Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Just a week after the midterms it looks like the Democrats will spend next year in hearings to investigate how Trump and his billionaire friends tried everything they can to grab as much money as they possibly can. There will be one hearing after another and I am sure the Democrats will be relentless in their efforts to drain the swamp.
And on a totally unrelated sidenote: every time I take a walk with my dog and we get to the car just to unplug it from the charging station and then take the dog for a quick ride around the block until I find a parking space, every time I do this, I ask myself: “what does my dog think about getting into the car for a ride around the block?”
Dear President Trump, it’s time to read the room
The Republican post-mortem following last week’s midterms disaster has so far been a remarkably selective exercise. There has been plenty of apparent soul-searching about the war in Iran, the cost of living and immigration. JD Vance, in particular, has been very keen to establish that he knows exactly what went wrong, and is ready to get to work on the solution.
But there is a rather large omission from his diagnosis. Because while, yes, to borrow from James Carville, it is the economy, stupid (via the extremely unpopular war), it’s also corruption.
Surprise, Donald Trump doesn’t really care about anyone else than himself and his billionaire buddies. Lock ‘em up!
Maintenance Futures
Narratives about the future sort into two piles more reliably than you’d expect, and the sorting has little to do with optimism. Optimism and pessimism are the tone. Underneath the tone is a quantity.
One pile says there will be less. Fewer objects, less wealth, less freedom, less autonomy — a future in which people have lost things they were accustomed to having. Apocalypse is the loudest version but not the only one; most of what reads as pessimistic futurism is simply an expectation of subtraction. The other pile says there will be more. More technology, more objects, more wealth, more reach, and nearly everything else we file under progress.
Interesting thought exercise. I doubt that there will be a neutral future, it will either get better or it will get worse. Hoping for a neutral future will lead to a worse future.
The Parents Who Never Stop Tracking Their Kids
No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.
When I was a kid, I had to come home when the streetlights went on. That worked, most of the time. I can call my kids whenever I want to know where they are. I know that other parents let the kids present their messaging and browser history every night. Seriously, why would anyone do that? Helicopter parents are bad enough, but surveillance parents are even worse.
Benchma(r)king
SO, WHAT WOULD CHATGPT MAKE of an autoprogettazione project? It took a few goes to get the machine to understand what I wanted—and critically, that I wanted it to use the materials I had available in the most economical way, with minimal waste. The machine talked a lot, unlike a good carpenter’s mate, in its customary enthusiastic and overconfident style (“That sounds like a great project!”), but it came back with a set of suggestions on how to go about it, and I tried to follow them. I started with a pencil drawing, and then proceeded to cut the wood to length, and to assemble the chair. There are two qualities of the chair that ChatGPT and I built that stand out. The first is that it looks flimsier than it is, but it works. The AI told me to use a sheet of very thin ply for the seat, so thin that I considered laminating two sheets of it together. It gives a little when you sit on it—but it holds. That’s exactly the kind of optimization I was looking for: a decision I wouldn’t have had the confidence to make, but, again, it works. It might even be slightly comfier that way—although I have no way of knowing if the machine actually intended it, structurally or comfort-wise; it might have been going on dimensions alone. Still, the chair stands.
I don’t know much about carpentry, but I do know about how an LLM works. This is a really interesting undertaking to combine both.
Twilight of the Rock Gods
Monocultural nostalgia is strong, and music streaming’s supremacy keeps old tunes within earshot even as it makes musicians more dependent on touring for big payouts. In politics, a gerontocracy (or oldigarchy) has serious consequences. In music, a gerocktocracy isn’t quite as costly: The downsides are some unsatisfying concerts, some upsetting sights, and, perhaps, a little less turnover on the annual leaderboards of top-grossing acts. However, much as the midterms brought new blood to Congress, 2026 seems to have delivered a changing of the musical guard: “Classic rock” refers to the 2000s now. Billboard’s top 20 touring artists for 2022 featured Elton John, the Stones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Paul McCartney, Eagles, and Guns N’ Roses. This year’s top 20 so far, per Pollstar, includes no artists that were active in the ’60s, one that was active in the ’70s (Iron Maiden), and one that hails from the ’80s (GNR).
36 years ago I drove all across Iowa to see Bob Dylan as he was over 50 years old already and I figured that he would not be going on tour much longer at that biblical age…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico