Is it just me or is there nothing attractive at all about the looks maxing or whatever kid? Then again I’m mostly attracted to Jewish men, preferably over sixty but I make an occasional exception for a very smart one in his thirties. It is very concerning though not surprising to see that toting a terrorist on the campaign trail has been one fashionable. What is wrong with these people? Of course Michigan has lots of radical Muslims and I suppose they are telling us who they are. Hi to Debbie.
I like that you challenged Derek Thompson about the financial aspects of an AI bubble, given how leveraged these companies are (and how much of the debt has been sliced and distributed into financial vehicles that will affect more than tech companies if/when the bubble pops). Thompson has switched his view to seeing AI as a commodity like electricity, but that’s not his big new idea - that’s what Sam Altman has been saying, hyping the idea that we’ll all need “compute” the way we need light. Me, I’m tracking the social and political pushback against AI, which is not all about increasing productivity. People are pissed and worried for a reason - and I’m not yet convinced demand for compute has suddenly taken off (beyond the government partnering with these companies for various nefarious things - another problem).
It's so hard to tell, Martha, what's really going on. Is this an arms race or a race to fulfill a legitimate need,. mostly for businesses. I don't think anyone, including Altman, knows.
Autonomous robotic fighting machines. That's the military angle. The US accounted for 42% of global arms exports in the last few years. Which is truly big business. AI-powered or enhanced smart munitions and fighting platforms are the future.
And also big geopolitically. Ukraine supposedly won a battle last week with a 100% robotic force. Imagine what they could do with swarms of fire-and-forget smart drones? Or big smart drones with long range that can evade evade Russian anti-air and hit refineries?
Enhanced robotic manufacturing. Telemedicine. Self-driving taxis. There's a lot of money to be made as AI is harnessed to specific applications. The only real question is will that money be made by Anthropic or whoever has a sustained performance breakout, as licensing fees? Or by specialist firms that harness said market leader's product to specific, specialized applications?
I’m sorry Mallory was endorsed by Jew hater Elizabeth Warren. Warren also endorsed Mandani and recently voted to block arms sales to Israel. Only 7 dems can be celebrated for voting with Republicans in this measure. I wonder how Mallory would have voted.
We have a friend who recently left Microsoft. He said upper management threatened to fire anyone who did not make AI a priority.
Hubby would never do cosmetic surgery unless he had to. He doesn’t like when I wear make up but he has to live with the Keratin on my hair. I’m happy to be done with the Jew-fro.
Mallory has said she would vote against offensive weapons sales to Israel. So her views don't track exactly with mine. But I'm MAGA allergic so I want as many decent Democrats to win as possible.
Netanyahu and Trump are really jeopardizing long term American commitment to Israel. The polling on American views on Israel is really worrisome to me.
I find myself having to make compromises to support who I think is best long term.
Netanyahu and Trump with this Iran War made a severe blunder that will not only hurt the US and the GOP, not only the global economy, but also Israel and the Diaspora. Billions of people who right now can't afford to cook their dinner couldn't give a shit about Israel's need to mow the grass. They're all royally pissed at Trump and Bibi.
It also doesn't take a genius to recognize that overall, Bibi's leadership has only deepened the divide between the values of Israeli Jews and those of the Diaspora. As well as fueling consensus on both US Right and Left that Israel is an increasingly problematic ally. Last week Noah Smith even muttered in the comments that he thought the US should end its alliance with Israel. He may walk that back before he gets labelled a self-hating Jew; but it reflects exasperation with Israel's trajectory.
Barring some unexpected funding and support shift that makes J-Street top tier and dethrones AIPAC, the only alternative is for prominent individuals to somehow help AIPAC leadership understand the mess they've created. Ain't holding my breath, though.
“You don’t need special status to get access” to a good plastic surgeon is one of the most blindly ridiculous things I’ve read. Of course special status is required. I can’t just go up to Nicole Kidman or Kris Jenner and ask who their surgeon is. I can’t lunch with ladies from the east side of Manhattan. I don’t know anyone in Jupiter Florida. The evidence for the exclusivity of “good” plastic surgery is in the results: check out the botched faces of Lauren Bezos, whose surgery was done years before Jeff’s billions smoothed out the rictus on her face. That surgeon is so deep into his special world that he’s oblivious to the existence of people who lack any social connection much less the folks who have $$ but no social capital.
Ellen, I bet anyone could ask around and find plenty of good plastic surgeons. Most doctors will know of some. The real barrier is the expense. And from what I hear, the celebrity surgeons spend more of their time on P/R than honing their skills.
David, respectfully: the “anyone “ you refer to is a narrow slice of society. It requires money to make a serious inquiry. It requires a relationship with a primary doctor. It requires a certain level of ability to evaluate and research the evidence that a doctor is good. Look at all the failed BBLs to understand that most people who don’t fall into that narrow slice get their medical recommendations from FB or other social media. I’m relatively affluent and if I wanted “good” cosmetic surgery, I would have to access it in a major metropolitan area. It’s not available here in rural southern Oregon. FFS, people here can’t access restorative plastic surgery after being burned, or following mastectomy. They have to travel for hours to get to a city. Your NYC/rich man bias is showing, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way.
I recognize that few people could afford cosmetic procedures. My point was that if one could afford it and wanted it, one could access a good surgeon. You make a good point about people who get botched jobs because they don’t have a medical network or try to find a relatively inexpensive option.
However, you’re right that it’s hard to escape my POV. Thanks for pointing it out.
I love the sampler style! I enjoyed all but the most interesting piece to me was about AI. I think the development of AI mirrors the early days of commercial aviation in that the underlying investment well precedes the payoff. Just as airlines required airports, fuel networks, and air traffic control before they could operate at scale, AI demands massive compute infrastructure, data pipelines, and model APIs before most real-world applications become viable. This is where I think we are, and winners and losers will emerge, possibly with the added differentiator of whether their bond duration coincides with profitability.
I also think that the downstream effects are underexplored. The most durable businesses in aviation were the engine manufacturers and fuel suppliers. The AI equivalent may be the infrastructure, integration, and fine-tuning layer rather than the headline models themselves.
But the more profound parallel may be in what the technology ultimately unlocks: AI’s greatest potential lies in its ability to accelerate discovery in fields where the bottleneck isn’t creativity or insight, but the sheer scale of possibilities to explore. AlphaFold demonstrated this recently by solving the protein folding problem not through a flash of human intuition, but by systematically mapping an enormous possibility space that no research team could traverse manually. As quantum computing matures and begins to operate in concert with AI, that capacity for exploration expands by orders of magnitude.
Thanks Audrey, I am excited about the medical possibilities of AI. Genetic codes and the gut biome are so individualized and so data-massive that there is potential to do things with AI.
I really think it's hard to see who will win and lose at this point. The clear winners so far are the smaller companies who have some value-add to offer the big guys. When you have a trillion dollar valuation, a billion dollars is 0.1% of your valuation!
I totally agree! Downstream is the place to be, which incidentally is why I think sponsor-side banking is still doing well since that’s where funding would come from. Also this touches on one of my pet points that so many people don’t understand the relative magnitude of million/billion/trillion and how different they are 😊
I saw "Giant" and may write a post about it one day, but I didn't think it was "about" Israel or even antisemitism. Its real point I think was that antisemitism, like any form of racism, is often mainly just an expression of someone's personality disorder.
Interesting, thank you for sharing. I live in western MICHIGAN which is mainly republican unfortunately. We rejected Chump in 2020 and Bernie Sanders did upset Hillary in the primaries one year, but we have too many Christian Reformed, tea party, Hillsdale college Pat Sajak cringeworthy types on this side of the state.
A few thoughts on this pertaining to the Israel debate. I don't have a dog in the Michigan Senate primary and I don't feel strongly about any of the candidates, though I suspect either McMorrow or Stevens are better positioned to face down a Republican.
1) Does Israel hatred lead "inevitably" to antisemitism? I do not agree. I go back to my father, who was an anti-Zionist at the end of his life even though he had lived on a kibbutz in the 1960s, cheered on, as a child, the foundation of Israel, and retained a certain nostalgia for labor Zionism. (My father was proudly Jewish, and I am proudly Jewish. Certainly, a proud American Jew.) He was clear-eyed about what the Israeli government had morphed into: a right-wing de facto theocracy that is, in practice, much more fascist than Trump's United States. The trouble with the "Netanyahu is bad!" thesis (well, he is bad, we agree) is that Netanyahu doesn't exist in a vacuum. He responds to political incentives. He will be gone someday, and a more "moderate" leader might even replace him.
But unlike the United States, which has a relatively strong and vibrant Left (the Democratic Party) and will most likely have a Democratic president and Democratic Congress in the near future - I am sure the "Dem trifecta 2029" odds on Polymarket are rather good - there is no such thing as a "Left" in Israel anymore. Labor Zionism is dead as a doornail. The Israeli people very much wanted to go to war with Iran, and the most powerful and growing voting faction are the Haredi and religious extremists. That is what Israel is. And to be frank, as a progressive/leftist person in the United States, I want no part it in.
This transcends the war in Gaza, which we can debate forever (I say genocide, you say no genocide, and on and on we go) and the slaughter of 20,000 or so Palestinian kids. In a strange way, the war in Gaza was almost a distraction from the sickness and rot within the Israeli project, which is the West Bank. I find this is the stuff liberal Zionists don't really want to engage with. At best, Palestinians face the equivalent of Jim Crow-style conditions, violently evicted from their homes, menaced and outright killed. An Arab born in the West Bank in some ways might be *worse off* than a Black person in 1920s Alabama - at least, under Jim Crow, a Black person was theoretically an American citizen.
America, to its credit, has done much to evolve from its Jim Crow past. I'm an American optimist, generally. Israel has a "right" to be a Jewish state in the sense that it artificially (and violently) preserves its Jewish majority, since the ethnic minority population (Arabs) cannot ever achieve enough citizenship to begin voting in numbers that would make them competitive with Jews. You can argue genocide, but I do not think you can argue apartheid. The West Bank is an apartheid state. And even the Arab Israelis that do exist have fewer rights than Jewish Israelis. That's a fact.
One talking point I have no patience for is "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" or "what about Iran, what about Saudi Arabia?" These countries, indeed, are autocracies, and they're worse. But that's not my standard for a democracy. My standard is the United States, my standard is France, my standard is Germany etc. (The "West"). In Israel, interfaith marriage is illegal - a Jew marrying a Christian couldn't do it within Israel - as is, still, same-sex marriage. By the standards of the U.S., it is a failure, and I would call the U.S. a deeply flawed democracy/republic.
2. "Mamdani was elected for many reasons but foremost among them was the appeal of his anti-Israel stance among young progressives, including many young Jews. A key difference, however, is Mamdani ran against a very weak candidate, Andrew Cuomo."
This is half true. Of course, being anti-Israel/pro-Palestine held appeal for young people who flocked to him. It gave him a lot of juice. The equivalent would be running as an anti-war candidate in the 1960s. But to call it "foremost" ignores the fact that he spent much of the campaign talking about economic issues and local policy, like free buses and a rent freeze. He won the votes of hundreds of thousands of people in the primary, and more than 1 million in the general. It's not like the cab driver in Richmond Hill or the public school teacher in Harlem cares that much about the Middle East.
Cuomo was weak and fatally flawed. But he and his super PACs spent at least $50 million against Mamdani in that race. He survived a gauntlet. That's talent.
I don't know where you get your information about Hasan Piker, but it is false. He has expressed his views (endlessly) that he doesn't support Israel's genocide (it fits the definition), but that he doesn't hate Jewish people. Conflating Israel's government and the Jewish people is misleading at best, and in fact, many young Israelis are protesting against what is being done in Gaza.
Empathy and the ability to question our inherent racism toward Black and brown people as white people raised within a white supremacist society are required. We also must confront widespread anti-muslim hate and false narratives about Islam. Honestly, I don't like any religion because they are ALL misogynistic, constructed of hierarchies where men are placed above women.
The clip you reference demands critical thinking skills when reviewing. We see the Vietnamese woman state that she was a refugee from Communism and then Piker goes off on a rant, the worst thing he calls her is an expletive "old woman". Yes, he says "suck my" you-know-what, which is crude, agreed. So I wondered, "Who is this women?"
On screen is written "BBC Bach Hac , Hon Viet Choir". A Google search found that it's a 2020 video featuring Bach Hac via the BBC News Vietnamese channel. The video shows Bach Hac and other members of the Hon Viet (Vietnamese Soul) Choir explaining their support for Donald Trump, primarily due to their past experiences as refugees who suffered under the communist regime in Vietnam.
Conveniently, this was left out of the clip you linked. In this context, it makes sense why a progressive like Hasan Piker would be angry at a group who came to America and used their voting rights to support a monster. I'm not saying that I like Piker's language, but you and I are not his target demographic. I also just did a quick search for Abdul El-Sayed who is a progressive Democrat, a doctor, and an advocate for Medicare for All (universal healthcare). God forbid we elect a scholar and humanitarian as a senator for Michigan.
David: I was surprised to see you supporting (I assume financially) anyone in a Michigan election. Do you have ties to Michigan? Do you financially support someone in most states? Or is it because this particular election is more focused on Israel and Jews than most? Just curious. I was named an "honorary Jew" by a friend because of my sense of humor, and I took it as an honor.
A chain of circumstance. I ended up supporting Elisa Slotkin in 2024. So Mallory McMorrow approached me very early on (which was smart) and I really liked her and, like I did with Elisa, wanted to support a more centrist Democrat in a swing state.
The video at the end of Sen. McMorrow is everything. WOW! I'm so happy there are people like you supporting people like her. I hope to heaven there are more people like her running for office in the coming years. We need more of this. Well done.
It is awesome that you have found a Michigan Democratic candidate like Mallory McMurrow. I hope you right about there being made candidates like her running for office. I think candidates like her will have the effect of depopularizing antisemitism. There is an article in the New York Review of Books April 23, 2026 issue about a book called "Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries" written by Nicholas Lemann. It is book about when German Jewish people emigrated to America in this case New Orleans in the mid 1850s. In regards to antisemitism there is chilling quote in how German Jewish people of that time believed:
"that Jews could be Jewish in ways that would not strike non-Jews as strange and threatening -- that we could join the wider world without being penalized for being Jewish, and without penalizing ourselves by giving up too much of what we were"
Maybe until more recently before the arrival of the Far Left, that was true but isn't anymore. It is sad that the Far Left has resumed the demonization of "otherness" that they believe they see in Jewish people. And are seemingly totally blind and oblivious to the almost obscene different-ness of how ugly hard core Socialist sold by legacy media as moderate progressive liberalism. Moderate Democrats can do much help eliminate Far Left antisemitism.
So happy to hear that! I wish she were running for office in New York. But I think she will do well in Michigan and her success of its own will effectively resist antisemitism.
Not sure if you saw Clavicular’s recent viral interview on 60 Minutes Australia. It was unsettling, but ultimately fell flat for me because the dialogue lacked depth. The journalist seemed to approach the interview from judgment rather than curiosity, which narrowed the conversation when there was so much more room to interrogate the ideas. I felt like I could have made stronger arguments for both sides. Asking, “Isn’t it more important to be kind than physically attractive?” sets up a false binary, and framing the world as though appearance barely matters ignores reality. But Clavicular also allows that fact to govern his identity in a way that feels ruinous. Would be curious your and Laura’s thoughts if you’ve seen it!
I have not seen it. But I think as with so many issues, moderate views make the most sense and are the least able to attract attention. False binaries are everywhere and I agree that both looks and kindness matter.
While I can't comment on hammers as an answer to full facial recon, I do have thoughts on AI... I think you’re asking the right question, which is not “is this a bubble?” but “where is the actual value?” That’s the part most people skip. Everyone’s very comfortable talking about scale. Less comfortable talking about what any of it is for.
And I think that’s where we part ways, slightly.
You’re looking at infrastructure… the chips, the buildout, the capital intensity. Whether the math holds. I get it. It’s a clean way to analyze what’s happening. But it also feels a bit like standing in the middle of a massive power grid and asking whether electricity is overbuilt… without asking what anyone is going to plug into it. Because the thing that keeps nagging at me is this:
AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on. And most of that data right now is… not great. It’s scraped. Flattened. Generalized. A kind of statistical blur of human experience. Which is why so much of what comes out of these systems feels technically correct, but emotionally off. You can feel the gap. So when you ask where the value is, I think the answer is quieter than the market wants it to be.
It’s not just in the infrastructure. It’s in who actually understands the human beings on the other side of it. Take something very simple. Midlife women. They control an enormous amount of wealth. They drive most purchasing decisions. They are, in every practical sense, one of the most important consumer groups in the world. And yet… they barely exist inside these systems in any meaningful way. What exists instead is a kind of approximation. A guess. Which means every product built on top of that data is slightly off. Sometimes more than slightly.
So while the market is debating whether we’re overbuilding, I find myself asking a different question: What happens when the underlying data is wrong? Or incomplete. Or missing entirely. Because if that’s true… and I think it is… then the scarce resource isn’t chips. It’s real, high-fidelity human data. The kind that isn’t scraped. The kind that’s actually lived. Chosen. Interacted with. Understood over time. That’s much harder to build. And much harder to replicate.
I don’t think you’re wrong about the economics being unclear. They are. But I think the reason they’re unclear is because we’re still looking in the wrong place. We’re measuring the cost of building the system… without really understanding the value of what flows through it.
Electricity was valuable because of what it enabled. AI will be the same. But not everything plugged into it will matter equally. And right now, most of what we’re plugging in feels… interchangeable. The companies that win here won’t just be the ones with the most data centers. They’ll be the ones that actually understand people in a way the systems don’t. Yet.
Anyway… I appreciate this piece. It’s rare to see someone ask the harder question. I just think the answer probably lives a layer lower than where most of the conversation is happening. And I am at MIT surrounded by chatter. But maybe... that’s where it starts to get more compelling?
Is it just me or is there nothing attractive at all about the looks maxing or whatever kid? Then again I’m mostly attracted to Jewish men, preferably over sixty but I make an occasional exception for a very smart one in his thirties. It is very concerning though not surprising to see that toting a terrorist on the campaign trail has been one fashionable. What is wrong with these people? Of course Michigan has lots of radical Muslims and I suppose they are telling us who they are. Hi to Debbie.
It’s sad and scary that no one blinks at an Islamist in office.
Absolutely bigoted and abhorrent comment.
I'm sorry the idea of a Muslim person holding office in the United States of America is so awful for you. Get used to it.
There’s as difference between a Muslim and Islamist. Islamist wants Sharia Law implemented and all of us Jews dead. So yeah it’s scary.
Thanks April! I hope it turns out to be a fatal error for El-Sayed. Michigan is not NYC!
I think he would be adorable if he wasn’t torturing himself :( makes me so sad!
Sparks from culture in the roundup-style of “The Week…” I like it!!
NYT Opinion worthy.
I like that you challenged Derek Thompson about the financial aspects of an AI bubble, given how leveraged these companies are (and how much of the debt has been sliced and distributed into financial vehicles that will affect more than tech companies if/when the bubble pops). Thompson has switched his view to seeing AI as a commodity like electricity, but that’s not his big new idea - that’s what Sam Altman has been saying, hyping the idea that we’ll all need “compute” the way we need light. Me, I’m tracking the social and political pushback against AI, which is not all about increasing productivity. People are pissed and worried for a reason - and I’m not yet convinced demand for compute has suddenly taken off (beyond the government partnering with these companies for various nefarious things - another problem).
It's so hard to tell, Martha, what's really going on. Is this an arms race or a race to fulfill a legitimate need,. mostly for businesses. I don't think anyone, including Altman, knows.
Autonomous robotic fighting machines. That's the military angle. The US accounted for 42% of global arms exports in the last few years. Which is truly big business. AI-powered or enhanced smart munitions and fighting platforms are the future.
And also big geopolitically. Ukraine supposedly won a battle last week with a 100% robotic force. Imagine what they could do with swarms of fire-and-forget smart drones? Or big smart drones with long range that can evade evade Russian anti-air and hit refineries?
Enhanced robotic manufacturing. Telemedicine. Self-driving taxis. There's a lot of money to be made as AI is harnessed to specific applications. The only real question is will that money be made by Anthropic or whoever has a sustained performance breakout, as licensing fees? Or by specialist firms that harness said market leader's product to specific, specialized applications?
I’m sorry Mallory was endorsed by Jew hater Elizabeth Warren. Warren also endorsed Mandani and recently voted to block arms sales to Israel. Only 7 dems can be celebrated for voting with Republicans in this measure. I wonder how Mallory would have voted.
We have a friend who recently left Microsoft. He said upper management threatened to fire anyone who did not make AI a priority.
Hubby would never do cosmetic surgery unless he had to. He doesn’t like when I wear make up but he has to live with the Keratin on my hair. I’m happy to be done with the Jew-fro.
Mallory has said she would vote against offensive weapons sales to Israel. So her views don't track exactly with mine. But I'm MAGA allergic so I want as many decent Democrats to win as possible.
Netanyahu and Trump are really jeopardizing long term American commitment to Israel. The polling on American views on Israel is really worrisome to me.
I find myself having to make compromises to support who I think is best long term.
Netanyahu and Trump with this Iran War made a severe blunder that will not only hurt the US and the GOP, not only the global economy, but also Israel and the Diaspora. Billions of people who right now can't afford to cook their dinner couldn't give a shit about Israel's need to mow the grass. They're all royally pissed at Trump and Bibi.
It also doesn't take a genius to recognize that overall, Bibi's leadership has only deepened the divide between the values of Israeli Jews and those of the Diaspora. As well as fueling consensus on both US Right and Left that Israel is an increasingly problematic ally. Last week Noah Smith even muttered in the comments that he thought the US should end its alliance with Israel. He may walk that back before he gets labelled a self-hating Jew; but it reflects exasperation with Israel's trajectory.
Barring some unexpected funding and support shift that makes J-Street top tier and dethrones AIPAC, the only alternative is for prominent individuals to somehow help AIPAC leadership understand the mess they've created. Ain't holding my breath, though.
“You don’t need special status to get access” to a good plastic surgeon is one of the most blindly ridiculous things I’ve read. Of course special status is required. I can’t just go up to Nicole Kidman or Kris Jenner and ask who their surgeon is. I can’t lunch with ladies from the east side of Manhattan. I don’t know anyone in Jupiter Florida. The evidence for the exclusivity of “good” plastic surgery is in the results: check out the botched faces of Lauren Bezos, whose surgery was done years before Jeff’s billions smoothed out the rictus on her face. That surgeon is so deep into his special world that he’s oblivious to the existence of people who lack any social connection much less the folks who have $$ but no social capital.
Ellen, I bet anyone could ask around and find plenty of good plastic surgeons. Most doctors will know of some. The real barrier is the expense. And from what I hear, the celebrity surgeons spend more of their time on P/R than honing their skills.
David, respectfully: the “anyone “ you refer to is a narrow slice of society. It requires money to make a serious inquiry. It requires a relationship with a primary doctor. It requires a certain level of ability to evaluate and research the evidence that a doctor is good. Look at all the failed BBLs to understand that most people who don’t fall into that narrow slice get their medical recommendations from FB or other social media. I’m relatively affluent and if I wanted “good” cosmetic surgery, I would have to access it in a major metropolitan area. It’s not available here in rural southern Oregon. FFS, people here can’t access restorative plastic surgery after being burned, or following mastectomy. They have to travel for hours to get to a city. Your NYC/rich man bias is showing, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way.
Ellen,
I recognize that few people could afford cosmetic procedures. My point was that if one could afford it and wanted it, one could access a good surgeon. You make a good point about people who get botched jobs because they don’t have a medical network or try to find a relatively inexpensive option.
However, you’re right that it’s hard to escape my POV. Thanks for pointing it out.
I love the sampler style! I enjoyed all but the most interesting piece to me was about AI. I think the development of AI mirrors the early days of commercial aviation in that the underlying investment well precedes the payoff. Just as airlines required airports, fuel networks, and air traffic control before they could operate at scale, AI demands massive compute infrastructure, data pipelines, and model APIs before most real-world applications become viable. This is where I think we are, and winners and losers will emerge, possibly with the added differentiator of whether their bond duration coincides with profitability.
I also think that the downstream effects are underexplored. The most durable businesses in aviation were the engine manufacturers and fuel suppliers. The AI equivalent may be the infrastructure, integration, and fine-tuning layer rather than the headline models themselves.
But the more profound parallel may be in what the technology ultimately unlocks: AI’s greatest potential lies in its ability to accelerate discovery in fields where the bottleneck isn’t creativity or insight, but the sheer scale of possibilities to explore. AlphaFold demonstrated this recently by solving the protein folding problem not through a flash of human intuition, but by systematically mapping an enormous possibility space that no research team could traverse manually. As quantum computing matures and begins to operate in concert with AI, that capacity for exploration expands by orders of magnitude.
Thanks Audrey, I am excited about the medical possibilities of AI. Genetic codes and the gut biome are so individualized and so data-massive that there is potential to do things with AI.
I really think it's hard to see who will win and lose at this point. The clear winners so far are the smaller companies who have some value-add to offer the big guys. When you have a trillion dollar valuation, a billion dollars is 0.1% of your valuation!
I totally agree! Downstream is the place to be, which incidentally is why I think sponsor-side banking is still doing well since that’s where funding would come from. Also this touches on one of my pet points that so many people don’t understand the relative magnitude of million/billion/trillion and how different they are 😊
I saw "Giant" and may write a post about it one day, but I didn't think it was "about" Israel or even antisemitism. Its real point I think was that antisemitism, like any form of racism, is often mainly just an expression of someone's personality disorder.
A lot of people with that particular personality disorder around lately.
Interesting, thank you for sharing. I live in western MICHIGAN which is mainly republican unfortunately. We rejected Chump in 2020 and Bernie Sanders did upset Hillary in the primaries one year, but we have too many Christian Reformed, tea party, Hillsdale college Pat Sajak cringeworthy types on this side of the state.
Looking forward to voting for Mallory.
Mallory wins my vote, no beauty war needed.
Susie, happy to hear. I also supported Elisa Slotkin and was so glad she was able to eke out a victory.
A few thoughts on this pertaining to the Israel debate. I don't have a dog in the Michigan Senate primary and I don't feel strongly about any of the candidates, though I suspect either McMorrow or Stevens are better positioned to face down a Republican.
1) Does Israel hatred lead "inevitably" to antisemitism? I do not agree. I go back to my father, who was an anti-Zionist at the end of his life even though he had lived on a kibbutz in the 1960s, cheered on, as a child, the foundation of Israel, and retained a certain nostalgia for labor Zionism. (My father was proudly Jewish, and I am proudly Jewish. Certainly, a proud American Jew.) He was clear-eyed about what the Israeli government had morphed into: a right-wing de facto theocracy that is, in practice, much more fascist than Trump's United States. The trouble with the "Netanyahu is bad!" thesis (well, he is bad, we agree) is that Netanyahu doesn't exist in a vacuum. He responds to political incentives. He will be gone someday, and a more "moderate" leader might even replace him.
But unlike the United States, which has a relatively strong and vibrant Left (the Democratic Party) and will most likely have a Democratic president and Democratic Congress in the near future - I am sure the "Dem trifecta 2029" odds on Polymarket are rather good - there is no such thing as a "Left" in Israel anymore. Labor Zionism is dead as a doornail. The Israeli people very much wanted to go to war with Iran, and the most powerful and growing voting faction are the Haredi and religious extremists. That is what Israel is. And to be frank, as a progressive/leftist person in the United States, I want no part it in.
This transcends the war in Gaza, which we can debate forever (I say genocide, you say no genocide, and on and on we go) and the slaughter of 20,000 or so Palestinian kids. In a strange way, the war in Gaza was almost a distraction from the sickness and rot within the Israeli project, which is the West Bank. I find this is the stuff liberal Zionists don't really want to engage with. At best, Palestinians face the equivalent of Jim Crow-style conditions, violently evicted from their homes, menaced and outright killed. An Arab born in the West Bank in some ways might be *worse off* than a Black person in 1920s Alabama - at least, under Jim Crow, a Black person was theoretically an American citizen.
America, to its credit, has done much to evolve from its Jim Crow past. I'm an American optimist, generally. Israel has a "right" to be a Jewish state in the sense that it artificially (and violently) preserves its Jewish majority, since the ethnic minority population (Arabs) cannot ever achieve enough citizenship to begin voting in numbers that would make them competitive with Jews. You can argue genocide, but I do not think you can argue apartheid. The West Bank is an apartheid state. And even the Arab Israelis that do exist have fewer rights than Jewish Israelis. That's a fact.
One talking point I have no patience for is "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" or "what about Iran, what about Saudi Arabia?" These countries, indeed, are autocracies, and they're worse. But that's not my standard for a democracy. My standard is the United States, my standard is France, my standard is Germany etc. (The "West"). In Israel, interfaith marriage is illegal - a Jew marrying a Christian couldn't do it within Israel - as is, still, same-sex marriage. By the standards of the U.S., it is a failure, and I would call the U.S. a deeply flawed democracy/republic.
2. "Mamdani was elected for many reasons but foremost among them was the appeal of his anti-Israel stance among young progressives, including many young Jews. A key difference, however, is Mamdani ran against a very weak candidate, Andrew Cuomo."
This is half true. Of course, being anti-Israel/pro-Palestine held appeal for young people who flocked to him. It gave him a lot of juice. The equivalent would be running as an anti-war candidate in the 1960s. But to call it "foremost" ignores the fact that he spent much of the campaign talking about economic issues and local policy, like free buses and a rent freeze. He won the votes of hundreds of thousands of people in the primary, and more than 1 million in the general. It's not like the cab driver in Richmond Hill or the public school teacher in Harlem cares that much about the Middle East.
Cuomo was weak and fatally flawed. But he and his super PACs spent at least $50 million against Mamdani in that race. He survived a gauntlet. That's talent.
We can agree to disagree.
"And now, for your listening enjoyment, Bach's "Well Tempered Clavicular"...
I don't know where you get your information about Hasan Piker, but it is false. He has expressed his views (endlessly) that he doesn't support Israel's genocide (it fits the definition), but that he doesn't hate Jewish people. Conflating Israel's government and the Jewish people is misleading at best, and in fact, many young Israelis are protesting against what is being done in Gaza.
Empathy and the ability to question our inherent racism toward Black and brown people as white people raised within a white supremacist society are required. We also must confront widespread anti-muslim hate and false narratives about Islam. Honestly, I don't like any religion because they are ALL misogynistic, constructed of hierarchies where men are placed above women.
The clip you reference demands critical thinking skills when reviewing. We see the Vietnamese woman state that she was a refugee from Communism and then Piker goes off on a rant, the worst thing he calls her is an expletive "old woman". Yes, he says "suck my" you-know-what, which is crude, agreed. So I wondered, "Who is this women?"
On screen is written "BBC Bach Hac , Hon Viet Choir". A Google search found that it's a 2020 video featuring Bach Hac via the BBC News Vietnamese channel. The video shows Bach Hac and other members of the Hon Viet (Vietnamese Soul) Choir explaining their support for Donald Trump, primarily due to their past experiences as refugees who suffered under the communist regime in Vietnam.
Conveniently, this was left out of the clip you linked. In this context, it makes sense why a progressive like Hasan Piker would be angry at a group who came to America and used their voting rights to support a monster. I'm not saying that I like Piker's language, but you and I are not his target demographic. I also just did a quick search for Abdul El-Sayed who is a progressive Democrat, a doctor, and an advocate for Medicare for All (universal healthcare). God forbid we elect a scholar and humanitarian as a senator for Michigan.
Amy,
We will just have to agree to disagree about Hasan Piker.
David: I was surprised to see you supporting (I assume financially) anyone in a Michigan election. Do you have ties to Michigan? Do you financially support someone in most states? Or is it because this particular election is more focused on Israel and Jews than most? Just curious. I was named an "honorary Jew" by a friend because of my sense of humor, and I took it as an honor.
A chain of circumstance. I ended up supporting Elisa Slotkin in 2024. So Mallory McMorrow approached me very early on (which was smart) and I really liked her and, like I did with Elisa, wanted to support a more centrist Democrat in a swing state.
Swing state! Yes. Thanks.
The video at the end of Sen. McMorrow is everything. WOW! I'm so happy there are people like you supporting people like her. I hope to heaven there are more people like her running for office in the coming years. We need more of this. Well done.
Thanks Kim! She really caught fire with that speech. I told her that after watching that speech I was determined to avoid angering her!
It is awesome that you have found a Michigan Democratic candidate like Mallory McMurrow. I hope you right about there being made candidates like her running for office. I think candidates like her will have the effect of depopularizing antisemitism. There is an article in the New York Review of Books April 23, 2026 issue about a book called "Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries" written by Nicholas Lemann. It is book about when German Jewish people emigrated to America in this case New Orleans in the mid 1850s. In regards to antisemitism there is chilling quote in how German Jewish people of that time believed:
"that Jews could be Jewish in ways that would not strike non-Jews as strange and threatening -- that we could join the wider world without being penalized for being Jewish, and without penalizing ourselves by giving up too much of what we were"
Maybe until more recently before the arrival of the Far Left, that was true but isn't anymore. It is sad that the Far Left has resumed the demonization of "otherness" that they believe they see in Jewish people. And are seemingly totally blind and oblivious to the almost obscene different-ness of how ugly hard core Socialist sold by legacy media as moderate progressive liberalism. Moderate Democrats can do much help eliminate Far Left antisemitism.
Thanks Larry. I really like that quote.
In America, at least in NYC, I feel that we achieved the gist of the quote. Can we maintain it?
Mallory's husband is jewish and they are raising their daughter in the Jewish faith.
So happy to hear that! I wish she were running for office in New York. But I think she will do well in Michigan and her success of its own will effectively resist antisemitism.
Not sure if you saw Clavicular’s recent viral interview on 60 Minutes Australia. It was unsettling, but ultimately fell flat for me because the dialogue lacked depth. The journalist seemed to approach the interview from judgment rather than curiosity, which narrowed the conversation when there was so much more room to interrogate the ideas. I felt like I could have made stronger arguments for both sides. Asking, “Isn’t it more important to be kind than physically attractive?” sets up a false binary, and framing the world as though appearance barely matters ignores reality. But Clavicular also allows that fact to govern his identity in a way that feels ruinous. Would be curious your and Laura’s thoughts if you’ve seen it!
Hi Sophie,
I have not seen it. But I think as with so many issues, moderate views make the most sense and are the least able to attract attention. False binaries are everywhere and I agree that both looks and kindness matter.
While I can't comment on hammers as an answer to full facial recon, I do have thoughts on AI... I think you’re asking the right question, which is not “is this a bubble?” but “where is the actual value?” That’s the part most people skip. Everyone’s very comfortable talking about scale. Less comfortable talking about what any of it is for.
And I think that’s where we part ways, slightly.
You’re looking at infrastructure… the chips, the buildout, the capital intensity. Whether the math holds. I get it. It’s a clean way to analyze what’s happening. But it also feels a bit like standing in the middle of a massive power grid and asking whether electricity is overbuilt… without asking what anyone is going to plug into it. Because the thing that keeps nagging at me is this:
AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on. And most of that data right now is… not great. It’s scraped. Flattened. Generalized. A kind of statistical blur of human experience. Which is why so much of what comes out of these systems feels technically correct, but emotionally off. You can feel the gap. So when you ask where the value is, I think the answer is quieter than the market wants it to be.
It’s not just in the infrastructure. It’s in who actually understands the human beings on the other side of it. Take something very simple. Midlife women. They control an enormous amount of wealth. They drive most purchasing decisions. They are, in every practical sense, one of the most important consumer groups in the world. And yet… they barely exist inside these systems in any meaningful way. What exists instead is a kind of approximation. A guess. Which means every product built on top of that data is slightly off. Sometimes more than slightly.
So while the market is debating whether we’re overbuilding, I find myself asking a different question: What happens when the underlying data is wrong? Or incomplete. Or missing entirely. Because if that’s true… and I think it is… then the scarce resource isn’t chips. It’s real, high-fidelity human data. The kind that isn’t scraped. The kind that’s actually lived. Chosen. Interacted with. Understood over time. That’s much harder to build. And much harder to replicate.
I don’t think you’re wrong about the economics being unclear. They are. But I think the reason they’re unclear is because we’re still looking in the wrong place. We’re measuring the cost of building the system… without really understanding the value of what flows through it.
Electricity was valuable because of what it enabled. AI will be the same. But not everything plugged into it will matter equally. And right now, most of what we’re plugging in feels… interchangeable. The companies that win here won’t just be the ones with the most data centers. They’ll be the ones that actually understand people in a way the systems don’t. Yet.
Anyway… I appreciate this piece. It’s rare to see someone ask the harder question. I just think the answer probably lives a layer lower than where most of the conversation is happening. And I am at MIT surrounded by chatter. But maybe... that’s where it starts to get more compelling?