Listening to the world, and to the propaganda


Source: Wikimedia Commons

In today’s world, why does it feel like we are fighting World War II all over again? I would argue that this isn’t just a feeling. We are fighting the same war, and much of the danger now is as great as the danger was then.

The stakes today are the same stakes as in the 1930s and 1940s: Democracy vs. authoritarianism. Equality vs. hierarchy. Human rights vs. nationalism and ethnic supremacy. Reason and knowledge vs. propaganda and fabricated mythologies. The rule of law vs. elite power. Social and economic justice vs. entrenched privilege. International cooperation vs. militarism and domination.

Even the theaters of this ongoing war are much the same. Once again, Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Russia, is in the thick of it. America is in it, this time as a bad guy, not as a good guy — a shocking change. Asia is in it, more powerful than before. Israel has a new kind of role. The destabilizing effects of oil and oil money have brought the Middle East into the conflagration. New technologies have not only changed the battlefields, they’ve also enriched a new oligarchy of the tech elite, who have formed an alliance with the oil-and-kleptocracy oligarchy.

Where is our Churchill?

Today, do we have our Churchill and our Roosevelt?

We do not, and that is one of the most terrifying aspects of our problem. Instead we have Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Most people, like me, are watching from the sidelines, feeling powerless and disoriented. Some good people choose to shut all this out to focus on their own families and their own struggles. I don’t blame them.

But some of us, like the worried people gathered around their radios in 1943, crave to know what is going on.

Though some of our media — the responsible media — do a remarkably good job, they cannot cover everything. The American media are under huge pressure not only from the Trump White House, but also from their corporate owners.

Our tools are better now

Fortunately, we ordinary people have access to technologies that were science fiction in 1943. We have a global network. We have powerful computers. We have AI. The enemies of democracy use all those things. We enemies of authoritarianism can use them, too.

Those technologies certainly include AI, though there is a trend — I think it is a prudish and misguided trend — to reject and disparage the use of AI. My attitude is that we should use AI for everything it’s good for, while being clear and up front about how we use it.

In 1943, radio was a new technology. Shortwave radio could reach across continents and oceans. The BBC, with its many transmitters, was heard round the world during World War II, translated into many languages. But Europeans weren’t limited to the BBC. Germany and Russia broadcast their propaganda in English during the war. Other countries also had radio stations — Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, and even the Vatican.

Listening to propaganda, and paying attention to news from afar, is an important part of modeling the world, whether now or in 1943. With AI, translation is no longer a problem.

The Acorn Abbey global news digest

In that spirit, Acorn Abbey is going live with a new, automated system for monitoring propaganda and news from afar. There are links on the page for this.

How it works is complicated. But, today, Claude can write complicated programs for us. Acorn Abbey’s global news digest is built with more than 12,000 lines of Claude-written computer code, running on Acorn Abbey’s servers.

Acorn Abbey’s mainstream digest is built on data retrieved from GDELT, a sophisticated open-source system which constantly monitors thousands of news outlets in more than 100 languages, yielding about a quarter of a million articles a day. Acorn Abbey’s system retrieves updates from GDELT every 15 minutes.

Acorn Abbey’s unofficial digest comes from the Russia-centered Telegram network. GDELT does not monitor social media, so Acorn Abbey’s code monitors Telegram directly, typically 1,500 posts a day. Posts that are not English are machine-translated by Acorn Abbey’s code.

Both the mainstream digest and the unofficial digest are written by Claude AI, working from many megabytes of data handed to it by the programming that gathers, translates, sorts, and does preliminary analysis on the data, based on criteria determined by Acorn Abbey. A key part of the mainstream analysis is quantifying how much attention an event is getting in international media.

What to focus on

Acorn Abbey could as easily have built a system for monitoring global attention to cats, or taxation, or even the environment and climate change. But we are in the middle of a war for global democracy, so that is what Acorn Abbey’s system is designed to monitor at present.

This is not meant as a substitute for the sources of information that we already use. Rather, it’s meant to fill in the gaps. Most of us don’t have any means of monitoring newspapers in Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Iran, Denmark, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Rome, or Bogota. But GDELT monitors those countries and many more, and, through GDELT, Acorn Abbey’s programming has access to all that data.

Acorn Abbey’s global news digest has been operating in test mode since early October. Refinements will continue. The pages are automatically generated once a day, around 6:30 a.m. Eastern time, from data collected during the previous 24 hours.

My blog posts here reflect my own values and political views. Acorn Abbey’s global news digest, though, is designed to take no side. It reports only on what it finds.

We are living through a counter-Enlightenment. A tiny global elite with vast wealth and authoritarian power sees an opportunity to take over the world — or at least big parts of the world — and run that world for their own profit and power, without interference from the rest of us, and in opposition to every noble thing the Enlightenment stands for. Warfare has drastically changed in the last 80 years. But this is war. And technology has developed new forms of shortwave radio.

The exploitability of the deplorables


Jim Bakker died on October 5 at the age of 86.

It probably was Jim and Tammy Bakker who first showed the world that there are millions of suckers who are so simple and so morally vacant that con men in makeup can strut and crow and mug right in front of them and the suckers will believe they’ve seen a vision of godliness and leadership.

Though con men preachers had existed for ages, it was television that made it possible to reach the sucker population in numbers great enough to support corporatized exploitation. There is a straight line from the first Christian television stations to Fox News to Donald Trump in the White House.

Though anyone with normal cognitive ability could watch the Bakkers on TV and detect within 30 seconds that they were clowns on the take, the deplorables sent the Bakkers $1 million a week.

In 1985, as the law was catching up with the Bakkers, Rupert Murdoch was starting to put together his cable network, having recognized the economic and political possibilities of both monetizing and weaponizing the deplorable population. Fox News was born in 1996.

Changes in technology combined with diabolical development in the science of propaganda made mass deception not just costless, but profitable. Thanks to the political weaponization of the deplorables with these new technologies, it took only about twenty years for billionaires, backed by the deplorables, to take over America and start systematically looting the country. Compared to the right-wing elite now looting the country, Jim and Tammy Bakker were pathetic pikers, raking in mere millions rather than billions and trillions. But they were pioneers.

In 1989, we were still a country that could put someone like Jim Bakker in prison. Let’s hope we still are.

What percent of Americans are crazy as a betsy bug?


Source: Wikimedia Commons

A new poll by the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago gives us a solid estimate of the size of two species of dangerously clueless Americans. Let’s do the math.

Species 1 contains the completely clueless betsy bug Americans who still think that Trump was sent by God. They’ll probably go to their graves thinking that Trump was sent by God.

Species 2 contains the Americans who are so dense and gullible that they fall for Republican deceptions, and vote for the likes of Trump, until something like the price of gasoline gets through to them.

Species 2 is just as dangerous as Species 1. They’re the reason why it will be hard for the United States to win back the trust of the civilized world after Trump is gone. The civilized world won’t forget that Americans voted for Trump not once, but twice. That’s reasonable grounds for concern that such a thing could happen again.

I think that a reasonable analysis of the poll shows that the size of Species 1 is about 15 percent of American adults. However, that 15 percent votes, and when they vote they make up about 24 percent of the vote in a presidential election.

As for Species 2, the highest percentage of the vote that Trump ever got (in 2024) was 49.8 percent. So the size of Species 2 is a whopping 26 percent of the voting population.

Each group is about a quarter of the voters. Together, they’re half the voters. They’ve never added up to more than 50 percent of the popular vote, but the 49.8 percent in 2024 translates to 312 vs 226 in the Electoral College, a horribly regressive quirk in the American system.

Here we should keep in mind that 36 percent of Americans eligible to vote did not vote in 2024.

So how do we get our democracy back?

Species 1 are the eternally damned. There is no way to reach them.

As for Species 2, we have to hope that they learned a lesson at the gas pumps that they’ll remember for a while.

As for those who didn’t vote in 2024, it’s a good thing that they didn’t. Polls by Pew Research have shown that non-voters in 2024 actually preferred Trump, 44 percent to 40 percent. Let’s call the Trumpy non-voters Species 3.

So if you add Species 1, Species 2, and Species 3, and if all of them had voted in 2024, then Trump would have won by an even bigger margin.

No wonder the civilized world no longer trusts Americans. Half of the American population are a loaded weapon with the Republican Party’s finger on the trigger.

Edible magic for 50 cents a pound


Click here for high-resolution version.

It makes me sad that my Celtic ancestors did not have pumpkins. Oh, the Old World magic they’d have made of them if they had. To make their autumn lanterns and carved faces, they had to use turnips and rutabagas.

Once pumpkins were discovered, though, by the first European explorers to sail to the New World, pumpkin seeds made their way back to Europe very quickly. There is a painting of a relative of a pumpkin in a book painted for French royalty in about 1508. Like turnips, for many years pumpkins were seen as food for poor people and fodder for livestock. But by the late 17th century, French cooks were experimenting with pumpkin recipes.

It was in 1697 when Charles Perrault first wrote of a pumpkin being turned into a carriage — an innovation in the Cinderella story, which is much older than 1697. Thomas Jefferson grew several types of pumpkins at Monticello.

It surprises me how little country people here in North Carolina know about pumpkins these days. They buy the ugly, inedible, bright orange variety (Howden pumpkins) for Halloween. And they often use “heirloom” pumpkins to decorate their porches. But they no longer see pumpkins as a food to be bought fresh and cooked from scratch. Of course they like pumpkin pie, but virtually everyone buys canned pumpkin for pies, which they put into a store-bought pie shell, something that ought to be a felony crime against nature. (Libby’s uses Dickinson pumpkins for canning.)

The woman who weighed the pumpkins I bought yesterday didn’t even know about baking pumpkins as the best way to acquire pumpkin for pies. It ought to be obvious: Cut a lid in the top of the pumpkin, clean out the seeds through the hole in the top, then replace the lid and bake the pumpkin. At 325F, the pumpkin will need to stay in the oven for an hour or more, depending on the pumpkin’s size. It’s easy enough to press the excess water out of the pumpkin flesh. And that pumpkin juice should go into soup. It has been years since I serve pumpkin soup in a pumpkin tureen. Maybe I’ll do that this fall.

August weather has lingered into late September, and it’s too hot this week to bake a pumpkin. But next week there will be pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie.


This farm near King, North Carolina, sells strawberries in the spring and pumpkins in the fall. Click here for high-resolution version.

The deplorables’ demonology meets the undeniable


Madison, North Carolina, September 19, 2026

One of the services provided by deplorable opinion leaders is to deliver to the deplorables a demonology designed to deceive them, enrage them, flatter the traits that make them deplorable, and exploit them politically. The deplorables perceive that someone is eating their lunch — no great feat of cognition. But if the deplorables somehow became capable of perceiving who really is eating their lunch, instead of their scapegoats, then America would become Denmark, instantly, just like that, overnight, and democracy would flourish.

During the 2024 election, the demonology boiled down to this: Immigrants are invaders, poisoning the blood of America, stealing jobs, voting illegally, and living on welfare. Democrats, allied with a “woke” radical left, hate America, steal elections, trample on deplorable freedoms, and are intentionally destroying America with weapons such as DEI and even empathy. The “deep state” is persecuting conservatives and standing in the way of a white, Christian America. A globalist elite headed by the likes of George Soros is using its billions to pull all the strings. If these demons are defeated, then a Norman Rockwell America in which prices never go up will arise from the ruins of what the demons have wrought, and the demons will all go back to whatever hell they came from and stay there.

There is only one thing about which the deplorables cannot be deceived. That’s the price of gasoline. In 2024, Trump promised the deplorables that he’d get the price of gasoline below $2 a gallon. They believed it and were counting on it. (In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, Trump told Fox News that the price of gasoline will drop to below $2 a gallon after the midterm elections.)

With the average price of gasoline in the U.S. now above $4 a gallon, the deplorables, shocked and betrayed, have to figure out whom they should demonize for that. The revisions to the demonology differ.

MAGA types are almost scholars on the price of gasoline. Something like 60 percent of MAGA types correctly blame Trump and the Iran war for gasoline prices. Still, that leaves about 40 percent of MAGA types who blame Biden, or OPEC, or Iran, or something.

MAGA types dismiss most of Trump’s lies. They just don’t care. But if you lie to them about the price of gasoline, then an extraordinary 60 percent of them will actually wake up and take notice.

This is terrifying and marvelous at the same time. It’s terrifying that they’re so thick. But it’s marvelous that there is at least one way to get through to some of them.

Update: In California, prices are much higher.


From a Facebook post

When pigs fly


Illustration by ChatGPT. Click here for high-resolution version.

Politico has a piece this morning busting Senator Rand Paul for sending staff to Pittsburgh on a chartered plane at a cost to taxpayers of $18,000. The purpose of the trip was to investigate whether the Secret Service should have done a better job of protecting Trump from an assassination attempt.

A train ticket to Pittsburgh costs about $150 round trip. A commercial flight would cost about $150 to $250 round trip. Congressional staff don’t normally fly on chartered planes. You can be sure, though, that they all want to now — the Republicans, anyway.

My oligarch aircraft tracker database has been running since May 10, 2026. Since then it has tracked 4,655 flights by people who have a lot of money and who are active in the project of making the world safe and profitable for oligarchs. It’s the status symbol that all the wannabes are so eager for now, the transportation version of Mar-a-Lago Face.

Today I had Claude Code run a query on the database to list where American oligarchs have been going to when they travel outside the country. Below, I’m including the raw report as written by Claude Code.

One pig in particular stands out: Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director. Why does this plane go where it goes? I have no idea, but I suspect the media have stopped tracking Patel’s plane because they have so many other pigs to fry.

A note from Claude: Not every landing is a destination. Long-range private jets still have to refuel, and they do it at a familiar set of waypoints — which is why these lists include places no billionaire is actually visiting. A stop in the Faroe Islands (or Iceland, Greenland, or eastern Canada) is almost certainly a fuel stop on the North Atlantic crossing between North America and Europe. Likewise, brief touchdowns in obscure corners of West Africa — Gambia, Guinea, Cameroon, Cape Verde — are almost certainly refueling stops on the long haul down to South Africa, where the tanks won’t reach in one leg.


Miriam Adelson, 304 landings, including rural Faroe Islands; rural Greece; Petaẖ Tiqva, Israel; Astypálaia, Greece; Rocchetta di Vara, Italy; London, United Kingdom; Vienna, Austria; rural Canada; rural China; Chihuahua, Mexico; rural Cyprus; Larnaca, Cyprus; Kenitra, Morocco; rural Western Sahara; Rishon LeTsiyyon, Israel; rural Brazil; Nice, France; rural Italy; rural Morocco; Mílos, Greece; Tianjin, China; rural Japan; Barcelona, Spain; Pissoúri, Cyprus; Bnei Brak, Israel; Kobe, Japan; Kagoshima, Japan; Hsinchu, Taiwan; Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Zhuhai, China; rural Malaysia; Singapore, Singapore; rural Türkiye; rural Norway; rural Iceland; Toronto, Canada; Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei; rural Philippines; rural Ireland; Ceriale, Italy; Askeaton, Ireland; Fontcoberta, Spain; Venice, Italy; La Spezia, Italy; Sant Antoni de Portmany, Spain; Sixmilebridge, Ireland; rural Greenland; rural Spain; Toyohama, Japan; Makurazaki, Japan; rural Taiwan; rural Mexico; rural Hong Kong

Liberty University, 240 landings, all within the United States.

Steve Wynn, 176 landings, including rural Mexico; Colonia Teñhe, Mexico; Tijuana, Mexico; Mexico City, Mexico

Howard Lutnick, 164 landings, including rural Canada; Paris, France; Carterton, United Kingdom

Ken Griffin, 158 landings, including rural Canada; Kobe, Japan; Tokyo, Japan; Nice, France; Amsterdam, Netherlands; London, United Kingdom; Stabbia, Italy; Gazzola, Italy; Rome, Italy; Paris, France; Jerez de la Frontera, Spain; rural Algeria; Naples, Italy; Milan, Italy; Castelforte, Italy; rural Spain; Genève, Switzerland; Nîmes, France; Santon, Isle of Man; rural Gambia; rural Guinea; Luanda, Angola; rural Cameroon; Johannesburg, South Africa; rural South Africa; rural Italy; rural Dominica; rural Puerto Rico; Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; Bournemouth, United Kingdom; rural Iceland

Elon Musk, 151 landings, including Reynosa, Mexico

FBI Director, 148 landings, including rural Greece; Ankara, Türkiye; rural Morocco; rural Canada; Seoul, South Korea; rural Japan; rural Philippines; Bangkok, Thailand; rural Cambodia; Jakarta, Indonesia; San Miguel, Philippines; Ningjin, China; Niudaokou, China; rural China; Xinkaikou, China; Larnaca, Cyprus

Lachlan Murdoch, 127 landings, including Sydney, Australia; Melbourne, Australia; rural Canada; London, United Kingdom; Sydney, Canada; rural United Kingdom; Dublin, Ireland; Swinford, Ireland; Sixmilebridge, Ireland; Charlestown, Ireland

Mark Zuckerberg, 115 landings, including rural Canada; London, United Kingdom; Steeple Bumpstead, United Kingdom; rural United Kingdom; rural Iceland; rural Italy; Cavtat, Croatia

Charles Koch, 73 landings, including rural Portugal; Lisbon, Portugal; Paris, France; Cowichan Bay, Canada; rural Bahamas; San Juan, Puerto Rico; rural Puerto Rico; Shawnigan Lake, Canada

Richard Uihlein, 70 landings, including Edmonton, Canada

Peter Thiel, 65 landings, including Shawnigan Lake, Canada; Victoria, Canada; Mill Bay, Canada

Franklin Graham, 64 landings, including rural Canada; rural Bahamas; Madrid, Spain

Tilman Fertitta, 60 landings, including rural Mexico; Lamezia Terme, Italy; Rome, Italy; rural Italy; Munich, Germany; rural Canada; Brindisi, Italy; Messina, Italy; Porto Azzurro, Italy; Casarza Ligure, Italy; Oschiri, Italy; Richmond, Canada; Ottawa, Canada; Montréal, Canada

Harold Hamm, 58 landings, including Bogotá, Colombia; rural Cuba; rural Jamaica; rural Honduras; Atenas, Costa Rica

Kenneth Copeland, 56 landings, all within the United States.

Jeff Bezos, 44 landings, including rural Canada; Paris, France; London, United Kingdom; Silistra, Bulgaria; rural Kazakhstan; Tianjin, China; Tokyo, Japan; rural Fiji; Nadi, Fiji; Sydney, Australia; Zaton, Croatia; Seget Vranjica, Croatia; rural Italy

Harlan Crow, 36 landings, all within the United States.

Donald Trump (family plane, not Air Force 1), 32 landings, including rural Bahamas; rural Canada; Aberdeen, United Kingdom; Prestwick, United Kingdom; rural Ireland; Sixmilebridge, Ireland

David Geffen, 25 landings, including rural Canada; Inca, Spain; rural Spain; Madrid, Spain

Rupert Murdoch, 24 landings, all within the United States.

Timothy Mellon, 5 landings, all within the United States.

Samaritan's Purse, 1 landing, none with a usable position fix.

How this works: Acorn Abbey’s oligarch aircraft tracker continuously monitors 127 aircraft from 22 countries, using publicly available data from the global ADS-B network. Ownership is cautiously assigned from publicly available records. However, aircraft ownership is often obscured behind holding companies such as LLCs, and in some cases cannot be determined with 100 percent confidence. Note too that ADS-B tracks aircraft, not people: who is aboard cannot be known. The Acorn Abbey database and its programming are on a virtual private server in Nuremberg, Germany.

Reassessing existential risk


I asked ChatGPT to create an image based on chapter 10 of my 2014 novel Fugue in Ursa Major. Jake is in Washington, and all hell is breaking loose on a global scale. Jake is about to head for the hills. But much has changed since 2014. Click here for high-resolution version.

This morning there were yet more stories about how AI could exterminate the human race:

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon has quit the AI company, saying those building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

If the people issuing these warnings were anti-technology outsiders, we’d do well to take them less seriously. But these warnings keep coming from people who actually are involved in AI development. There rarely are any specifics on how AI would actually do such a thing. A bio-engineered pandemic is sometimes presented as the easiest way. Another type of threat has to do with AI getting control not only of weapons systems but also life support systems such as water systems and the power grid.

We might take some comfort in the RAND Corporation’s findings that exterminating all human beings would be very difficult, because humans are so adaptable and there are so many places on the planet where people can hide.

But it seems to me that, short of extermination, there are many ways in which elites who have both power and money are already building systems for controlling the masses. I’m much more inclined to worry about authoritarians using AI for entrenchment than about AI wiping out the human race.

The most worrisome concept, I think, is “stable authoritarianism” and how AI could make it far more difficult for people to throw off a corrupt authoritarian regime:

• Greatly improved systems of watching people and tracking people, using cameras and facial recognition plugged into AI systems.

• Automated censorship and narrative control, once a free media has been eliminated.

• Automated security forces, which boils down to armed robots under AI control — RoboCops, a roboticized military, and drones for civilian surveillance, many of them armed.

Science fiction has thoroughly explored these areas. We have been warned.

Some of these things are in the early stages, but they’re no longer science fiction. In the U.S., Flock cameras have become a big issue. Something like 120,000 Flock cameras, which read license plates and track vehicles, have already been deployed. China is the world leader in public surveillance. China already has a large surveillance system that uses facial recognition. China also is in the early stages of deploying robots. They’ve started with traffic control robots in cities, but they’re also testing robotic dogs and even humanoid robots as police assistants. China is scaling these systems up, and there are lots of countries that want to buy what China is developing.

There’s another disturbing new angle that comes with AI. If AI increasingly does the work that is now done by the millions of people who work in offices, and if autonomous robots can increasingly do manual labor as well as the work of police and soldiers, then what’s to become of the human beings thus displaced? Historically elites and their capital have needed human beings as workers and soldiers, which meant that people had some power over their own welfare because they were needed. The Trump administration — and in particular the attitude and actions of Elon Musk in joyfully eliminating any costs that support human welfare — is a pretty good clue as to what elites think of the rest of us and how much they’d like to not need us. In fact this seems to be a big part of what is driving the financial bubble right now — the development of means whereby the owners of capital can reduce the need for human beings.

One thing has not changed and probably never will. In Fugue in Ursa Major in 2014, it was the billionaires and oligarchs beyond the reach of democracy who would do anything at all to get what they want — control of all the money and all the power. It’s still the billionaires and authoritarians and oligarchs who want total domination. What has changed is that AI has suddenly given them new options, and they know it.

All this touches on a big question: Why do elites need people, and what do they need us for?

Elites at present are alarmed about birth rates because they need people young enough to work and to fight, rather than an aging population. China’s population is aging and shrinking. We need to watch China for clues about what authoritarians will try to do, because China has the technology and the industrial power to respond to demographic and technological change without any interference from democracy.

The rapid development of AI is coinciding with declining populations in places where people are still needed. Authoritarian elites have two urgent needs: To run a country with more technology and fewer people, and to better control a population when domination threatens to create turmoil.

Whatever happens over the next few years, we’ll probably see it in China first, keeping in mind that authoritarian elites in the U.S. still have a big problem to deal with — democracy interfering with their dream of domination. So that’s another thing that doesn’t change. Democracy, law, and regulation — the things that authoritarian elites hate the most — are the people’s only hope.

Krugman: Trump is destroying what he cannot dominate

Krugman’s Substack post today is a must-read (or must-watch). The YouTube video is above; the transcript is at Substack.

Krugman writes:

When we talk about Hitler’s last days, as I said, one of his last attempted acts was what’s called the Nero Decree, which was an attempt to destroy as much of Germany’s infrastructure as possible, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies. But clearly, and even there’s some evidence that he actually he clearly thought this as a way of punishing the German people for failing him.

Now, historiography is a little more complicated than that, as it usually is, but that’s clearly the gist of it. That Hitler’s final acts were to basically try to bring everyone else down with him.

Do you really want to say that that’s not what’s going to happen with Trump?

Krugman is on sound historical ground on the Nero Decree:

German History in Documents and Images

Sealing the Third Reich’s Downfall: Adolf Hitler’s “Nero Decree”

Wikipedia on the Nero Decree

Testing AI’s ability as a writer


Illustration by ChatGPT

I think it was almost two years ago when I first asked ChatGPT to compose a sonnet. It completely botched it. It was clear that ChatGPT, at that time, had no idea what the structure of a sonnet is. It had no idea how to write iambic pentameter. It didn’t understand rhymes. Times have changed.

Mostly these days I am using Claude. I find that Claude has a better education and a better social sense. Claude tends to be a little argumentative and likes to “push back,” but I put up with that.

Here I should make what is becoming my standard disclaimer. AI is not going to go away. Ordinary people should not wait for elites to decide how AI should be used, for what, and by whom. The development of AI detection tools such as Pangram is not going to stop the flood of AI slop. But at least we already have a reliable means of detecting what was written by AI. This will help keep people honest. And, unfortunately, an AI detector has become a tool just as important as AI.

Claude wrote four sonnets for me yesterday. Each of them was technically perfect — no small feat. Claude also understood my prompts about subject matter and tone. I ran each of the sonnets through Pangram. Pangram reported correctly that each of the sonnets was 100 percent composed by AI.

I asked Claude how it is that Pangram can detect AI writing so accurately. Claude’s answer boiled down to perfection. AI’s writing contains none of the idiosyncracies that human writing contains, Claude said. I have no idea whether this is true. But that’s what Claude said. As an editor, I would have to say that Claude’s writing is terrifyingly good. That is not the way creative people want things to be. But I think that’s where we are. And it’s only 2026.

I asked Claude to write a sonnet that on the surface was about chimney pots, but that, on another level, was about an old person’s memories of the past.

Sonnet No. 1

The chimney pots outlast the falling hall,
though ivy grips the brick and pulls it down;
they stand like sentries on a ruined wall,
and wear the empty sky to be their crown.

I knew them when the windows all were bright,
and hearthlight glowed against the fall of day,
and one belovèd face was in that light,
that time nor ruin ever took away.

No hearth burns now, and no one climbs the stair,
and no one leans to watch the evening fade;
the rooms hold nothing but the moving air,
and all the flame they held has turned to shade.

Yet still they stand, and still, in me, they show
the one dear face I loved so long ago.

When I asked Claude to choose a subject for a sonnet, it chose telegraph wires, knowing that antique telegraphy is a subject that interests me.

Sonnet No. 2

The singing wire could reach a distant shore,
and carry words across the sleeping land;
the keys would tap their code from door to door,
a pulse would leap from eager hand to hand.

But now the office stands with shutters drawn,
the sounder cold, the copper gone to green;
and not a message stirs from dusk to dawn,
and stillness holds the space where song had been.

And yet the pulse it woke can never die;
it lives in every current humming there,
in code that leaps unseen from earth to sky,
it hums in wire and beam and open air.

The wire may fail, the sounder fall to rust,
but rhythm lives when all has turned to dust.

I asked Claude to write a poem about living with cats.

Sonnet No. 3

They came uncalled and chose to stay a while,
and made my quiet house their own domain;
they knock my pen and papers off in style,
then blink at me as if I should explain.

At three they race the hallway, wall to wall,
and thunder past my bed at dead of night,
and then, as though they never moved at all,
they curl up small and purr, a warm delight.

I know their years will pass more quick than mine,
that all too soon they must be called away,
and miss the gentle weight against my spine,
the paw that reached for me and bid me stay.

And yet I’d take the grief to have the years,
the years of purring warmth outweigh the tears.

Because it is the nature of sonnet structure to contain emotion and reverie, I asked Claude to write a poem in the style of the New Yorker, where anything resembling emotion or reverie would be deemed embarrassing to the reputation of the magazine.

Sonnet No. 4

The CVS on Ninth stays open, which
is its entire personality. At two
the floor’s so bright it hums. I’m here to fill
a thing that isn’t mine—my mother’s name
spelled back to me, and slightly wrong, inside
the register’s flat mouth. The pharmacist
has seen this face before, the one you make.
She rings it through. Outside, a man is busy
teaching the pigeons how to wait. I used
to think that love was mostly verbs. It’s not.
It’s a co-pay. A lozenge. A small white
bag they staple shut and slide across the counter
like something confiscated. Walking back
I hold it to my chest. As you’d hold water.

I had a very good laugh at how perfectly the poem spoofed the New Yorker — a poem about absolutely nothing, passed off as sophisticated and worthwhile, even though it’s trash. Some years ago I realized just how silly and bogus the New Yorker is and how much damage the New Yorker has done to our understanding of what good writing is. The New Yorker contains some of the worst writing in the world, usually about nothing that matters, and always following the same formula. I wanted to see if Claude could recognize the New Yorker formula and write a parody. I asked for a 600 word parody of a New Yorker article. After I read it, Claude and I had a good laugh about how the New Yorker is such a sitting duck to be made fun of.

The last good tick

By Claude

In a converted dairy barn outside Hardwick, Vermont, a man named Elias Thorn is teaching a grandfather clock to be honest again. The clock, a Vienna regulator from the 1880s, has been running four minutes fast for a century. “It’s been lying to three generations,” Thorn says, not unkindly. He is sixty-eight, with the hands of someone who has spent his life persuading small brass things to change their minds. There are forty-one clocks in the barn. All but one are stopped. This is on purpose, though the purpose takes some explaining.

Thorn is one of perhaps two hundred people in the country who still repair mechanical clock movements at what he calls “the level of conscience.” He does not mean this loosely. When he was nine, in Pittsburgh, his father—a man who sold insurance and distrusted anything that couldn’t be sold—brought home a broken mantel clock as a gag gift, and something in the boy went permanently quiet and attentive. “I understood immediately that it wanted to keep time,” Thorn says. “It just needed someone to take its side.” He says things like this. You stop noticing after a while, or you start believing them, and it’s hard to say which is worse.

The barn smells of oil and cold coffee. A cat named Huygens, after the Dutch physicist, patrols the workbench with the air of a foreman who has seen productivity decline. Thorn’s process is slow to the point of provocation. A single movement can take him six weeks, during which he will sometimes simply sit and listen to it, the way a doctor might listen to a chest. “The escapement is the heart,” he explains. “Everything else is opinion.” I ask what he charges. He looks briefly pained, as though I’ve asked a monk about his 401(k), and says the number is “not the point,” which is the answer of a man for whom the number has never once had to be the point.

His customers find him by word of mouth and by a kind of desperation. A woman in Maine sent him a clock that had stopped the hour her husband died; she didn’t want it fixed, exactly. She wanted it understood. Thorn kept it for a year. When he returned it, still stopped, she wept, and so, he admits, did he. He tells this story the way you’d handle something you’re afraid of dropping.

The one running clock in the barn is the Vienna regulator, ticking now with a new and terrible sincerity. Thorn cocks his head at it. Four minutes, retrieved from a century of drift. It is, he seems to feel, a small act of moral repair in a country that has largely stopped bothering. Outside, the Vermont light does the thing Vermont light does in this kind of article. Huygens watches the pendulum with narrowed eyes, unconvinced. “People think I’m fixing clocks,” Thorn says, and here you can feel the piece reaching for its final chord, the one it was always going to end on. “I’m not. I’m arguing with entropy.” He smiles. The clock ticks. Somewhere, presumably, the universe continues to win.

Star City


Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyudmilla Raskova

Star City, on Apple TV, is one of those shows with lopsided ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics rate it at 94 percent, and mere popcorn-eaters at 80 percent. I’d side with the popcorn-eaters. It’s a little dry and a little slow, but it’s fascinating at what life might have been like for elites in the old Soviet Union.

Though Rhys Ifans, for some reason, gets top billing, Anna Maxwell Martin steals every scene she’s in. Star City is worth watching only for her performance as a cold-blooded villain.

It’s an eight-part series and an alternate history of the Soviet space program, in which, as Rotten Tomatoes says, it’s safer to be in space than on the ground. It was filmed in Lithuania.