Slippery Souls: June 2023

Friday, June 30, 2023

Best Films 2023 So Far

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The Best Films of 2023 … So Far

The Editors June 30, 2023

For too much of film history, the first half of the year has often been forgotten as people make their top ten lists when the calendar actually turns over. It’s a product of studios scheduling high-profile projects in a season that’s often kinder regarding awards, along with that little thing called recency bias. But this might be changing. The last Best Picture winner was a March 2022 premiere, and 2023 has been rich with artistic quality over its first six months. This list was once going to be around 15 titles but easily expanded to 20 and then 25. Honestly, we had to cut some excellent films from it. So consider this just a sample of what the writers of RogerEbert.com have loved so far this year, with new capsule reviews, links to the originals, and information on where to watch them. Catch up with these 25 movies. And don’t forget them in six months.

“Air”

We all know how this story of rich people getting richer ends: Michael Jordan’s deal with Nike is almost as legendary as his career with the Bulls. Somehow, director and uncredited co-screenwriter Ben Affleck keeps it surprising with superb structure, impeccable casting, and performances. (Though Jordan does get some credit as his one request was that Viola Davis play his mother, Deloris, and of course, Davis is dazzling as always.) It’s also important to point out that 2023 is the year of movies about the art of the deal, with consumer product origin stories featuring Blackberry smartphones, Beanie Babies, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Tetris, and more. On the surface, “Air” is about sneakers named for a basketball player. But it has a subtle, deeper origin story, especially meaningful during a writer’s strike with the possibility of an actors’ strike. “Air” is the first film from a new company formed by Affleck and Matt Damon that promises to give a percentage to the people who work on films as Nike did for Jordan, giving cinematographers, designers, and sound technicians a share in the profits of the work they help to create. The medium is the message. (Nell Minow)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

Not only is Kelly Fremon Craig’s marvelous screen adaptation of iconic author Judy Blume’s 1970 masterpiece my favorite film of the year thus far, but it's also the first movie I’ve seen five times during its initial theatrical run. This resulted in me wanting to share the picture with as many friends and family members as possible, including my grandma—a lifelong movie buff—who told me as tears streamed down her face that this is the sort of film that can make the world a better place. For over half a century, Blume has busted stigmas regarding the female experience that the current governor of her home state appears hell-bent on reinforcing, and writer/director Craig has masterfully captured the timeless humanity of her work in every frame. The ensemble contains brilliant turns from Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, and a revelatory Elle Graham, though it is Abby Ryder Fortson’s extraordinary portrayal of the titular heroine’s adolescent bewilderment and spiritual yearning that makes this film a cinematic gift for the ages. Indeed, Abby told me during our interview that the conversations sparked by this movie are ones “we need to have in order to let people know, if nothing else, that they’re not alone.” (Matt Fagerholm)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Asteroid City”

In a time when people think they know Wes Anderson enough to develop AI systems that try to replicate his work, his “Asteroid City” proves not only that his voice and style can't be duplicated or recycled but that it keeps evolving. In this multilayered ensemble piece about an in-universe televised production of a play about an alien sighting at an astronomy convention in a deserted town during the ‘50s, Anderson reflects on life as an artist. “Asteroid City” is as inviting and quirky as most of Anderson's films, but the humor is consistently hilarious, swaying between upbeat and dark. The ensemble cast all pour incredible soulfulness into their immersive performances; Jason Schwartzman, Tom Hanks, Jefferey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Jake Ryan (who I can only imagine Anderson went giddy over that he found a miniature Schwartzman) are standouts. But the film's boldest quality lies in Anderson's existential exploration of life, asking how artists can continue to make art with purpose when processing a significant tragedy. It’s as if the pandemic had Anderson wrestling with an existential crisis, and writing this script was his only outlet. “Asteroid City” is as humanely complex and sincere as his best work. (Rendy Jones)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“The Eight Mountains”

The other day, while filling my car with gas, I was enjoying standing there in the cool misty morning, enjoying the quiet and peace. Suddenly the screen on the gas pump blazed into life with jingles and manic voices, all commercials. I was a captive audience. You can't "opt-out" of these. I resented this. I can't even have a minute alone to myself without being advertised to! This is all part of a larger cultural refusal to allow space for contemplation and stillness. Sometimes quiet and even emptiness leave room for depth of feeling and thought. Current movies sometimes act like that gas pump, afraid to allow the audience a moment to think.

What does this have to do with "The Eight Mountains"? The film's slow rhythm, its quietness, and gentleness, and its resistance to high-pitch emotions or even conflict took an attitude adjustment at first, even for me, who watches all kinds of movies of every pace imaginable. The film forces you to slow down. I was captured by the visuals, the cinematography, the music, and the way it told the story of a 40-year friendship between two very different men (Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi). Co-directed by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, based on a best-selling novel, "The Eight Mountains" has the patience to allow for things in the audience, giving us space and time to be with our own thoughts. This "allowing" space is all too rare. I see a lot of films, and some are forgettable, others are terrible. Some are flawed but likable, and some are very good. It's rare that a film expands in your consciousness after you've seen it, sticking with you, images floating by, a part of you already. "The Eight Mountains" is one of those films. (Sheila O’Malley)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Full Time”

Laure Calamy delivers a powerhouse performance in “Full Time,” a sharp observational drama set in and around Paris. Her force of presence in the role of Julie Roy, a stressed single mother of two who travels each day from the city to the suburbs, is essential to writer/director Éric Gravel’s breathless, furiously focused strain of social realism; both actor and filmmaker achieve an astonishing intimacy and credibility in their depiction of not only the quotidian rhythms of Julie’s domestic and working-class life but the social, psychological, and moral tensions that its economics impose. Entirely reliant upon public transportation to get to the five-star hotel where she works as the head chambermaid, and also to an interview for a job at a marketing firm that would better suit her skill set, Julie faces a hectic week even before a transit strike shuts down the city’s trains and buses, making her day-to-day existence even more fraught with obstacles. The film’s supply-chain drama informs Julie’s increasingly frantic movements—her all-consuming initiative and inner life governed by a sense of pressurized individualism—while remaining at its periphery; in Gravel’s cutting social analysis, her political and personal considerations of labor are suppressed by its constancy.

(Isaac Feldberg)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Godland”

In "Godland," writer/director Hlynur Pálmason uses the history of Iceland's colonial past to craft a transfixing meditation on life's many oppositions. At its center is the relationship between Danish priest Lucas, on a mission to build a Lutheran church in a rural southeast settlement, and his soulful Icelandic guide Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), who the colonizers continually belittle. As they make their journey together, cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff captures the beauty–and the harshness–of this unspoiled land, capturing its raging ocean waves, peaceful waterfalls, and glowing lava in richly textured 35mm shot in Academy ratio. This framing choice adds both intimacy and distance to the film as if it were composed of thousands of vacation slides. This same sensation is echoed in the way Pálmason films his actors, often centering their bodies, positioning their faces to look squarely at the camera, as if they too were about to be photographed by Lucas. Through these two characters, Pálmason contemplates the complex tension between Denmark and Iceland, the Church and the natural world, life and death. The title, “Godland,” is presented at the beginning and end of the film in Danish and Icelandic, probing the audience to contemplate these ever-present dualities of life in a colonized state. (Marya E. Gates)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline”

Daniel Goldhaber’s thriller is relentless because it has to be. It conveys the urgency of its creator that he felt on reading the non-fiction book of the same name by Andreas Malm. Working with writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol, Goldhaber took the study of extreme action to stem environmental trauma and fictionalized it into a riveting story of eight people drawn together by their extreme desire for change. Working back and forth to unpack a complex story of young people with different motives but similar goals, Goldhaber has made a film that simultaneously works as a character study, cultural commentary, and intense thriller. It’s not a movie that preaches; it pulses and hums with the understanding that we are long past the time when talking will save the future. It’s reductive to label this film as a call to violent action. Goldhaber isn’t interested in that kind of exact moral supposition. He merely understands that people need to do something more than talk about change that never comes. We don’t need to literally blow up anything to understand that lack of some kind of action will doom us. And we need to start asking ourselves what this kind of dread is doing to young people in this country, who are so increasingly frustrated by the world around them that something feels like it might explode inside them. (Brian Tallerico)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Infinity Pool”

“Infinity Pool” wouldn't really work as a black comedy or a horror movie if its creators weren't so committed to their depraved vision of bougie privilege run amok. This sort of eat-the-rich satire requires a full head of teeth and an appetite to match, and writer/director Brandon Cronenberg thankfully brought both. Set at a tacky vacation resort in the imaginary third-world country of Li Tolqa, “Infinity Pool” seems more like a natural extension of the to-the-molars style that Cronenberg previously established in both the hypno-hypochondriac psychodrama “Antiviral” and then the body-mod bloodbath “Possessor.” In “Infinity Pool,” “The Northman” star Alexander Skarsgard delivers another all-in turn as James Foster, a violently hungover and creatively blocked writer who stumbles into the wrong crowd, led by Mia Goth's femme fatale out-of-towner Gabi Bauer, and then gets stuck with them after he commits manslaughter, and then pays top dollar to clone himself to avoid the death penalty. The numbing bender that ensues wouldn't be as compelling if Cronenberg—and cinematographer Karim Hussain, and production designer Zosia Mackenzie, and special makeup artist Dan Martin—weren't so maniacally focused on representing James's physical and spiritual bottoming out. Many try, but few succeed at being this fanatically vicious. (Simon Abrams)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“John Wick: Chapter 4”

In almost any other circumstance, beginning a film with a direct visual homage to one of the most famous moments of “Lawrence of Arabia” might come across as wildly cheeky at best or an act of insane hubris at worst. “John Wick: Chapter 4,” however, proves itself more than capable of covering that particular check. In this continuation of this saga about the enormously resourceful hitman on the run (Keanu Reeves, whose laid-back soulfulness continues to mesh beautifully with the insane violence he deals out), director Chad Stahelski takes us around the world, brings in an impressive supporting cast of series regulars (including Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, and the late Lance Reddick) and newcomers (such as the legendary Donnie Yen in a scene-stealing turn) and offers one knockout set piece after another over two solid hours. That is all prelude for its extended Paris-set finale, the most astonishing burst of sustained action to hit the screen since “Mad Max: Fury Road”—an orgy of pure cinema that pays homage to the likes of De Palma and Keaton and manages to continually top itself. And it does so in such a seemingly effortless manner that when it's all over, you may resent most other new action films—even the good ones—for a long time to come for their comparative lack of ambition and execution. (Peter Sobczynski)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Judy Blume Forever”

At first glance, “Judy Blume Forever” is your typical bio-doc about the life of a person whose name you might recognize from your old summer reading list. But this documentary blossoms into something poignant for today as well as a celebration of its subject, beloved author Judy Blume. The film is a nostalgic trip back to those awkward tween years normalizing the questions kids may have about God and periods, it’s a time capsule of when women had to struggle to pursue their own careers separate from their husbands, and it’s a call to fight book censorship, which Blume has done so for decades. With the recent release of the movie adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok’s colorfully-illustrated documentary is an ideal companion piece, rich in heart, a revealing story time with the author on her sources of inspiration. Readers and fans of all ages will be delighted to learn Blume is a kid-at-heart, now eager to share personal memories and rally against the increased calls to prohibit kids from reading what they want. (Monica Castillo)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Knock at the Cabin”

Lots of people understandably take issue with M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, a moody, claustrophobic apocalypse thriller liberally adapted, let’s say, from Paul G. Tremblay’s novel. After all, it’s a film that posits, at least on its surface, that our salvation from a very Christian-looking apocalypse comes from the ritual killing of a queer person. But contrary to that (quite surface, in my estimation) reading, “Knock at the Cabin” feels like a thought experiment testing the purity and strength of queer love and resilience—fighting to stay ourselves in a world that hates us and what we’ll do to save the little corners of happiness we find. If that read doesn’t move you, consider it one of Shyamalan’s leanest and most stylish genre exercises to date. Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography turns a humble woodland cabin into a tesseract of skewed perspectives, and Dave Bautista and Ben Aldridge give impressive performances that constantly teeter between sensitivity and savagery. (Clint Worthington)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Master Gardener”

With his motif of men journaling, journaling, journaling, Paul Schrader has long chased a movie adapted from a book that didn’t exist, a book whose careworn spine they could feel in their hands, annotated, pages bent to make communing with its best passages all the easier. I would argue he’s succeeded twice; once in his script for “Taxi Driver,” his perverse revision of Catcher in the Rye, and now with “Master Gardener,” his tale of a white supremacist whose external humanity and fascist tattoos have to vie for conclusive proof of his soul’s true direction. Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth, a perfect literary name and fittingly a construct, a man that a neo-Nazi invented to escape his past. He has shaved himself to a fine point, a man who exists to say “yes” when people ask him for anything and ensure that acres of flowers don’t die on his watch. Schrader has found a vessel for his lifelong spiritual agony that’s genuinely on the precipice of something risky and dangerous. (Scout Tafoya)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Past Lives”

Woven from delicate whispers of truth, Celine Song’s debut feature summons an incandescent yearning for the paths untraveled, for the versions of ourselves lost to the passage of time in order to give birth to who we were meant to become. Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the central childhood sweethearts turned strangers over many decades and across thousands of miles, are not involved in a love triangle of dueling suitors. Instead, they reunite to mourn a precious shared past that didn’t bloom into a future together. But whether the hand of destiny or the randomness of circumstance is to blame for their multiple separations, the distant memory of who they once were to each other remains alive within them. For Nora, however, this bond exists not as romantic interest but as an anchor that holds together all the moving parts of her identity. The miracle of Song’s debut and the swoon-worthy performances within it is that they give a cinematic body to sentiments so layered and ambivalent they could seem nearly impossible to articulate on screen with such emotional precision. Thankfully for our hearts, the film’s tear-inducing conclusion brims with empathy for every character’s resolution. (Carlos Aguilar)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Polite Society”

“Polite Society” begins and ends with a spin kick. The feature debut from “We Are Lady Parts” creator Nida Manzoor explodes with energy, color, and movement, telling the story of a martial arts-obsessed British-Pakistani teenager named Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) who shifts into action-hero mode after her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) gets engaged to a wealthy doctor who’s too perfect to be real. The obvious touchstone here is Edgar Wright and “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” with whom Manzoor shares a knack for heightening familiar situations with bold, stylized filmmaking. But Manzoor’s sensibility leans more feminist and punk—dig that X-Ray Spex song over the end credits—giving her take on the coming-of-age action comedy an infectious sense of rebellion and fun. (Katie Rife)

NOW STREAMING ON:

“Rye Lane”

Raine Allen-Miller's incredibly enjoyable feature debut proves the power of likable leads. It's such a simple formula, and Hollywood keeps failing to get it right. Two people that viewers not only want to spend time with but want to see end the film happy. It's that simple. And from nearly the first frames of this film, we find ourselves rooting for the happiness of Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah). As they walk through the vibrant neighborhood around Rye Lane Market, their backstories become clear, mostly how they still suffer from broken hearts. They make each other stronger. Yas helps Dom confront his toxic ex-girlfriend; Dom helps Yas do the same. It's an incredibly lean film in terms of plot, but we feel the growth in these characters that needed someone to help them get over the latest speedbump in their young lives. Jonsson and Oparah are cha

Thursday, June 29, 2023

New ‘Separate but Equal’

‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal’

On the first day of class in the fall of 1924, Martha Lum walked into the Rosedale Consolidated School. The mission-style building had been built three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi.

Martha was not a new student. This 9-year-old had attended the public school the previous year. But that was before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, banning immigrants from Asia and inciting ever more anti-Asian racism inside the United States.

At the time, African Americans were fleeing the virulent racism of the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration north and west. To replace them, white landowners were recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. But instead of picking cotton, many Chinese immigrants, like Gong and his wife, Katherine, opened up grocery stores, usually in Black neighborhoods, after being shut out of white neighborhoods.

At noon recess, Martha had a visitor. The school superintendent notified her that she had to leave the public school her family’s tax dollars supported, because “she was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.” Martha was told she had to go to the district’s all-Black public school, which had older infrastructure and textbooks, comparatively overcrowded classrooms, and lower-paid teachers.

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

[Imani Perry: Lessons from Black and Chinese relations in the Deep South]

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism. This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,” referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

[Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action]

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Why are advocates spending millions to expand access to test prep when a more effective and just move is to ban the use of standardized tests in admissions? Such a ban would help not only Black, Native, and Latino students but also low-income white and Asian American students.

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

[Issa Kohler-Hausmann: No one knows what ‘race neutral’ admissions looks like]

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts. According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Then again, voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

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Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Brakes on Cellular Senescence

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New Peptide Puts the Brakes on Cellular Senescence

Pep 14 reversed aspects of aging in cells and skin samples.

Josh Conway

June 26, 2023

Researchers publishing in the Nature journal npj aging have discovered a new peptide that might prevent cells from becoming senescent and possibly youthen human skin.

Senolytics and senotherapeutics

WHAT ARE SENOLYTICS? SENOTHERAPEUTICS FOR SENESCENT CELLS

Senolytics work by targeting one of several pro-survival pathways that senescent cells use to evade apoptosis and cling onto life. One of the challenges in dealing with senescent cells is that there are a number of different populations of these cells in our tissues and organs, each using different pro-survival pathways. It could be that multiple senolytic drugs need to be used to remove senescent cells using different pathways to survive.

The introduction to this paper includes a discussion of the harmful effects of senescent cells and different methods of dealing with them. Killing these cells through senolytics has become the standard method explored in research and development. However, these researchers note that as killing some senescent cell populations can lead to a loss of functions such as wound healing [1], preventing or reversing their senescence through other senotherapeutics might be a better approach [2].

Finding an effective peptide

Senotherapeutics have not been as heavily researched as senolytics, so these researchers sought to help bridge that gap by exploring a library of 164 peptides that are known not to be cytotoxic: they do not kill cells. They used fibroblast cells from a progeric human donor, more than half of which were positive for the senescence marker SA-ß-gal and had large quantities of the senescence-related enzyme ATRX [3] and senescence-related gene expression.

The researchers looked for the peptides that reduced the percentage of senescent cells, then re-analyzed to create a different database of 764 potential candidates. Of this large group, the researchers selected five with the least toxicity and greatest senotherapeutic potential. The best-performing one was Pep 14, a compound that does not closely resemble any other known protein. It was found to reduce multiple senescent markers, although gene expression (left) and an ELISA protein assay (right) did not fully agree with each other.

Pep 14

Pathways and tissue samples

A closer look at RNA pathways found that Pep 14 reversed many of the epigenetic alterations associated with aging. Signaling, longevity, and cellular senescence pathways were all affected in positive ways, which, interestingly, were largely different from rapamycin’s effects. Pep 14 was found to modulate part of the PP2A pathway, which these researchers discovered to be part of cellular senescence.

A close examination of cellular populations found that Pep 14 delayed and discouraged the transition into late senescence, decreasing their proportions in samples. However, it was not found to have any affect on autophagy nor any senolytic properties: it does not kill cells.

Samples of donor skin and 3D-grown skin tissues showed encouraging results even compared to rapamycin. Samples treated with Pep 14 had more organized layers and better skin thickness than rapamycin-treated or untreated samples, and aging biomarkers were also improved. A formula designed to sink into the skin was developed, and it was found to perform better than retinol, which is often used to treat skin aging.

Promising, but early stages

These experiments were performed in skin cells and tissue samples, not mice and certainly not people. It remains to be seen whether Pep 14 can be safely and effectively administered to living organisms at all and if it has effects on other parts of the body. However, these results show significant potential, and we look forward to preclinical experiments and possibly clinical trials of this promising compound.

OneSkin, which funded this study, is a corporate sponsor of Lifespan.io.

We would like to ask you a small favor. We are a non-profit foundation, and unlike some other organizations, we have no shareholders and no products to sell you. We are committed to responsible journalism, free from commercial or political influence, that allows you to make informed decisions about your future health.

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Literature

[1] Demaria, M., Ohtani, N., Youssef, S. A., Rodier, F., Toussaint, W., Mitchell, J. R., … & Campisi, J. (2014). An essential role for senescent cells in optimal wound healing through secretion of PDGF-AA. Developmental cell, 31(6), 722-733.

[2] Kim, E. C., & Kim, J. R. (2019). Senotherapeutics: emerging strategy for healthy aging and age-related disease. BMB reports, 52(1), 47.

[3] Kovatcheva, M., Liao, W., Klein, M. E., Robine, N., Geiger, H., Crago, A. M., … & Koff, A. (2017). ATRX is a regulator of therapy induced senescence in human cells. Nature communications, 8(1), 386.

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 Tags:Cellular Senescence, Epigenetic Alterations, Senolytics, Senotherapeutics

About the author

Josh Conway

Josh is a professional editor and is responsible for editing our articles before they become available to the public as well as moderating our Discord server. He is also a programmer, long-time supporter of anti-aging medicine, and avid player of the strange game called “real life.” Living in the center of the northern prairie, Josh enjoys long bike rides before the blizzards hit.

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Saturday, June 24, 2023

Wagner Group

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

JUN 24, 2023

226

Having been told for months that Putin was fully in control and not vulnerable to coups, his authority is now being directly challenged in a way that may have far-reaching implications for the regime as well as the course of the war. The confidence there would be no coup was due to there being nobody obvious to lead one, given a serious candidate would need to be backed by credible military capabilities.

Now we have a candidate. This coup is being led by the boss of the Wagner mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin. At first the smart money was on his failure because the full weight of the Russian state is against him. Before he made his moves, he was declared a traitor, his offices were raided, and his bases shelled. But the Russian state is inept and decrepit. If the aim was to catch Prigozhin unawares and shut him up it failed, because he appears to have had some notice of what was being prepared for him and so took his own initiatives. If you are going to move against your opponents you need to be decisive. Prigozhin got away (like Zelensky in February 2022).

Instead a column of his men crossed from the Donbas into Russia, without hindrance, moving towards Rostov-on-Don. This is a vital command centre and logistic hub for the war. As he did so his people reportedly hacked into local TV and radio, broadcasting appeals for support, claiming that those who support Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu are the real traitors and supporters of Ukraine.

Putin now appreciates the danger that he should have realised weeks ago. In his Saturday morning address he denounced those stabbing Russia in the back at a time of war, insisted that they would be punished, confirmed that a ‘counter-terrorism’ regime was now in place in Moscow, and promised his people that everything was under control. He managed to do this without actually uttering Prigozhin’s name. The Wagner boss has become Voldemort.

There are many uncertainties about developments on the ground. These are situations when rumours are fertilised and grow rapidly, so it is unwise to talk yet with great confidence about what is happening let alone how events will unfold. But at times like this speculation is unavoidable.

How did we get here?

We are on reasonably sure ground when charting the development of this crisis for the Russian state. The tension has been evident for months, gaining attention with Prigozhin’s frequent complaints that he was being starved of ammunition during the long battle for the city of Bakhmut. At one point he threatened to walk away from the battle unless his needs were met, agreed to carry on when told that he would get his supplies, and then still grumbled that it was not enough. Once Bakhmut was taken, after months of gruelling urban combat, there were further complaints that weaknesses among Russian regular forces had allowed the Ukrainians to take back territory on the flanks, thus rendering the efforts of his men useless.

This led to a wider critique of the quality of Russia’s senior command for being out of touch with the harsh realities of the war, playing down casualties, and talking as if all was well when clearly it wasn’t. Then Shoigu made a push to have the Wagner group and other private military companies put under his direct control. Prigozhin made a big show of rejecting Shoigu’s orders. He was already in mutinous mood.

Through this it was assumed that Prigozhin was sufficiently close to Putin to have some latitude when it came to making a noise. Perhaps it suited Putin for a friendly critic to keep his main military advisors on their toes. Yet was he so friendly? The sharper the criticisms the closer they got to Putin. The accusation that the President was being kept wilfully uninformed by his underlings was hardly a ringing endorsement of his leadership. He was either gullible or complicit.

Nor did Putin make any effort to distance himself from Shoigu. Whenever he speaks about military operations, which he has been doing recently more often than at any point since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, he takes the Shoigu line that all is well, that the Ukrainians are taking a beating, that NATO equipment is nothing special, and that his forces are being prepared for a long haul should this be necessary. One continuity in his pronouncements is that he remains far surer about why the war had to be fought than how it can be won. On this he remains remarkable vague.

Boiling over

It is the question of the war’s necessity that made Prigozhin’s latest accusations so incendiary. Those made on Friday were quite different in nature and direction to anything that had gone before, challenging not only the conduct of the war but the whole basis upon which it was launched. The shots might have been aimed at Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, the commander-in-chief, but Vladimir Putin was clearly in the firing line.

Remember that the pretext for this war was that Ukraine was mounting a ‘genocide’ against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbas, egged on by NATO. That made the invasion urgent, both to safeguard the potential victims and to remove the hateful neo-Nazi regime that was engaging in such terrible acts. The whole sequence of events leading to the 24 February 2022 invasion was orchestrated in line with this theory, starting with the Security Council meeting on the morning of 21 February which was asked whether the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics (DNR/LNR) be recognised.

Putin immediately decided that they should be, confirmed the next day that this covered the classical boundaries of these oblasts rather than the DNR/LNR enclaves, and gained authority from the Duma to do whatever was necessary to defend them. This was followed by a staged incident in Luhansk, a request for help to meet Kyiv’s aggression, and then the full-scale invasion.

In his Friday morning video Prigozhin took down this whole contrivance. He explained that there was no extraordinary threat to the Donbas prior to the invasion, that artillery exchanges were no more than usual, and that the whole business was a put-up affair by Shoigu and other corrupt officers, backed by oligarchs making money out of the military build-up. So damning was the charge that the FSB, the security agency, opened a criminal investigation against Prigozhin. Later Prigozhin was on air again, showing images of the aftermath of an attack by Russian missiles and helicopters on a Wagner camp. He moved even further onto the rhetorical offensive. ‘The evil carried by the country’s military leadership must be stopped.’ The official Russian media denied the attacks, insisting sniffily, that they remained preoccupied with the fight against Ukrainian forces.

What is going on?

Maybe this was an elite fight that got out of hand, a consequence of a military system that failed to achieve unity of command and allowed a number of these private military companies, not just Wagner, to operate independently and according to their own agendas. Since he moved out of the shadows during the course of this war Prigozhin has shown an interest in an eventual political career. He has his own propaganda machine and significant name-recognition among the population. Most importantly he commands a substantial body of men – as many as 25,000 engaged in his current manoeuvres.

The language we have to describe these events often fails to grasp their singular nature. When we talk of coups we imagine armed men rushing into the Kremlin to arrest or kill Putin and installing a new leader, with the main media outlets seized to ensure that everyone knows who is now in charge. In that sense it is not a coup and Prigozhin has insisted that he is not mounting one. His aim is solely to remove Shoigu and Gerasimov and replace the ‘meat-grinding’ strategies they have followed in the war. At any rate following Putin’s speech whether or not this was his intention, Prigozhin is in a direct confrontation with the Russian President. One of them will be a loser.

Prigozhin will have some supporters among the civil and military elite, for his arguments if not for his character, and he is after all not short of funds when it comes to buying favours and intelligence. And while most will take it for granted that their careers and wellbeing depend on Putin’s survival, few can have many illusions left about the mismanagement of this war and the costs it is imposing on Russian society and economy. Most for now will be keeping their heads down, but if this goes much further then there will be demands for loyalty that will carry their own risks.

There has been some fighting, sufficiently serious for Wagner to claim to have shot down three helicopters, but it has not yet got close to a civil war, which would mean that the armed forces were completely divided against each other as if they were confronting an external enemy. On the ground Wagner does not appear to have faced much resistance, even as he walked into the Russian army’s main command centre.

Nor is it an insurrection. Prigozhin has urged people to go out on to the streets to get rid of their ‘weak government’, (‘we will find weapons’). To the extent that they know what is going on the Russian people are likely to be alarmed and perplexed but they are not going to rush out onto the streets and start building barricades. It is certainly not a drive to make peace. At Rostov Prigozhin has taken care to show that he is not interfering with the business of Southern Command as it tries to manage the war, although one must assume that the officers involved must be a tad distracted at the moment. He wants to appear patriotic and claims that he has a better way to fight the war.

It is, however, a mutiny. As such everything for Prigozhin depends on whether his accusations ring true to other troops and prompt them to join his ranks, or at least refuse to start fighting his men. By and large Wagner has shown more discipline and elan than many other Russian forces and it would not be surprising if they gained the upper hand in any fighting. This could soon have a knock-on effect on the cohesion of the loyalist military response.

Prigozhin is clearly not alone in his disdain for the higher command of this war. There are many military bloggers, often extremely nationalistic and pro-war, who are candid about the failings of Russian forces and also blame corruption and complacency at the top. What distinguishes him from others is that he has a large and apparently loyal force at his disposal. Unlike other generals he also has actual victories to his credit, albeit pyrrhic in nature. His men were to the fore in the capture of Soledar and Bakhmut. Elsewhere during the recent Russian offensive there were only costly failures.

Furthermore we know that for many in the front lines, especially those that have been fighting in the Donbas, conditions have been miserable, casualties extremely high, and commanders absent. The Wagner group has claimed that contracted Russian troops would rather be with them than under Gerasimov’s chain of command. Those in the Donbas have supposedly served as part of the LNR and DNR militias, but these have been hollowed out, as their troops kept on getting killed, and now seem to be run as rackets by the remaining local warlords. One of the many tragedies of this war is how those supposedly being protected from mythical Ukrainian atrocities have suffered harsh treatment at the hands of their protectors. Vital cities have been reduced to ruin. Since the first moves in the Donbas to challenge the Ukrainian authorities in the spring of 2014 this region has been impoverished.

What Next?

It is telling that Moscow’s instinctive response is to insist that the mutiny is already failing and that Wagner fighters are seeing the error of their ways and returning to join their true comrades. There is a hope, present in Putin’s speech, that the Wagner troops can be divided from their leader. Denying bad news is the default position of this regime but there is no evidence for now that the mutiny is faltering.

The big question is how the rest of the armed forces will respond. One of the most remarkable videos to emerge so far shows Prigozhin talking in Rostov with Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseev, the deputy chief of Russia's military intelligence service, who were both presumably on duty at the command HQ, and now appear to be effectively hostages. Alekeev had not long before issued his own video urging Prigozhin to abandon his adventure. Intriguingly from the same room Prigozhin’s main ally in the high command, General Sergei Surovikin (incidentally a participant in the 1991 coup against Gorbachev), had issued a similar appeal, delivered more in sadness than in anger. So where is Surovikin now? He is potentially a key player.

Shoigu and Gerasimov, who Prigozhin also claimed to be in Rostov, do not appear to be there now. As they still have Putin’s backing it will be up to them to organise the counter-mutiny. Prigozhin now has to decide whether to continue with his march on Moscow as he has promised knowing that preparations are being made to receive him. The UK MOD claims that his men have already reached a half-way point at Voronezh What happens now depends on the loyalty of troops. There are reports – rumours – of some from mainstream forces going over to Wagner. Many more may be passive spectators. If he can’t mobilise substantial loyalist units then Putin is in trouble. If he can then Prigozhin will be isolated and potentially crushed. One factor in all of this is where the loyal troops come from given that so much of the army is bogged down in Ukraine.

Even if Wagner is defeated quickly, which I would not take for granted, then this is still a big shock to the regime and it will have been weakened. If the confrontation goes in the other direction then all bets are off and panic may start to grip the Kremlin. The problem for autocrats like Putin is that they don’t really know what is going on among their people, and that tends to add to the panic. Moreover once the high command looks vulnerable what will the junior commanders do in their battles with Ukrainian forces? How keen will they be to die for a cause that seems lost? For now those watching events with the greatest enthusiasm will be the Ukrainian high command. There are opportunities opening up for offensive operations that they never expected.

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James

Writes Himbonomics

5 hr ago

Thank you for doing these posts Lawrence. Every single one has been insightful, lucid and valuable. I’m sure all your other readers agree.

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Fiona

6 hr ago

Very interesting. As Sam said last year something along the lines of regimes look impervious until they don’t.

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Sunday, June 11, 2023

ChatGPT took their job

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ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.

Technology used to automate dirty and repetitive jobs. Now, artificial intelligence chatbots are coming after high-paid ones.

By Pranshu Verma and Gerrit De Vynck

June 2, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Eric Fein at his home in Bloomingdale, Ill. Fein lost many of his writing jobs to ChatGPT and plans to attend the College of DuPage technical school in the fall to study heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. (Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post)

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When ChatGPT came out last November, Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter in San Francisco, didn’t think too much about it. Then articles about how to use the chatbot on the job began appearing on internal Slack groups at the tech start-up where she worked as the company’s only writer.

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Over the next few months, Lipkin’s assignments dwindled. Managers began referring to her as “Olivia/ChatGPT” on Slack. In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear.

“Whenever people brought up ChatGPT, I felt insecure and anxious that it would replace me,” she said. “Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those anxieties were warranted and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.”

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Understanding AI

What is artificial intelligence?

AI is an umbrella term for any form of technology that can perform “intelligent” tasks. For decades, AI has been mostly used for analysis — trawling huge sets of data to find patterns. But a boom in generative AI, which uses this pattern-matching to create words, images and sounds, has opened up new possibilities.

What is generative AI?

The technology backs chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generators, such as Dall-E, which can create words, sounds, images and video, sometimes at a level of sophistication that mimics human creativity. This technology can’t “think” like humans do; it can find patterns and imitate speech, but it can’t interpret meanings.

How does AI learn?

AI can “learn” without programmer to tell it each step, a process called machine learning. It uses neural networks, mathematical systems modeled after the human brain, to find connections in huge data sets. The poems or images it makes may seem creative, but it’s really pattern matching based on which word is most likely to come next.

Is AI dangerous?

The boom in generative AI brings many exciting possibilities — but also concerns that it might cause harm. Chatbots can sometimes spread misinformation or “hallucinate” by producing information that sounds plausible, but is irrelevant, nonsensical or entirely false. It can be used to make fake images of real people, called deepsfakes.

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Some economists predict artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, in a cataclysmic reorganization of the workforce mirroring the industrial revolution.

For some workers, this impact is already here. Those who write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools such as chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work.

Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.

Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter in San Francisco. (Olivia Morfit)

“We’re really in a crisis point,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California in Los Angeles specializing in digital labor. “[AI] is coming for the jobs that were supposed to be automation-proof.”

See why AI like ChatGPT has gotten so good, so fast

Artificial intelligence has rapidly increased in quality over the past year, giving rise to chatbots that can hold fluid conversations, write songs and produce computer code. In a rush to mainstream the technology, Silicon Valley companies are pushing these products to millions of users and — for now — often offering them free.

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AI and algorithms have been a part of the working world for decades. For years, consumer-product companies, grocery stores and warehouse logistics firms have used predictive algorithms and robots with AI-fueled vision systems to help make business decisions, automate some rote tasks and manage inventory. Industrial plants and factories have been dominated by robots for much of the 20th century, and countless office tasks have been replaced by software.

But the recent wave of generative artificial intelligence — which uses complex algorithms trained on billions of words and images from the open internet to produce text, images and audio — has the potential for a new stage of disruption. The technology’s ability to churn out human-sounding prose puts highly paid knowledge workers in the crosshairs for replacement, experts said.

Human or ChatGPT? AI is getting good.

4:42

Reporter Danielle Abril tests columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler to see if he can tell the difference between an email written by her or ChatGPT. (Video: Monica Rodman/The Washington Post)

“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.”

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In March, Goldman Sachs predicted that 18 percent of work worldwide could be automated by AI, with white-collar workers such as lawyers at more risk than those in trades such as construction or maintenance. “Occupations for which a significant share of workers’ time is spent outdoors or performing physical labor cannot be automated by AI,” the report said.

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The White House also sounded the alarm, saying in a December report that “AI has the potential to automate ‘nonroutine’ tasks, exposing large new swaths of the workforce to potential disruption.”

ChatGPT "hallucinates." Some researchers worry it isn’t fixable.

But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. He noted that jobs such as copywriting, document translation and transcription, and paralegal work are particularly at risk, because they include tasks that are easily done by chatbots. High-level legal analysis, creative writing or art may not be as easily replaceable, he said, because humans still outperform AI in those areas.

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“Think of AI as generally acting as a high-end intern,” he said. “Jobs that are mostly designed as entry-level jobs to break you into a field where you do something kind of useful, but it’s also sort of a steppingstone to the next level — those are the kinds of jobs under threat.”

Eric Fein ran his content-writing business for 10 years, charging $60 an hour to write everything from 150-word descriptions of bath mats to website copy for cannabis companies. The 34-year-old from Bloomingdale, Ill., built a steady business with 10 ongoing contracts, which made up half of his annual income and provided a comfortable life for his wife and 2-year-old son.

But in March, Fein received a note from his largest client: His services would no longer be needed because the company would be transitioning to ChatGPT. One by one, Fein’s nine other contracts were canceled for the same reason. His entire copywriting business was gone nearly overnight.

“It wiped me out,” Fein said. He urged his clients to reconsider, warning that ChatGPT couldn’t write content with his level of creativity, technical precision and originality. He said his clients understood that, but they told him it was far cheaper to use ChatGPT than to pay him his hourly wage.

Fein was rehired by one of his clients, who wasn’t pleased with ChatGPT’s work. But it isn’t enough to sustain him and his family, who have a little over six months of financial runway before they run out of money.

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Now, Fein has decided to pursue a job that AI can’t do, and he has enrolled in courses to become an HVAC technician. Next year, he plans to train to become a plumber.

“A trade is more future-proof,” he said.

The debate over whether AI will destroy us is dividing Silicon Valley

Companies that replaced workers with chatbots have faced high-profile stumbles. When the technology news site CNET used artificial intelligence to write articles, the results were riddled with errors and resulted in lengthy corrections. A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT for a legal brief cited numerous fictitious cases. And the National Eating Disorders Association, which laid off people staffing its helpline and reportedly replaced them with a chatbot, suspended its use of the technology after it doled out insensitive and harmful advice.

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Roberts said that chatbots can produce costly errors and that companies rushing to incorporate ChatGPT into operations are “jumping the gun.” Because they work by predicting the most statistically likely word in a sentence, they churn out average content by design. That provides companies with a tough decision, she said: quality vs. cost.

“We have to ask: Is a facsimile good enough? Is imitation good enough? Is that all we care about?” she said. “We’re going to lower the measure of quality, and to what end? So the company owners and shareholders can take a bigger piece of the pie?”

Lipkin, the copywriter who discovered she’d been replaced by ChatGPT, is reconsidering office work altogether. She initially got into content marketing so that she could support herself while she pursued her own creative writing. But she found the job burned her out and made it hard to write for herself. Now, she’s starting a job as a dog walker.

“I’m totally taking a break from the office world,” Lipkin said. “People are looking for the cheapest solution, and that’s not a person — that’s a robot.”

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