
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I’m very excited to announce that Tyler Austin Harper will be our co-host for the next month or so.
Tyler was on the show last month and introduced himself then, but for those who missed it, he’s a writer at the Atlantic and a professor of literature in the environmental studies department at Bates College. He specializes in extinction literature and film.
For the next month or so, Tyler and I are going to talk to guests and to one another about a variety of topics, including literature and movies. In this episode, for example, you’ll find a “Book Corner” at the end where we talk about the rise of true crime podcasts and a recent op-ed in the Times.
As always, if you’re getting this email and want to support the show, please subscribe for $5 a month and you’ll receive access to our Discord server, where all these things are discussed at great length.
thank you!
Jay
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