"Like many journalists, I have a bunch of unpublished fiction lying about, so I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago..."

"... during the hysterical, mawkish phase of a particularly bad breakup. 'Megan McArdle,' said Opus 4.7, after a few seconds of thought. Fascinated, I kept feeding it smaller and smaller passages to see how little prose it needed for identification. The answer, apparently, was 1,441 words."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Will AI end anonymity? I tested it. Artificial intelligence can echolocate authors through their prose. Your digital fingerprint is at risk" (WaPo).

"You walk into a restaurant and see a woman you used to know.... She looks amazing at a distance and way younger than she has any right to."

"Then, as you get closer, you realize something is wrong. Her face isn't moving naturally. It's part of it is frozen in place, and other parts are uncomfortably over-inflated. Then you look around and you realize, she's not the only one. It's like they all took the same picture to their plastic surgeon and said, I want that one.... It happens because they're optimizing for a screen instead of real life.... It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that videos and photos are somehow especially real because, after all, it's just a plain picture of what happened. But in fact, cameras can alter a perception of reality in dozens of ways.... You shouldn't chase screen beauty because even celebrities don't really look like that when they're walking around, and... you need to take away is how destructive it can be for people who attain it. I've had so many encounters with people who look amazing at first glance and uncanny once you've watched them talk a bit. Frankly, I don't want to be around those people because it's a little scary...."

Says Megan McArdle, who goes on to condemn open-floor plans, on "Everyone wants to live like an influencer now," the new episode of her podcast "Reasonably Optimistic" (WaPo).

When people are talking face-to-face, how much are they thinking about the genuineness of each other's face? I'd say it's close to 100% of what we are doing and what we were born to do. It's only less than that if we're having trouble making eye contact or we're distracted or disgusted. 

"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

"How can official orthodoxies persist for so long even when few people believe them?"

Megan McArdle asks, in "The transgender orthodoxy is cracking/Malpractice suit and shifting clinical guidelines show cracks in transgender orthodoxy" (WaPo)(referencing the book "Private Truths, Public Lies" by political scientist Timur Kuran).

Public orthodoxies that diverge from private opinion may be surprisingly stable, but they can also prove remarkably unstable, because they depend on private thoughts to stay private, giving doubters the illusion that they are lone deviants rather than members of a silent majority....

Why is this surprising? It's the familiar story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which everyone has always easily understood.  

Starting around 2015, an orthodoxy on transgender issues crystallized, seemingly out of nowhere....

Once you've said "2015," you've got your answer staring you in the face! Why don't you see it? That was the year gay people won their great victory, a right to marry, in Obergefell v. Hodges. McArdle has "an orthodoxy... crystalliz[ing]" — as if a mysterious disembodied force emerged out of nothing — ex nihilo!

But real human beings were involved and their incentive to acquire a new cause is obvious. The activists had won, but they still needed to work, they still needed contributions, they still needed to push conventional people to move forward into challenging new territory. They couldn't just allow people to become decently accepting and empathetic to the gay people who, after all, are human beings who sometimes love each other and want a home and a family. Remember that moment?

That made too much sense. Ordinary people relaxed. Got comfortable.

By the time I went to the Ivy League swimming championships in 2022 to cover the controversy over a trans swimmer, people I talked to evinced a wariness that seemed more appropriate to a Cold War spy novel than to citizens of a free republic....

What happened?

"For 10 years, I’ve been hearing that we needed to fight fire with fire, to oppose Trump by becoming him, to protect our supposedly sacred liberal institutions by taking some shortcut..."

"... that carved a destructive path straight through them: cracking down on speech, abandoning the norms of journalistic objectivity, making unprecedented use of prosecutorial power. These were bad ideas in their own right, and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "When the rule of law becomes rule of lawfare/Friday’s Bolton raid and the rebuke of Trump’s $500M fine show what happens when justice is not impartial" (WaPo).

Bad ideas... and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump. But what if they had stopped Trump? That was the biggest of the ideas, and it might have worked. McArdle asserts that now — now that Trump is back with a vengeance — now we should see that neutral principles are best. If only the lawfare hadn't backfired, it would have been delightful to go on ignoring them.

Delightful for whom? Who are we talking about? Not McArdle herself. She's reporting on what she'd "been hearing" for 10 years. She also says "it was depressing watching so many people on the left thrill to this abusive lawfare." Well, "so many people on the left" think a lot of awful things, including that the so-called "rule of law" is a con.

Did the ordinary liberals of America buy into the fight-fire-with-fire approach? Let them take responsibility, not merely gesture at the "many people on the left." But it's not as though admitting you were wrong now will carry any weight. You played a game of tit for tat and now you're sad that the game continues.

ADDED: Trump plays openly, on Truth Social, just yesterday:

"A famous economist once remarked: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.'"

"That epigram, issued by Robert Solow in 1987, became the subject of a lot of debate among economists in the 1990s.... A decade later, another famous economist made a similar observation about the internet — actually, a prediction: 'By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.' That was Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.... We’re now hearing similar questions about artificial intelligence...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Are we in an AI bubble that’s getting ready to pop? The promised AI revolution isn’t here yet. But it’s a smart bet that productivity gains will follow" (WaPo).

And this caught my eye: "A friend who is a lawyer... asked a chatbot to draft a document, and though the draft needed work, he estimated it had saved him two to four hours of typing. I asked him what he did with the extra time. He pleaded the fifth." Pleaded the Fifth, eh? That makes it sound as though he billed the client for the 2 to 4 hours it would have taken to do the work traditionally!

It's not just the "typing" that the AI did for him. It also composed material into solid standard English, wrote the citations in the required form, put the substance in some sort of order, and probably much more. It wasn't just "typing" he'd have been doing during those hours. 

McArdle is using the word "typing" in a way that reminds me of Truman Capote's famous insult to Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." Oh, Jack wasn't just typing typing. He was typing typing. 

"And that is why you should be concerned about what Colbert’s cancellation means for American democracy..."

"... not because it’s a sign of a corporation bending the knee to a would-be dictator, but because it’s a sign of the unbundling of the American public. Ensconced in our homes, watching our custom-tailored streaming feeds, we simply have fewer and fewer things in common.... And America needs a shared national story, a common understanding of something, to hold together as a nation.... [A] lot of what we are doing is consuming tailored content, curated for us by a personal algorithm. In some ways, the Colbert show was a symptom of that shift. The sharp leftward lurch that consumed American media companies was driven by social media algorithms that rewarded left-wing political hot takes with high engagement. Media companies followed those rewards precisely because they were no longer catering to a truly mass audience but to niche fandoms. Having come of age in the long shadow of truly mass media, many of the people in those institutions might have thought they were moving public opinion into the progressive future, but in fact it was fan service for a narrow demographic. Now the algorithms have changed, and so have young people, who rarely turn on their televisions today.... [W]e have no obvious successor to the unifying force that late-night shows used to be. America might no longer want the 'Late Show.' But it needs some way to hear the same stories, laugh at the same jokes and gather around the collective water cooler to talk about what they mean."

Writes Megan McArdle, quoted in "Why the ‘Late Show’ cancellation worries me about the American public/The loss of Stephen Colbert’s show is another sign of how we are losing our shared ties" (WaPo).

Everybody laughed at the same joke that was that kiss cam couple. That was "a common understanding of something," holding us "together as a nation."

TV has died, but the stories get out, through TikTok and other media. More things have an opportunity to go big, and the dispersion is fast. What was television, really, by contrast? 

"As a gay man I applaud this decision. The court may be acting in bad faith, they may be hostile to gay rights, but..."

"... this ruling will help protect gay kids and gender non-conforming kids from this insane gender ideology that suggests that they may have been born in the wrong bodies if they don't fit some retrograde heterosexual gender role. You can't argue on one hand that gender is 'fluid' and on the other that it is somehow fixed in small children who have yet to experience puberty. This is madness, especially as we know these medical procedures lead to a lifetime of medical issues and a shorter lifespan. Only an adult can make these decisions for themselves."

Writes John02116 in the comments section to the Megan McArdle column, "The ACLU bet big on a trans rights case. Its loss was predictable. A Supreme Court ruling shows trans advocates failed to see the fragility of the liberal consensus" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the big disconnect between the column and the comments).

An even more strongly worded comment comes from JR Colorado:

"Suddenly, while they were drinking their coffee...."

GenX here. Three people I knew died in the towers, human beings just like Taylor Lorenz, who got on the subway and went to work one day and then suddenly while they were drinking their coffee they had to decide whether to jump or burn to death.

Not a fucking punchline. https://t.co/drIyJJxgfn

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 30, 2025

"On Tuesday, federal employees got an email with the subject line 'Fork in the Road,' inviting them to resign..."

"... in exchange for getting to work from home — probably on administrative leave — until Sept. 30. It was very similar to an email Twitter employees got shortly after Musk took over, down to the same subject line. But while the Twitter email saw employees resign in 'droves,' the current round is unlikely to have the same effect. The Trump administration is about to discover why reforming the government is so different from — and so much harder than — reforming the private sector.... Federal workplaces... select people who are risk-averse and willing to trade higher pay and autonomy for a job that offers excellent benefits and a low likelihood of getting fired.... These are not mercurial young tech workers, ready to flounce off to the next start-up if management isn’t to their liking. These workers are older... with an average tenure... three times longer than that of a typical private-sector employee. And their jobs often have no equivalent in the private sector. I will be surprised if many of them resign.... [T]hese kinds of buyouts often see star performers leave while the laggards cling to jobs they can’t easily replace...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Trump, Musk are about to learn why reforming the government is so hard/Musk’s cutbacks at Twitter might have worked. The federal government is a different beast" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Star performers and laggards — are those the 2 groups? Just because you're not a highly energized risk-taker doesn't mean you're a slow-moving loser. What sort of person belongs in this bureaucracy?

"Americans are too ornery to fall for TikTok propaganda/Banning TikTok may be legally sound but not really necessary."

Writes Megan McArdle (at WaPo)(free-access link).

I am wary of Chinese control over such an influential app and, potentially, its user data. But the internet is spying on us all the time, and I presume the Chinese already get a hold of a lot of that data. As for the Chinese influence over what we see... the Chinese government will surely slip some subtler nudges in among the makeup tutorials and cat videos.... But if you think that kind of gentle sculpting is so effective, you need to explain why the more overt efforts of countless establishment institutions, including our major social media companies, failed to get the American public to mask up, lock down and repudiate Donald Trump. I suspect the Chinese propagandists will simply discover what Americans already know: We’re too ornery to be controlled by anyone, including an algorithm.

We are affected by speech, and speech is important because it affects us, but the way it affects us is infinitely complicated. It's cute to use the word "ornery," but it doesn't express what we really are, and it's deceptive to refer to "control," because even if we can't be "controlled," we are open and vulnerable to complex influence. I'm "ornery" enough to resist this assurance that speech doesn't matter. I defend freedom of speech because speech does matter. 

And it troubles me to see "makeup tutorials and cat videos." People who talk like that are revealing that they don't use TikTok. They don't know what it is. I could show you thousands of things that are not transitory fluff, but just as an example, let me show you this man:

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

Megan McArdle went to see the Matt Walsh movie "Am I Racist?"

You know, so did I, last week, and I didn't even blog about why I wasn't blogging about it. But I'm telling you now because I have the hope that reading McArdle will liberate my thoughts on the subject. 

The headline is "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway. In the mockumentary, Matt Walsh is concerned that he is racist. Awkward moments follow" (WaPo)(free access link).

Ok, first, I don't agree that it's a mockumentary. I think the word "mockumentary" refers to a scripted (or improv) fictional movie that takes the form of a documentary, like "Spinal Tap" or "Best in Show." It's a great comedy category. I love it. But "Am I Racist?" films real people who are being themselves within a situation that the filmmaker sets up. It's in the category of pranking. The classic example is "Borat." The central character is pretending to be something he isn't, perhaps for sheer comedy, perhaps with a political agenda, and the idea is to extract something revealing from people who are not in on the joke. 

McArdle writes:

About that revolution....

I love Talkin Bout a Revolution, but “we’re going to rise up and overthrow the system” was not exactly a novel musical theme by the late 1980s. https://t.co/QHYivpHvGL

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 7, 2024

"Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."

"I think, for example, of my fellow Post columnist Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out as president of Harvard several years ago after he speculated, at a small private seminar, that one possible reason for the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs might be that their ability was less variable than men’s. So while both sexes perform about as well on average, the women might tend to cluster near the middle, while the men are overrepresented at the bottom and the top — the latter being where elite programs draw from."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "The world could use more jerks" (WaPo).

When did you first become sensitized to the mocking of women?

I wonder, this morning, as I scan the comments on yesterday's post, "Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."*

Here's what I'm seeing (boldface added):

Sebastian: "Exuberant mockery of women, subversion of common sense, and in-your-face-take-that-deplorables-middle-fingerism....

Michelle Dulak Thomson: "[A]ll I can say is that he doesn't traffic in 'whimsy and joy.' He is a sick individual who mercilessly mocks women. Which is evidently OK these days...."

"Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."

"Where Matt Walsh offers enemies, Dylan Mulvaney aspires to exuberance. She suggests the possibility of making yourself, and the world, into something better, while [Matt] Walsh promises, at best, only the dour satisfaction of being right about how terrible everything is. It isn’t surprising that the kids are choosing Mulvaney over that. But Walsh is right, his followers cry. Even if he were, it wouldn’t justify his tactics. In the court of public opinion, truth is not necessarily a sufficient defense."

Writes Megan McArdle in "For conservatives, Dylan Mulvaney should be a role model" (WaPo).

Also: "Conservatives... understand that bullying has cost progressivism a lot of support among moderates, including on issues surrounding transgenderism, where successful efforts to stifle public discussion of basic questions — such as 'What Is a Woman'? — have led to resentment and backlash rather than consensus...."

ADDED: I've got a new post based on some of the comments in this post. Writing that new post, I noticed my use of brackets in the post title above — "[s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty" — makes it seem as though McArdle might have used the masculine pronoun "he." No, she had "She," and I needed to switch to a lower-case "S." I just deploying brackets in the conventional way editors do when cutting down a quote. Nothing substantive.

200 journalists and writers release an open letter to the NYT to raise "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

Hell Gate reports.

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Hell Gate has an interview with Jo Livingstone, "an award-winning critic and writer who helped organize the open letter."

Here's the open letter. I'll highlight what I think are important parts:

"Last week, in a conversation with colleague Gail Collins, [Bret] Stephens argued that a couple with a combined income of $400,000 a year doesn’t necessarily have a lifestyle we’d describe as 'rich.'"

"'They’re scrimping to send their kids to college, driving a Camry, if they have a car at all, and wondering why eggs have gotten so damned expensive.' 'Granted,' said Collins, which was the most fascinating part of this exchange.... How have liberals gotten so comfortable with the idea that $400,000 a year — more than what 98 percent of the population makes — is really just a middle-class income?..."

Writes Megan McArdle in "The $400K conundrum: Why America’s urban rich don’t feel that way" (WaPo).

"People moved to coastal cities because that’s where the good jobs were.... This went on so long that the appeal of central cities..."

"... came to seem almost a law of nature, effortless and eternal. Unfortunately, the pandemic broke the virtuous cycle.... I suspect cities have fallen prey to the same delusion as those people who carefully pack up their laptops while the plane fills with smoke: They are looking around at other people, most of whom seem to be acting pretty normally.... Yes, crime might have risen, and residents might be darkly muttering about moving to the suburbs. But when haven’t city-dwellers threatened to move to the suburbs if the mayor didn’t fix their pet problems right away?... It would be understandable for mayors to look at all the people who have stayed and thought, 'Well, that’s not so bad.'"

Writes Megan McArdle in "Mayors are missing a window to address the remote-work revolution" (WaPo).