"Oh, what if it was this contest between A.I. and me? We would both get the same prompts."

"We’ll give a list of possible ideas that readers can choose from, a combination of very summery stuff, like pop songs and sand and sunscreen, and also mixed in are things that I like to write about, like ennui and ambivalence and self-consciousness and privilege.... [We asked A.I. to w]rite a thousand-word short story in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld that includes these elements: lust, kissing, flip-flops, regret and middle age.... To see the speed at which it spits out sentences was the most unsettling part because, in a very biased way, I’m like, my story’s better. But it wrote its story — I don’t know — a million times faster? And my story is probably not a million times better. The speed is unsettling...."

Said the fiction writer Curtis Sittenfeld, in the podcast "Can You Tell Which Short Story ChatGPT Wrote?" (YouTube for NYT podcast).

You'll hear the beginning of the human-written story and the machine-written story and get a chance to notice the distinctive differences. I know that I myself want to learn how to recognize A.I.-written material so that I can maintain a healthy disgust for what is artificial. The uncanny valley must continue to feel uncanny... or what are we living for?

"The horse appears to be digitally composed because its front and hind legs do not represent any phase of natural movement at the walk, trot, canter, or gallop."

"Based on its leg position the horse appears to be trotting with his hind legs and cantering with his front!"

So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."

The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."

Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:

"If we did implement a wealth tax, should it tax tenure?"

"Professorial tenure is, after all, a valuable asset. As long as you show up and teach your classes, and you don’t make passes at your students or steal from the department’s petty cash drawer, you can draw a paycheck for the rest of your working life."

That's Megan McArdle, possibly pushing back the lefty academics who are enthusiastic about taxing wealth.

Midway through the piece, she shifts topics from tenure as wealth to the enjoying your job as wealth. Instead of continuing with the job of professor — a job I find immensely enjoyable — she talks about the job of big-media news reporter — maybe because it's the job she knows but maybe because she wants to push back lefty reporters.

She compares the job of big-media news reporters to the job of someone working in a non-famous accounting department. This part of the article amused me because — even though I agree jobs that pay the same may have greatly different value — McArdle, a big-media reporter, assumes that being a big-media reporter is immensely more enjoyable than working in accounting. She regards things like work travel and getting fed at receptions and seeing that other people recognize the name of your employer as big pluses. But some people like to stay close to home and loath aspects of work that resemble genuine social functions with friends and scoff or puzzle at lines like: "When [a big-media reporter] tells people where he works, he gets to see their eyes light up and his impressiveness immediately rise four notches — six, if he reports on something really cool."

It's far more subjective than McArdle acknowledges. But even if we could all agree that it's better to eat out and get far from home and impress people with the name of your employer, we couldn't put a number on it. Imagine doing your taxes and getting to the line where you're supposed to put a dollar value on the enjoyability of your job. Did you just double your salary? Or were you trying to eke out a deduction?

McArdle doesn't really support trying to tax these things. She's mainly brainstorming in resistance to the charms of the book she is reading, Thomas Piketty’s "Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

ADDED: Rereading my phrase "aspects of work that resemble genuine social functions with friends," I am reminded of the idea of the "uncanny valley":

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some human observers. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics, 3D computer animation, and in medical fields such as burn reconstruction, infectious diseases, neurological conditions, and plastic surgery. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as subjects move toward a healthy, natural human likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability.

I think that some human observers feel this kind of revulsion about work-related social events. Isn't this what the TV show "The Office" was often about? I have to ask because I've barely ever watched the show, which I can't enjoy because of how awful these events do feel to me. It's the uncanny valley between work and your personal life. There are people who feel good in that place, and they are not only revolting, like a too-realistic robot, but they are often in a position to compel you to participate in these events, and they are powered on by their belief that they are making the workplace better and taking on the task of staging these horrors.

There's no "upper limit on penis size" but "'the most attractive penis size' appeared to fall outside the range used in the study..."

"... which was designed to capture 95% of the variability women would encounter. So although attractiveness beyond the 3 in. continued to increase in a linear fashion, it did so at a slower rate."

3 inches refers to incremental enlargements over a baseline that is never stated, so it's a tad hard to understand what this projected ideal actually is. The women in the study looked at "life-size video clips of computer-generated images of naked men who varied in height, body shape and flaccid penis size, but not in other qualities like facial attractiveness and hair."

Personally, I find computer-generated images very creepy, and I'd hate to be asked to take looking at naked CGI men with larger and larger penises seriously as a "science" experiment. Stuck down at the bottom of the article — which appears in Time magazine — is this: "height was as important as endowment in a male’s attractiveness, while wider shoulders and narrow hips was more important than both combined." In other words, after much obtuse blah blah blah about the importance of penis size and height, we're told that in fact wide shoulders and narrow hips are more important.

What a poorly written article!