Welcome to Anywhere, Texas Tea Leaves
I was recently visiting Harvard Square, where I was looking forward to showing my daughter around. But it quickly became clear that she would be the one giving me the tour (even though she had never been there before). Between social media and the ubiquity of chains, she knew all the places where we should look, eat, and drink, and thanks to her superior GPS skills, I ended up following her from place to place. My daughter had never been to this specific neighborhood. But she had definitely been there and done that. While standing on some street in some city, the Dutch Australian data scientist Lauren Leek explained the feeling: “What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic. Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere. It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.” NYT (Gift Article): Why Does Culture Feel So Monotonous? A Walking Tour Reveals the Math. “Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline ‘Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,’ that analyzed the ‘flattening’ effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture … Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous ‘monoculture’ in which, she writes in her Substack post, ‘we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.'” (I’m thinking of taking my daughter back to the street where I grew up. I could use a tour guide.)
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, All Blues
The heart wants what the heart wants. And it wanted something very different deep in the heart of Texas. The adage that everything is bigger in Texas definitely held up during Tuesday’s election, when an epic blue wave swept across the state and proved (in a shocking manner) that those who assumed that Texas would be forever red were all hat and no cattle. Consider that James Talarico “got 4,397,474 votes in early voting—more than the 4,249,373 votes that his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General James Paxton, received overall.” From Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker: The Night That Texas’s Seemingly Unchangeable Republican Identity Vanished. “Last night, I drank tequila and exchanged stunned, giddy texts with friends back home, as it became increasingly clear that something extraordinary was happening. Paxton and Abbott were losing, but so was Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, who fought to install the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom in the state; and Don Huffines, the comptroller, who has equated abortion with murder; and Bo French, the candidate for railroad commissioner, who once asked on X whether Muslims or Jews were a bigger threat to the country. The whole statewide G.O.P. apparatus—men who felt so secure in their power that they had nearly persuaded me to accept their inevitability—was teetering. Before yesterday, Texas had not elected a Democrat to statewide office in thirty-two years; now, nearly every key position will be held by a Democrat.” (I can’t wait to see how the characters on Landman react to all of this.)
+ “Elon Musk warned that Talarico would usher in the end of the American experiment. Ted Cruz said that “if Texas falls, everything changes.” Texas has fallen now, in almost every conceivable way. Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Gov. Greg Abbott. Democrats are poised to flip all 17 statewide offices that were on the ballot and take control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since 2002. They could net one seat in Congress from a map Republicans just redrew to flip five. Democrats went into Election Day cautiously optimistic. They ended it with the single most shocking set of results, at scale, that I have seen in my lifetime.” Tim Murphy in MoJo: The Texas Miracle.
+ Some of the changes will be immediate and local: “Less than 24 hours after a historic sweep of Texas’ statewide elected offices by Democrats, the state’s attorney general-elect Nathan Johnson said Tuesday he will not continue Ken Paxton’s practice of suing doctors in other states for sending abortion medication to patients here.” Some of them will be enduring and widespread. Vox (Gift Article): Democrats just seized one of the Republican Party’s most powerful weapons. “For years, Texas was the locus of the Republican Party’s quest to shape policy through litigation, especially during Democratic presidencies when Republicans could not use the US Department of Justice to bring cases.” That just changed, bigly.
Spies (Really) Like Us
“The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific place and time, analyzing ‘billions of location data points.’ … The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant from a judge to obtain location data from telecommunications companies. But the Justice Department has since argued that the principle does not apply to location data that agencies purchase from commercial sources, and Webloc users now include US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at least two branches of the US military, and more than a dozen American police forces.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Ads in Popular Apps Give Police a Powerful Tool to Spy on Users.
Forever in NewJeans
“The Korean government has a K-pop contract template that guarantees the right to education and to physical and mental health. The NewJeans contracts stripped away that language. The contracts banned such behavior as having an ‘insincere attitude,’ entering ‘inappropriate romantic relationships’ or criticizing the record label. The agreements included steep exit clauses and allowed the label to sell NewJeans music after the end of the deal, while slashing payments to the band. And it gave the label the right to use A.I.-generated NewJeans voices indefinitely.” NYT (Gift Article): Secret Deals Reveal K-Pop’s Firm Grip on a Top Girl Group.
Extra, Extra
Blunt and Center: WSJ (Gift Article): “Americans’ vote for candidates and ballot measures to ban or slow data-center development could rein in AI’s rapid growth and become a big business problem for the companies on the edge of technological progress. It also threatens to hobble an AI boom powering the U.S. economy.” (Data center contempt is part of a broader distrust of AI, specifically, and big tech more broadly. Election results aside, tech companies have to address these issues.) Meanwhile, the day after the election, the market soared. The day after that, things turned upside down.
+ JD’s Just Desserts: JD Vance is trying to save someone from the blue wave: JD Vance. “The vice president and 2028 hopeful is desperately trying to evade responsibility for the GOP’s bloodbath this week—by laying all the blame on his boss.” (To establish himself as the GOP frontrunner in 2028, JD Vance has to do two things: One, distance himself from Trump. Two, stop being a charisma-free, hateable, evil, boring, awful in every way, piece of garbage loser who is immediately despised by all who encounter him. It should be interesting to watch.)
+ MelaNEO: Is She the One? “Speaking at the White House, the first lady expressed hope that the six-day ceasefire around Oleshky would inspire a peace ‘more enduring than a temporary ceasefire,’ before praising the ‘highly cooperative’ Russian and Ukrainian leaders for helping bring about the pause.” Is Melania now in charge of peace talks? Does her husband know? Last we checked, he was back in the ballroom. “Now envision chandeliers all over.”
+ The Old College Trial: “If passed by enough states, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively nullify the Electoral College and, with it, the possibility of a candidate being elected president without winning the popular vote. Since the compact was introduced in 2006, 19 states have passed it, agreeing to assign their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. That amounts to 222 of the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win the presidential election.” Democrats Win Enough Seats Nationwide to End Electoral College.
+ Bomb Threats: Hoax bomb threats target European airlines and airports for the second time in a week. “Flights to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Poland and Romania were affected. An Aer Lingus plane from Dublin to Rome was diverted to an air base in France and Italian fighter jets escorted Finnair’s Helsinki-Rome flight.”
+ On Brand: Russell Brand has been found guilty of rape and sexual assault. The judge told Brand the consequence of the verdicts was a ‘significant custodial term.’ Here’s the latest from The Times.
+ LA Mode: “Raman, 45, who is part of the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated Bass, a former six-term congresswoman and a fixture of California’s political scene for decades. The result means three major cities will be led by democratic socialists, with Raman joining New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Janeese Lewis George, who won the mayor’s race in Washington, D.C., this week.” Nithya Raman defeats Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayor’s race.
+ LIV and Let Die: “Even as LIV Golf circled the drain in bankruptcy court, people around the league insisted that it had the means and vision to turn around the troubled outfit. Just last week, two-time major champion Bryson DeChambeau, LIV’s most popular player, appeared on a podcast saying he was hopeful it could live forever.” (Or, maybe not.) LIV Golf Is Finished After Last-Ditch Revival Efforts Fail.
Bottom of the News
Ever wonder what all those low-orbit satellites would look like if you could capture them in a photo? Well, someone did it. And while it makes a glorious image, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. A Stunning Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies.
