2025-06-05 23:53:23
It’s a funny thing, finding out you’re a lamplighter.
Apparently, we’ve all been trudging through the evening streets of an 1890s London, tending our gas lamps, watching from afar as the new electric ones flicker into existence. One by one they render us redundant. A change, we are told, we will eventually be thankful for.
For as The New York Times recently noted:
Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent in recent months… unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains.
In a recent Axios article warning of a “job bloodbath,” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said that 50% of entry-level white-collar positions could be eliminated in under five years, and predicts that overall unemployment will spike to 10-20%.
Some say this is hype. But it’s not all hype. How slow will it really go? How fast? Nobody knows.
Of course, some people think they have The Special Job, and no matter how advanced AI gets, they therefore don’t need to worry. E.g., Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist investing heavily in automating away white-collar work, apparently has The Special Job, musing about being a venture capitalist that:
So, it is possible—I don’t want to be definitive—but it’s possible that [investing in start-ups] is quite literally timeless. And when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields…
Unfortunately, the rest of us are mere lamplighters. That isn’t my analogy, by the way; it’s Sam Altman’s, the CEO of OpenAI. And what a waste of time, he bemoans, the job of the lamplighter was. How happy they would be to witness their own extinction, if only they could see the glorious future. As Altman describes it in his blog post, “The Intelligence Age:”
… nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable.
Altman has made this analogy in interviews and talks as well, but as it turns out, his repeated reference to lamplighters as a job happily lost is, historically, a particularly bad one. Before cities like London, Paris, and New York switched over to electricity, the job of being a lamplighter had already been much romanticized. Charles Dickens wrote a play, The Lamplighter, which he later adapted into a short story, and there was the 1854 bestselling novel The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins, in which the young girl protagonist is rescued by a lamplighter literally named “Trueman Flint.” So beloved was the profession that parents taught their children to declare “God bless the lamplighter!”
In his editorial, “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” Robert Louis Stevenson (of Treasure Island fame) laments firsthand the lamplighter’s replacement with electricity:
When gas first spread along a city… a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking... The work of Prometheus had advanced another stride…. The city-folks had stars of their own; biddable domesticated stars…
The lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the punctuality of heaven's orbs…people commended his zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to say, “God bless the lamplighter!”…
A new sort of urban star now shines nightly. Horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums. A horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm.
Is this true? Have we, without knowing it, lived under lights fit only for murderers and the insane? After all, gas burning resembles “biddable domesticated stars,” or a campfire. And what does sunlight and firelight mean to us humans, psychologically? It often means safety. Yet in the march of progress to illuminate our streets and our homes, we replaced the light of the sun with the light of the storm. And what do a storm and its arcs of electricity mean, psychologically? Danger.
And so it goes. Every night I drive, I think: These headlights are too bright, too cold, too technological. I miss the softer hues of my youth, when yellow cones swept the roads and traced paths across my bedroom walls before I slept.
The colors and lights of our civilization, precisely because they are so low stakes, demonstrate that nothing is gained for free in progress. It is a microcosm, and so Stevenson’s words about lamplighters have a chilling edge in the AI age:
Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis, and in the light of victory he himself shall disappear.
2025-05-28 22:49:30
Over a year has passed since I began teaching my toddler—then two years old—how to read (a process chronicled here).
Now, I’m prepared to answer a burning scientific question that has kept absolutely zero researchers up at night: Can a three-year-old read The Hobbit?
Turns out: yeah, pretty much. Here’s Roman reading from Chapter 1:
In a hole, in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry bare, sandy, hole, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Of course, there are still plenty of words he can’t read! While he could handle a lot of The Hobbit, I haven’t let him read the whole book himself (there’s too much violence, and the small font size, confusing names, and enough unknown words would likely wear him down). But for the class of books that he has any business reading alone, like early readers and chapter books, he can do so. He reads by himself for pleasure every day now, quickly and silently plowing through his growing library, and his decoding abilities have met the limits of his comprehension.
As you can tell, I’m quite proud of how well he’s done, to the degree I risk coming across as supercilious about the whole thing (now there’s a word he probably can’t read). A few months ago, I gave him the SDQA test, a simple way of determining reading level, and he got all the 3rd-grade-level words correct (so somewhere around eight or nine-year-olds).
Estimating reading level isn’t very meaningful from a practical perspective, however. Goodhart’s law of measures becoming targets has made vicious work of education. For example, in a study wherein researchers had college students read the first few paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, only 5% of English majors could passably describe what was going on.
Instead, I think the only literacy milestone worth caring about is whether a child reads for pleasure, because…
In the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project, a cohort of over 10,000 children in the US was tracked longitudinally. A 2023 analysis of the data revealed that the earlier a child was reading for pleasure, the more this correlated with higher scores on cognitive tests and lower numbers of mental health issues, even after controlling for things like socio-economic status, such that…
…cognitive performance was better and the mental problems were lower in young adolescents with higher levels of early RfP [reading for pleasure].
Here is years of reading for pleasure plotted against a number of such outcomes.
In fact, the researchers found that reading for pleasure—and the more years spent doing so—may literally lead to larger brain volumes in adolescence.
The positive effects showed up after controlling for genetics (as best one can, using genome-wide analyses in the full cohort). ABCD also had a participating set of 711 twins and, interestingly, estimations from the twin data revealed that, while early reading-for-pleasure does have a genetic component, the majority of the trait’s variance appears environmental.
Put it all together, and early reading for pleasure stands out in the scientific literature, in that it has (a) very broad cognitive benefits, (b) good empirical support for this class of thing, (c) has a large environmental component, and (d) actively replaces and competes with screen time, which is usually neutral or negative in the literature (in the ABCD cohort, screen time had an inverse correlation with reading for pleasure).
This last point, that reading for pleasure fills a certain time in the day, means I daily…
When I look back on my official reasons for teaching reading so early, oh, how naive I was! All pale in comparison to the true benefit.
Holy smokes, does early reading make parenting easier sometimes!
It’s all the advantages of an iPad, none of the guilt. You’ve unlocked infinite self-entertainment. Long drive? Bring a book. Or five. Roman toddles into restaurants clutching a book as a backup activity, and reads while waiting in boring lines. It’s also calming, and so helps with emotional regulation. Toddler energy descending rapidly into deviance? Go read a book! It’s a parenting cheat code. I don’t know if this alone justifies the hours spent, but it sure is one heck of a benefit.
Here’s a recent picture of him in his natural habitat, in one of his nooks (looking ever less like a toddler and more like a real little kid).
Reading for pleasure was the lodestar that governed my entire teaching process. A lot of other “teach your child to read” methods are based on modular lessons and exercises, which makes learning to read separate from what it’s all about, which is enjoying books. Comparatively, I did it by mostly reading books together, because it turns out reading books is a skill in itself. Not only does this practice the attention span needed to follow through with a book until its end; more subtly, it practices the skills you, a developed adult, don’t ever notice. E.g., sentences in picture-heavy books sometimes start at the top of a page, sometimes at the bottom, sometimes they’re broken up in the middle between images, or are even inside them. So the reader needs to scan for where to start. Easy for you! But much harder for a three-year-old without prior practice. You, an adult, can physically hold books splayed open with different spines and thicknesses, and also you, an adult, can easily flip single paper-thin pages without messing up your spot. But if you’re three? So much of what we do effortlessly is invisible to us. Like how when encountering any new book, there are a few initial pages with tiny text about publishing and copyright. This is the most difficult material, and yet skipping it is not obvious to someone just learning to read. So to get better at reading books, you have to read books!
The details for anyone who wants to replicate this can be found in a series of guides: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and the last part here. Privately, I’ve already worked with one person who wanted to get his own daughter reading early, and so far has had success. Eventually, I’ll put all these parts together in a book on the science and practice of (very) early reading, with edits and additions.
In Part 2, “Getting your child to love reading in 2024,” I discuss how, if the goal is reading for pleasure, then you must have books front and center in terms of daily entertainment. I also discuss the practicalities of setting up a daily “school time” (starting at less than 10 minutes a day, expanding to ~30 minutes a day by the end of the process).
In Part 3, “The BIG GUIDE to teaching LITTLE PEOPLE how to sound out words,” I overviewed how to start and progress with phonics. I also detailed my approach to “blending” sounds, one of the most difficult steps, as well as how to play a “sentence completion game” I developed, which is useful for mastering simple phonics before early readers get introduced.
I took inspiration from my historical research on “aristocratic tutoring,” but I also pulled what’s effective from the science of learning, like how…
Side note: I still read to Roman every night. Together, we’ve worked our way through many classics of children’s literature (favorites include The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan).
One night, we came across a character posing this riddle: "If you were to combine the movement of a circle and the movement of a line, what would you have?"
I asked Roman to guess. Without hesitation, he said, “A swirl." I was surprised, since that was just about the given answer: A spiral.
Anyway, a spiral represents the ideal Platonic structure for learning, via its combination of a circle (return) and a straight line (progression). And the modern science of learning tells us that “spiral learning” is indeed incredibly effective, because it automatically builds in spaced repetition—the review and reminder of what’s been learned, spaced out at ever-increasing intervals. Such “interleaving” that mixes old and new things is vastly more effective than the “block learning” of most traditional classrooms.
The power of spaced repetition has been known for 150 years. It replicates and has large effects. So why is spaced repetition (or even its more implementable form of spiral learning) not used all the time in classrooms? No one knows!
One reason might be that “memorizing” has become a dirty word in education (the “rote” part has become implicit). Yet all learning involves memory: it’s a spectrum, which is why spaced repetition improves generalization too (really, it improves learning anything at all). The second reason is that the “block model” of learning (learn one thing, learn the next) is much easier to implement in mass education; just as a factory, by being a system of mass production, is made as modular as possible, so too are our schools.
Unbounded by such concerns, I could go two steps forward, one step back. But I needed a set of phonics-based early readers that was large enough to trace a spiral. After completing simple phonics (described in Part 3), Roman could read “The cat sat on the mat” (slowly), but not “the feline reclined on the carpet.” Luckily, I was pointed to Julia Donaldson’s Songbirds Phonics books. Julia Donaldson is a renowned children’s book author, so unlike other phonics-based progression books, her set is well-written, with good illustrations, clever nods for parents, and an appropriate air of delight. They’re good books, in other words. This matters immensely, since the whole point is getting the kid to love books!
I took the Donaldson books and quite literally traced out a massive Archimedean spiral. If you had charted our progress from session to session, it would have looked like this: originating in the middle with the simplest Stage 1 books, more books were added, repeating for a time but then becoming rarer and rarer in the procession, making way for newer books. We started with goals like reading a single book in a single session. By the end, he often read three or four books.
So much re-reading didn’t feel unnatural because, as any parent can tell you, toddlers love to re-read books (and re-watch movies, and re-play games, ad infinitum).
I didn’t bother optimizing this process much. I just went with my gut about whatever he needed to practice, or when he was ready for a new book and thus often new phonics rules. To teach the rules explicitly, I also used spaced repetition: an iPad flashcard app stored sets of words that reflected different simple phonics rules (like “car, bar, star,” etc., for “ar”). Occasionally, I would notice him stumbling over some rule we had already covered, and so we’d quickly review the relevant set of words just to brush up (I didn’t track or optimize this review).
Following this spiral, doing flashcards when it felt needed, and adding in non-Donaldson books that were phonically simple enough (e.g., Hop on Pop), was enough to get to the final stage, wherein…
The choice to become lazy was made consciously, on purpose. I was increasingly dissatisfied while trying to teach the phonics of complex words; e.g., “ought,” “though,” “through,” and “plough.” Say those aloud and you’ll see why. Therefore, I don’t recommend highly advanced phonics. Rather, phonics is like the training wheels on a bike. Great at the early stages, but the goal is to take them off.
So once he felt ready, I decided to stop teaching phonics. I ditched the flashcards and the spiral of re-reading. We switched to general early readers, like Frog and Toad, and rarely repeated anything. When Roman made mistakes or ran into new words, I simply told him how to pronounce the word then and there, rather than explicitly teaching the rules to those words. The only remaining spaced repetition was asking him, before proceeding to the next page, to find in the text any words he’d mispronounced (“Can you find ‘special?’”), just to quickly reinforce the correct version.
I was nervous about this abandonment of phonics. I suddenly didn’t have to do anything other than select our early reader(s) for the day and sit with him. All the learning began to unfold internally; I had no access to it. Yet the momentum was there. Via the magic of the human brain extrapolating from limited data, funded not with billions of dollars worth of compute but with a thermodynamically-efficient budget of raspberries and chicken nuggets, he just got better and better with every session, until my presence was unnecessary for anything but advanced books.
That’s not to say this whole process was easy! Just that it got easier. Teaching reading is front-loaded, in that decoding simple words and blending them together is where a lot of structure and thought is needed. But by the end we were just reading whatever looked fun, and my role became correcting errors. Looking back on the whole process, what mattered most was that I made it fun and interesting and committed mental time and energy to the session, and that we did it regularly. In this, it resembled many other things in the world, where the hardest part is showing up and trying.
Here’s a compilation of what the entire progression looked like:
My main worry was that this would cut into his imaginary play. But he quickly settled into a healthy state wherein his reading occurs at will and freely, in his many chosen nooks. So he dips in and out during the downtime at the house, while otherwise playing outside in the yard, building stuff, fiddling with action figures and toys, putting on his costumes, making up games with his sister, or doing activities resembling typical preschool stuff (sensory play, puzzles, mazes, activity books, volcano sets). His mother is teaching him to write his letters and draw, so he can spell out simple messages now, like birthday cards and well-wishes (e.g., while drawing a thunderstorm he’ll write “BOOM” over the top of it). How much he reads every day depends on the circumstances and his mood. Sometimes it’s hardly at all, because he’s at the beach or distracted by a new toy or has some long-running imaginary game. Some rainy days he reads a ton. Filling a toddler’s day is hard work—their hours are not our hours, and successfully getting a toddler from 6AM to 7PM is rarely a question of “How can I squeeze in this thing, we’re fully booked!” but usually more like “Oh god, dinner is in an hour, I’m beat, and they’re already getting insane!”
No. By far the most common problem was that he enjoyed our sessions too much and would be mad when they ended. I eventually bought a 30-minute hourglass for him to flip at the start, which helped created an official ending when the sand trickled out. Getting him out to “school” (we did it in my office, which sits in the backyard) was basically never a problem. Toddlers and kids love schedules and rituals, and once “school” was in that category, it was just something we did every day. I always brought snacks, and so he’d chomp on berries or toast or whatever else (you can learn to read with your mouth full). He’s still young enough to unconditionally love getting attention from his parents, and he had me all to himself for a solid chunk of time.
Of course, occasionally, classic toddler issues would crop up. I’m not claiming the process was easy 100% of the time. Teaching anything serious and hard (and reading is hard) requires at least some authority; otherwise you can’t ever say “Okay, stop dropping goldfish on the rug and giggling like a maniac for no reason, let’s pay attention and try again, I know you can do it.” You have to hold the line that, ultimately, you are there to learn. But I was no taskmaster—we spent a lot of time discussing what we were reading (sometimes called “dialogic reading”), giggling, acting things out, and just chatting too. I’m going to do this same process with my daughter and am actively looking forward to it.
That could work. But starting with phonics has some advantages: (a) it gives a sensible progression with clear mastery levels, and (b) helps them conceptualize that words are “chunks,” which helps generalizing later, even if they never learn precisely why some “chunk” is pronounced the way it is (most adults don’t know this either). More generally, toddlers are sort of like AIs—they will overfit. Phonics means you know for sure what they’re learning. I personally wouldn’t want this process to be a black box from the beginning. It’d be easy to get stuck, and you wouldn’t know why.
Yes, I’m 100% sure. Especially now—he can pick up any random book in the children’s section of the library and read it—but I was sure even back when we were primarily working with a constrained set of books by one author. Still, it’s a real concern. Toddlers have incredible memories. In the early stages of the process, the distinction between memory and learning was indeed blurry. Early on, he probably memorized chunks of many of the Julia Donaldson books—if not to the point of being able to recite them verbatim, at least to the point of being deeply familiar with them. However, due to delaying early readers until he could decode the simple sentences I generated, which were different each time (via the sentence completion game in Part 3), he always understood the point was actually sounding out the words, even if he knew them already ahead of time. Familiarity was often good, not bad, for learning. A new book is a stimulating experience! Where do you look? The images are distracting and toddler-brain-melting in their novelty. Re-reading was key, in that the real learning could take place after he had dealt with its content as a book qua book and so could look beyond that and pay close attention to the letters.
Yes, for the foreseeable future. Now that reading is finished, we’ve moved on to math in our morning sessions. I’ll write more about this, too (right now it involves 100 tiny plastic ducks). Our local school system here is not the best, and he’s not attending preschool. This gives us plenty of time to find a situation that works for him. But for now, he’s focused on being a kid: he has a good social life, attends events daily, like public classes hosted by local organizations, and has an extended family and friend group. I’m keeping my eye out for interesting microschools, tutoring experiences, and things of that nature. If anyone knows any exciting educational opportunities in Boston, the surrounding areas, or Cape Cod, let me know. Same goes for someone in the area who’d be right for a well-paid and travel-compensated part-time tutoring/nanny position for a kid (or kids) like this.
True. This isn’t right for everyone. There’s no one path. Plenty of kids learn to read in traditional school (albeit usually later) and then read for pleasure plenty.
I’m sensitive to this concern. As of now, I don’t think he has a clear conception of how, e.g., his friends can’t read, or that he can read better than some kids three times his age. He’s still the same person, just one who reads a lot. He’s aware that adults like that he can read, but he’s mostly too shy to show off to strangers. Nor does he, in the blithe ignorance of the young, always notice its effects.
For instance, a couple of months ago we went on a humble errand to the pharmacy of our local CVS. Roman had been reading in the car, so he brought along a book almost as big as he is and stood mumbling the words as we waited. Standing primly in line behind us happened to be an older well-put-together woman, who had about her the matronly and bookish air of a former teacher—exactly the kind of woman you’d find at the desk of your local library. At first she smiled and took his reading as a novelty, but as time went on she leaned closer to listen, curious. This occurred several times, as if to confirm. Then, unable to contain herself, she declared aloud with amazement, “He’s actually reading!” to everyone around. It was said in the tone of needing to attract attention to this thing, this unexpected thing, unfolding in front of you in, of all places, CVS. She didn’t take her eyes off of him after that, smiling and occasionally blinking as if in bewilderment. Having soon gotten what we came for, we left. But as we passed by on the way out, and she kindly looked down at him tottering past, I saw that she was quietly, in the concealed and unobtrusive manner of someone unused to doing so in public, wiping away tears.
2025-05-17 00:56:43
The summer solstice comes. In just over a month, the sun’s rays will hike to their northernmost peak. At Stonehenge, the sunrise will summit the Heel Stone, turning the stone’s shadow into a long blade that pierces between the monoliths and touches the Altar Stone. There, amid the cramped tourist encampments, Fey creatures will have made their annual pilgrimage. Wearing faces so perfectly average they slip from memory, the Fey will sip their coffees and be jostled amid the crowd.
Here too at The Intrinsic Perspective, we are attuned to tides of light and the music of the spheres. And the astronomical charts have informed me it is time for my semi-annual call to share your writing here on The Intrinsic Perspective.
So send me your links, and I will (a) read your piece, (b) pull quotes and/or images from it, (c) often write some thoughts or reactions, (d) share it, bundled with others, in a structure much like my regular link and commentary roundups. Submissions will be published in two or three installments over the summer (the end results will look like previous ones did).
The benefits are twofold. Readers enjoy the act of browsing authors that might not normally show up in their feeds or inboxes, and submitting is a great way to show off your best work. Please note that submitting is for paid subscribers only.
Instructions (same as previous calls, but please read carefully):
You must submit something published for public consumption, like a blog post, website, paper, or so on, and you must be the author/originator. Do not submit a shared Google doc or a draft. What you submit doesn’t technically have to be writing, but don’t send me things the median TIP reader would be uninterested in (e.g., “here are pictures of my vacation” would be bad, unless your vacation was to space). I reserve the right to exclude anything too weird or controversial, anything which doesn’t fit the readership here, anything that looks like a scam, contextless links to social media homepages, anything promoting your company or service, and to order the results however I like. You can only submit one thing. Do not send me two different things and ask me to choose. Writing doesn’t expire, so if you have a great piece from last year, please share, but keep in mind recency bias is good.
Deadline:
When your cells are saturated with light. June 20th.
Submit to this email:
2025-05-10 00:00:11
Overstatement of the Year?
“Everyone is cheating their way through college.”
The Consciousness Wars continue.
“The most fascinating graph.”
If the US were an upper-class family, DOGE has saved $367.
Does the Great Filter hypothesis mean finding alien life is bad?
How close were the Ancient Greeks to calculus?
Peter Singer’s chatbot betrays him and endorses deontology.
Newest reasoning models are lying liars who lie. A lot.
Blackout jubilation as an indictment of the modern world.
From the archives.
Comment, share anything, ask anything.
Occasionally, I like to check in on predictions people have made about AI. Here’s one of my favorites. Did you know it’s been over three months since Deep Research supposedly allowed automating 1-10% of all economically valuable tasks in the world (according to the CEO of OpenAI)?
Meanwhile, our labor productivity was down by 0.8% in the first quarter of this year. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor output was down 0.3%, while hours worked was up 0.6%. As I’ve noted before: text-generation just isn’t that valuable! Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much of it to train the models on.
What Sam Altman should have said is that they’ve automated the “job” of being a student. Which is true. As a recent deep-dive in New York Magazine put it:
It’s a harrowing read. Its interviews and anecdotes make it clear we should now baseline expect, pessimistically, most students to use AI to do most assignments. Plenty of teachers are quitting because they want more from life than grading an AI’s essays.
After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said.
So what do we do? Is academia over? What does a GPA, or even an entire degree, reflect anymore, if homework and essays can be one-shotted by ChatGPT?
People are arguing for a return to tests, but relying solely on tests limits what academia can impart. It turns us into the AIs, focused solely on regurgitating facts. No “blue book” essay written in a cramped room by pencil can take the place of real research for hours, deep digestion of a book, and so on. This is the main relevant skill academia teaches: how to think in depth about a subject. The situation reveals deep tensions in academia. Ultimately, we have to ask:
Why, in 2025, are we grading outputs, instead of workflows?
We have the technology. Google Docs is free, and many other text editors track version histories as well. Specific programs could even be provided by the university itself. Tell students you track their workflows and have them do the assignments with that in mind. In fact, for projects where ethical AI is encouraged as a research assistant, editor, and smart-wall to bounce ideas off of, have that be directly integrated too. Get the entire conversation between the AI and the student that results in the paper or homework. Give less weight to the final product—because forevermore, those will be at minimum A- material—and more to the amount of effort and originality the student put into arriving at it.
In other words, grading needs to transition to “showing your work,” and that includes essay writing. Real serious pedagogy must become entirely about the process. Tracking the impact of education by grading outputs is no longer a thing, ever again. It was a good 3,000 year run. We had fun. It’s over. Stop grading essays, and start grading the creation of the essay. Same goes for everything else.
2025-05-01 22:53:21
When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.
A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.
Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.
Here are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.
Your teeth mash your food, and you swallow that food down the tube of your esophagus, which goes to the way-station of your stomach, then the further tube of your intestines, where the nutrients are sucked out. The whole long gut finds its terminus at your anus, where you poop out the remains. In this, the core of your body is like a coiled worm, with its base desires of greed and selfishness, around which has grown up all the accoutrements of consciousness and civilization. Most of the struggle of growing up will be choosing which entity to act like: the internal worm, or the human being encasing it.
The portal to the internal worm is the blocks of your teeth, set in arcs ringing your mouth. These innocuous things, which make up your smile, and so allow you to show happiness, will actually cause you great pain. In two ways. The first is that to gain teeth is to become independent, for they sever your need of mother’s milk, and to be independent is a type of pain. The second is quite literal, in that they must burst through your gums, a slow tectonic event like a rising mountain range. The pain will keep you awake at night. One day those baby teeth fall out, only for the process to repeat. Secretly, a new set of adult teeth will have been formed in your jaw via mineral deposition; it is as if your body is the earth’s mantle, and can secrete a kind of white rock. During this metamorphosis, your baby teeth will first become wiggly, then loose, and eventually drop, bloody, onto floors and pillows and held-out palms. This is somehow satisfying.
The mode of teeth is surprise, for they like making an appearance—in your pink gums, in the flash of a smile, but also in culture too. You’ll stumble across them in odd places, like when you read The Hobbit and come to the riddle Bilbo poses Gollum:
Thirty white horses on a red hill. First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still.
But if teeth are white horses, they’re statues of them, eternal, yet breakable and irreparable. Since we only get one extra set of teeth, we treat them with care. We brush our teeth every day, with bristles attached to a stick. Upon the bristles we squirt something called toothpaste, a slimy soap-like substance you must learn to spit out. Eventually, you will become addicted to this. You will not be able to sleep unless your teeth feel clean and brushed and newly made, as if a pristine set had just burst from your gums once again. This strange compulsion will linger your whole life.
These are monstrous creatures, bigger than a dragon, that live in the pelagic depths of the ocean. We go on boats to watch them, and they watch us in turn. Unlike a fish, they cannot breathe underwater, but must come up for air, and so are creatures split between realms. Even the perception of a whale is divided in twain; eyes on either side of its immensely broad head, it must view the world in two halves, always. So too is the brain of the whale split in ways ours are not. When they dream their cetacean dreams, they do so uni-hemispherically, in that one half of their brain sleeps as the other remains awake, so as to keep them bobbing above water. Often whales can be observed resting languidly on the surface with one eye open, the other closed, for just this reason.
Baleen whales, like humpbacks, blue whales, and fin whales, sing in the ocean deeps with vocalizations that can range miles. Why they sing we do not know. Meanwhile, the toothed whales, like sperm whales and orcas, talk in clicks and whistles. This too, we do not understand, nor know how complex what they’re saying is.
I remember when I told you that whales sing in the deep waters and you cackled with joy. I played you a recording of whale song on YouTube.
After a while you asked: “Are whales real?”
“Yes, whales are real.”
“But dragons are not real.”
“No, dragons are not real.”
“But whales really sing in the deep?”
“Yes, whales really sing in the deep.”
There are things about whales you must wait to learn. Our relationship with them is… complex.
Some whales have hated us for our sins against their race. The most vengeful whale was Porphyrios, who bent his bulk and mind to the purpose of sinking ships off the coastal waters of Constantinople, in the 6th century. This “purple boy” (for that is what “Porphyrios” means), was likely a sperm whale, for only sperm whales and orcas ever become dedicated man-killers, and sperm whales can look, when their dark gray flesh is seen roiling in a frenzy of waves, a dark purple. Emperor Justinian I, his arch-nemesis, could never capture him, even as Porphyrios terrorized the shipping lanes of the empire for fifty years, sinking merchant vessels and warships alike. His ultimate number of victims is unknown, but given the wide berth sailors gave of his regular haunts, and the dreams Justinian I had of the whale’s maw as he sweated through the royal sheets, it must have numbered in the dozens of ships and hundreds of sailors.
Porphyrios, as playful as all whales, met his demise frolicking with dolphins. He ventured too far into the mouth of the Sakarya River, and was beached. There, a local mob descended upon him, as vengeful and hateful as he had been. At first they hacked at him with knives and axes, but could not kill him, so great was his bulk. Becoming more organized, the mob dragged him up onto the beach with ropes and wagons, and on the sand he died by a thousand cuts, his huge eyes surveying what must have seemed an army of Lilliputians surrounding him, excising bit after bit of him, even cannibalizing his own massive body in front of him, until he finally, mercifully, perished.
It is hard to blame Porphyrios. We have been the aggressor for centuries. We used to hunt whales, indeed, an entire industry of men with harpoons grew up—the subject of great literature, you’ll learn—but we stopped, or most of us stopped, for whales are simply too majestic, and our use for them has passed. One day technology will enable us to talk to them, and the first thing they will ask is: “Why?”
We’ll have to sheepishly explain that, for a while, our whole civilization was lit by their oil, their internal juices. Our cities blazed with whale, and for a century they played, unknowingly, the role of a fleshy Prometheus, sacrificing themselves over and over on the rock for us. Horrific, yes, but darkly beautiful. Whales were the light by which we saw.
These are much smaller than whales. So small you can’t see them. They’re everywhere, though. They linger maliciously on door handles and inside nostrils. They make you sick, because it turns out being sick is when something is growing inside of you. When the fruit goes bad on the countertop, it is in an advanced stage of this—something else has grown and eaten it from the inside out.
For a long time we didn't know about germs. Sickness was mysterious because the cause is so tiny. The person who first saw germs under a microscope (which is a way to see tiny things, one that had to be invented), dubbed them “animalcules,” which means “little animals.”
The mood of germs is paranoia. You’ll notice your parents are strange about germs. Much like my grandmother’s generation was about money. After my grandmother died—your great grandmother—no one could find the jewelry. She had stitched it all into clothes, and the clothes had been thrown out or donated. That's what happens when you live through the Great Depression. My generation, in turn, has unopened boxes of N95s and squirts antibacterial hand spray on everyone’s palms too much. One day, if you’re lucky, you’ll laugh at our paranoia too.
When you get sick, and so must lie amid pillows and listen to audio books, you often have a fever, because your body is trying to burn away the animalcules trying to grow inside you. The growth of these evil seeds is also combated by other animalcules, good ones, for you secretly possess an army of soldiers called “white blood cells.” It’s an army whom you’ll never meet, and who have no commander, but this internal regiment patrols your arteries tirelessly. They stand guard over your insides in an internal trench warfare. As is true of many things, you as a child have no need to thank them for this selfless act. The fact that you exist is thanks enough.
The air is abuzz with things called radio waves. You can't see them, but they're there. They’re almost like shouts, although at a frequency you can't hear, and in a medium that’s not sound but rather electromagnetism. These waves can be picked up by radios, which you can buy at a store, or come installed in a car. Radio waves are sent by massive towers, which you have assuredly seen out the car window while being chauffeured around. Somewhere in a nearby town or city, there is a person in a room called a DJ, who works for a radio station. That person selects music. They must pay for the rights to this music, buying it either from the artists who created it, or from the conglomerates who already bought those rights. After being chosen, the music is then piped into the radio towers, which amplify and broadcast the signal, filling the air with encoded notation. Unknowingly, your life has been surrounded by invisible music. And car commercials.
Your parents often sing along to the radio. At first, this will delight you. One day, without having been aware of the change, you’ll feel annoyance as your parents croon:
Oh yeah, life goes oooonnn, long after the thrill, of living is gone.
What you don’t know yet is how there can always be another life, a further next life, and through it, the vicarious thrills of living once again.
2025-04-25 23:04:07
New directives from on high, shouted from a governmental megaphone at scientists, might not be so bad if they were clear. But since they are very much unclear, there is a new mood among my fellow scientists: paranoia. I don’t remember this ever happening before.
The director of the National Science Foundation—which, for all major scientific fields, except biology/medicine, is the main federal funder of basic research—resigned yesterday after the NSF was ordered to be cut by 55%. Meanwhile, the NIH (biology/medicine) is proposed to be cut by 40%, and NASA’s science division by 50%. These numbers will likely change to some degree in Congress, but the proposals are already having tangible effects everywhere. Science has, in terms of inflows of funding, been slowed to a trickle in 2025.
To litigate all that led to this, politically, would take a book. The stated reason for the cuts to science is obvious, best seen in the fight between the Trump administration and Harvard around the role of DEI requirements in admissions, hiring, and grants. But let’s just be honest: that doesn’t explain cutting 55% of the NSF budget.
Thus, the unstated reason is worth examining. If you criticize academia as a sclerotic and ailing institution, then you are a doctor, and should be seeking cures. If you view ideological creep within science as cancer, then the goal is to kill the cancer and keep the patient. Yet, there’s a new nihilism based on the idea that academia is entirely corrupt. And things entirely corrupt are not worth saving.
It’s a view only possible if an alternative is available. Academia houses the crown jewel of science. If academia is not to be saved, where does science go?
A possible hint comes from the current Science Advisor to the President: Michael Kratsios. As far as I can tell, he is the first confirmed in that position, created 49 years ago, to not actually be a scientist. There’s not one scientific citation to his name. But he does have deep ties to Silicon Valley, and was even Peter Thiel’s former chief of staff.
Of course, I don’t know what Trump or Kratsios personally believes. But I do think that the nihilistic view of academia, at least more nebulously at a cultural level, is fed by a whisper: Why not just do a little swap? Why not trade all those pompous ivy-covered campuses for something slicker and less janky? Why not take the crown jewel of science and box it up in a package white and molded, like an Apple product?
