Flashback 2011: So now we’re supposed to heed the U.N.

 

"Daniel in the Lions' Den," by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (National Gallery of Art)

      As promised, here is the column where the Samuel Johnson quotes published in Thursday's blog post appeared. While reading this, reflect on my dilemma — writing about situations which people seem to regard as unique to our current moment which in fact are revisiting the same evergreen problem we've been gumming ineffectively for years and years. 

     So here’s my question.
     The Palestinian Authority wants the United Nations to recognize the West Bank and Gaza as a nation.
     Why?
     Are they suggesting that being recognized by the United Nations means something? That it carries weight and significance?
     If that is the case, on Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. passed Resolution 181, dividing British Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. On May 11, 1949, Resolution 273 admitted Israel into membership in the U.N., declaring “Israel is a peace-loving state.”
     Yet, the Palestinian leadership balks at recognizing Israel as a legitimate nation, hoping to someday magically seize the country. It seems strange that they would put any meaning on a U.N. resolution now, given their rejection of past U.N. resolutions, and the rejection of Israel’s neighbors, which cynically use Palestinian suffering, year after year, as a cat’s paw to bat away their own failings.
     As satisfying as it is to smirk at this hypocrisy, the truth is, given how the U.N. has been hijacked by tin-pot dictatorships, some resolutions are indeed better than others.
     Besides, Israel might have been created by the U.N., but it endured on its own, forging its own legitimacy in the face of implacable enemies. It has its own government and politics, which tacking to the right and afflicted with the extremism that seems so popular everywhere, is sadly unable now to encourage the Palestinians, who at least, with this latest U.N. move, are pursuing their goals in a non-violent fashion, which wasn’t always the case.
     This is another feint in a very long stand-off. The key point for Jews to remember regarding Israel is: The world didn’t like us before we had a nation and an army, they sure aren’t going to like us now, with a nation and an army but, thank God, being liked by the world was never a prerequisite for the continued existence of Israel or the Jews, right up to the year 5772, which begins Wednesday night.

God assures me I don’t need facts

     If you’re wondering where 5772 comes from, that would be years since the universe was created in Genesis, and if you ask why we don’t see rabbis on TV pushing to have that tidbit taught in public school science class, the short answer is, as a tiny minority, Jews just aren’t accustomed to pressing their faith upon non-believers. Being allowed to practice our own religion ourselves is enough of a challenge, sometimes, without trying to dragoon local Baptists into believing too.
     That concept — the idea that faith is something that informs your private life, but not something you use to, oh, decide what kind of biology is taught to children of all religions in your public school, is one of the more important and timely lessons Judaism offers at this fraught moment in American politics, when the entire Republican Party platform seems to be formed, not by facts, but by faith.
     From rejection of global warming in the face of overwhelming consensus, to the notion that government safety and anti-pollution standards cripple business, to shearing gays of their human rights, to stating baldly that increasing taxes on the wealthy would wreck the economy, every other plank of the Republican platform seems based on faith, shored up by whatever stray fact that can be cherry-picked out of the mass of knowledge.
     To be fair, using faith in the public sphere is not a Republican monopoly — the Left has its own set of airy notions, from the rights of chickens to the equal worth of all moral values to the practicality of solar power.
     In fact, rather than just tar Republicans, which is just too easy, I’d like to end with the passage that sparked this line of thought, from a 1758 essay by Samuel Johnson. He sees trumping fact with faith as a universal practice, but try reading the last paragraph without thinking, as I did, “Tea Party!”
      Johnson writes:
     “Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great for the evidence from which opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man.
     “Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots . . . [who] resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow . . .
     “[They] deny the most notorious facts, contradict the most cogent truths, and persist in asserting today what they asserted yesterday, in defiance of evidence and contempt of confutation.”
     Some things never change.
            — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 2011

AI is 'going to be part of our lives for a really, really long time'

"The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin (National Gallery of Art)

 

     Robots, rather than the software that runs them, are what first appealed to Soham Batra.
     “My interest in technology didn’t start with AI,” said the 17-year old high school senior. “It started with robotics. When I was a lot younger, around elementary school, I was very involved with Lego robotics. That sparked my interest. I was thrown into a class where we expected to make them move. We’re just a bunch of 6-year-olds and I was [thinking]: ‘How do I even do that?’ Then I started looking into it and found programming, coding. As I moved to high school the entire AI bubble started expanding, and got to everyone.”
     High school for Batra being the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora, a residential hive of some of the brightest kids in the state. There the senior distinguished himself... well, maybe we should let him explain, the way he did in his introductory email:
     “You wrote last year that the AI genie is out of the bottle. I’m one of the people crawling into the bottle after it, and I’m in high school,” he began. “I do machine learning research on the side. Two of my papers were oral presentations at ICML and CVPR 2026 workshops (one on keeping a model aligned while it keeps learning, one on carrying 3D reconstruction uncertainty into physics simulations)...”
     ICML is the International Conference on Machine Learning. CVPR refers to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. Before we wander too far into the weeds, I should explain why I was interested in Batra.
     Most everything I see in the press about artificial intelligence is disaster-oriented. The leaders of AI, sounding the gong of doom. But kids like Batra don’t see it that way. To him, AI is just “a really cool tool.”
     “The thing with AI, there’s nothing like it,” he said. “I got really lucky, to see the development of AI at a very young age. A lot of people ask if the AI bubble is going to pop... If you try to do your day-to-day tasks without AI, and with AI — you’ll really see a really big difference.”
     At IMSA, students are given Wednesdays off to tend to side projects, and I could fill the column with Batra’s — such as doing research at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
     The project that really impressed me, however, is a simulation he built called “Play the House,” where participants run a casino, adding new games, setting the house edge, all the way down to dangling drink specials. Young people are being seduced into gambling, particularly at colleges, which abandon their responsibility to look out for their charges by allowing betting sites to entice them. The point of Batra’s game, which he made in “an extremely basic version” before using AI to “glamour it up a bit so it was ready to put out there on a domain” is to drive home the insurmountable advantage casinos enjoy.

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Busy Sept. 23

 

     I love writing books. You learn so much, though never enough — particularly when you bit off a big topic, such as Judaism, and have only a few months to furiously chew it down to a size that you and some as-yet-to-be-determined-but-certainly-small group of people can swallow.
      But writing a book does narrow your range of reading. Pretty much limited to the subject at hand. People will suggest other books to me, interesting books, books that I'd like to read, were I not occupied with adding to their numbers, and I'll smile and say "I'll put it on the list" without mentioning that the list is in suspended animation until after Jan. 15, my deadline, at least.
     I've also been neglecting my heroes, such as Dante and Samuel Johnson, who I like to take in regular doses, like medicine. But Facebook, for all its downsides — AI slop, intrusive advertising, constant harping on topics I'm coming to Facebook to be distracted from — is redeemed by the "Memories" section, which I check each morning to see what I was doing last year and the year before, and all the way to ... ulp ... 18 years ago, when I first began using it, at orders from the newspaper.

     Wednesday served up some prime Johnson quotes, which I'll get to. In a minute. After I submit to recounting a few of the other things mentioned as memories for the day.

     What's that line from the movie? "You've had a wonderful life." Particularly on Sept. 23.

     Sept. 23's pack of associations was satisfying bordering on amazing, beginning with the reopening of the Goodman Theatre after COVID five years ago, then including the Symphony, the Lyric Gala, the Goodman again,.

    A dozen years ago: "Fun hanging with Joakim Noah and his mom, Cecilia, at a party raising money for Noah's Arc Foundation."
     In 2012, after being slapped around by the New York Times Book Review, the paper added compliment to injury by winking at me from the Style section, a moment I described thus:
     "Okay, take your New York Times, pull out the Sunday Style Magazine, turn to page 40, direct your attention to the tiny photo on the bottom right. 'A rollicking newspaperman's memoir ... and strong case for Second City exceptionalism...' Right there next to books about China, South Africa and other exotic locales that few New Yorkers would actually visit. What I had thought last week was a NY Times travel blog pops up in print. Not quite the treatment I had hoped for, true ("Kinda small..." Ross sniffed) but still, the mighty New York Times pauses, cocks its head, detecting the faintest 'ping' from somewhere in the vast undifferentiated expanse of nothingness that is the nation beyond the Hudson. It'll have to do."
     Dinner at the Star of Siam, 15 years ago, then bumping into Rick Kogan in the Goat and over to the Tribune Tower to learn about Twitter, the future X. "My takeaway from the whole thing: Keep the day job" which turned out to be rare prescience.

   In 2009, I wrote: "just returned from a late night dinner with writers and editors from Granta" where earlier I had scoured the British Museum (I didn't mention it, but the room where my friends, the Lewis chessmen were on display, was being re-carpeted, and I couldn't go in, though for one desperate moment considered plunging into the bowels of the museum to find them. Gotta go back to London).
     The earliest entry, 18 years ago, was: "is saddened at the departure of his colleague Robert Feder, which will make the Sun-Times an even more grim and lonely place to work than it already is." Have to give him a call — we're overdue for lunch.
     None of which would have prompted me to write this post. Bragging, I can resist, with effort. But Victoria Driver — who I see, from her still-current Facebook page, is back in Chicago; welcome! — posted these 1758 Samuel Johnson quotes from a column which, now that I re-read it, is worth posting in its entirety.  That means you'll read the quotes below twice, if you come back Saturday. Which is okay, because they bear repeating, a reminder that what strikes us as a current depravity is actually a universal:

     “Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great for the evidence from which opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man."
     “Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots . . . [who] resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow . . ."
     “[They] deny the most notorious facts, contradict the most cogent truths, and persist in asserting today what they asserted yesterday, in defiance of evidence and contempt of confutation.”

    The more things change ... 

Is it OK for adults to wear pajamas in public?

     Lately I’ve been walking down the street in my pajamas.
     Not regularly. A couple of times.
     OK, four. Maybe five.
     Which might be a cause for concern, right? Older guy, strolling the neighborhood in his pj’s. One immediately thinks of Vincent Gigante, the Genovese crime family boss who wandered Greenwich Village for 30 years in a robe, pajamas and slippers. Pretending to be crazy, trying to build an insanity defense and keep himself out of jail.
     Not the best company to be in. (Plus it didn’t work; he died in prison.)
     So what’s my excuse?
    Well, I have a few — not excuses, but reasons.
     First Kitty, our elderly dog. She’s 16, or 112 in human years. Without going into detail, her habits are changing. While she used to be a regular 7 a.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. kind of gal, now she might feel the urge at 1:30 a.m., or 3 a.m., or 5 a.m. or, one recent night, 1:30 and 3 and 5 a.m.
     Let’s put it this way — right now my wife is in Washington, D.C., enjoying grandchildren No. 1 and No. 3, while I’m here, tending to a dog. Because we just couldn’t hand the dog to a neighbor with a wave and a breezy — “Oh, by the way, you might need to walk her every two hours, bye!” — as we waltz out the door.
     Second, let me tell you something about Center Avenue. It isn’t like strolling Michigan Avenue in your jammies, though I imagine that happens. Not many people at noon. At 5 a.m. it’s pretty much me. So far, this fashion leap is only taken at night.

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Flashback 2003: Ground down? In a rut? Just go fly a kite

The original 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer (Smithsonian Air & Space Museum)

     Not only do I write for the Sun-Times, but I read it, and can tell you, one of the central joys of being a subscriber is watching Lee Bey hit it out of the park on a regular basis — bam bam bam bam. Monday was his front page story on how the Museum of Science and Industry ... oh, all right, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry — is further defacing itself, not just in name, but in physical reality, by adding a nearly 30-foot-tall, 458-foot-wide "Welcome Hall." The thing is, well, let Lee describe it:

     The Welcome Hall is too tall and much too wide. It promises to sit there like a carbuncle in the park. And its arched grass roof makes the structure resemble a displaced section of Teletubbyland.

     It also eradicates the north lawn of the museum, which not only is visually important, but serves an important civic function as well, such as the kite festival this 2003 column relates, eventually. I apologize for the unashamed bitching of the first 2/3 of the column; I must have thought it was funny, at the time, or at least honest, and was trying to build up to the glorious end, not realizing that half the readers would probably never get there. Plus I didn't mention the facts of the story — Glen Ellyn airplane enthusiasts had spent four years hand-constructing an exact copy of the Wright flyer, and 2,000 people — including my family — gathered on the MSI lawn to watch them try, and fail, three times to get the thing airborne, in honor of the centennial of the first manned, powered flight at Kitty Hawk. The type of event which can't be held should the Griffin Carbuncle be built.
     Anyway, I offer up this 23-year-old chestnut as back up to Lee's scoop. 

     On my way to and from work I often cut through City Hall and the County Building. They're two halves of the same massive, square, block-filling structure, as you probably know if you work downtown. The nearly century-old corridors bustle with genuine Chicago types--loitering knots of cops, engineers clutching hard hats and pastel logs of rolled up blueprints, bright young good government sorts surging out of brass-faced elevators, while the older, shady, yellow-plaid-jacket crowd they inevitably become lope in to replace them.
     Then there's the architecture: marble, curving mosaics on the ceilings, brass frou-frou fixtures that would spark three scandals if the government paid for them now but which at the time seemed simply giving civic life its proper due.
     I cut through the building because it's cheering and, frankly, on some days I need cheering. Nobody who isn't in a refugee camp or a burn ward has the right to complain, of course, but I'm sorry; the routine gets oppressive. Like most people — perhaps like you — life gets dull. After three years in the suburbs and eight years with the children and 13 years being married and 17 years at the newspaper, well, I'll tell you, buddy, on some days the sparkling sense of newness and wonder just ain't there. The last time I walked through City Hall, I barely broke stride, even when a big poster caught my eye — "Mayor Daley's Kids & Kites Festival" it read.
     "Right," I said to myself, eyes forward, hurrying on, squelching the urge to stop and see where the festival was, thinking, "No way I'm dragging the crew to one of Hizzoner's bread-and-circuses."
     I'd rather have jumped on the L and gone out to O'Hare and charged a plane ticket to Fiji, where I'd end up standing at a grass shack bar like a character out of Conrad, gazing for hours at the flat blue horizon, silently nursing my wounds and my dark rum, the focus of glances and whispers. "The Mystery Man."
     Only I wouldn't. The Fijian authorities would track me down after three weeks and ship me home and I'd be right back where I am right now, another gray-faced workadaddy grinding back and forth in his rut between job and family, bouncing like a rubber ball from home hassles to work woes and back again, stumbling each morning from the company of my inert, mutely waving neighbors in the bland, soul-sucking suburbs through the grimy indifferent city, to the stasis of my office and my shrugging, impassive co-workers, then back to the changeless shoebox diorama of Northbrook, now bathed in twilight, to mark time until it begins anew next morning.
     Only, after Fiji, I'd have another $10,000 in credit card debt.
     Fortunately, I have a rule that I would like to pass along, just in case it might prove helpful to you. And that rule, which kicks in like a computer logic loop at these bleak moments — okay, bleak minutes and hours and whole days -- of vinegary unhappiness and boredom, is this: life is not dull or unpleasant, not generally, and certainly not in a great city such as Chicago, and thus anybody finding it dull or unpleasant needs to kick himself in his ample backside. The world does not fade to black merely because you happen to close your eyes.
     That is why I did not stay home and work as I should have Saturday morning, particularly with the book due April 1, a date whose ironic, mocking aspects only strike me now that I set them down.
     I wanted to. But despite the looming due date and the whole house liable to collapse in a puff of asbestos dust, I blew off my responsibilities and took the family downtown to see the Wright Flyer fly. It didn't, merely putted along a track on the windless front lawn of the Museum of Science and Industry, as earthbound as a root.
     But somehow that was all right. After an hour, we went inside the museum, and it was great. Normally, I occupy myself searching for signs of corporate spin in the displays, all of which seem to have been paid for by oil companies.
     But this time I just enjoyed the exhibits, particularly the new ToyMaker 3000. They've set up a faux toy company, and we learned about design and marketing and then were set before an automated production line where, for three bucks apiece, my kids watched their own cool gyroscopish Gravi-tron toys assembled and customized before their popping eyes.
     But that wasn't the best part. The best part came about 3 p.m. We had been in the museum for four hours, which is a lot, even with lunch. The boys were melting down. It was time to go home. Normally, just going outside after four hours in a museum is a diver-breaking-the-surface delight, a return to sunlight and air.
     But Saturday we went out the museum's front doors, and there was the kite festival. I had ignored it, but it had found me. Surprise intensified the wonder of an expanse of blue sky filled with multicolored kites of all shapes and sizes. A brass band played jazz. People of all races and ages enjoyed themselves, flying kites, strolling, picnicking. I can't begin to express the joy of the thing. It was like God reaching down and ruffling my hair and smiling. I stood on the steps for a long time, trying to burn the image in memory, and then hurried after the boys, eager to join the excitement.

               — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2003

At least Joe Biden isn't being airbrushed away — yet

 

   In this job, it helps to have stock phrases. That way, you don't have to think up something new and clever every time you answer an email. Not when something old and clever will do.
     For instance, if a reader writes to me, confused — my lucid, well-reasoned argument is just crazy to them — demanding I hold their hand and explain it to them again, perhaps using a felt board, I barely pause.
     "Sir, I have found you an argument," I reply, quoting Samuel Johnson. "But I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
     Not many actual Nazis write. But when imitators and admirers share their thoughts, to stretch the term, often in an argot I call the Fascist Plural, "We were amused at your feeble Semitic attempt at..." I often deploy a line that is my own, though well worn from use.
     "You know, the whole Nazi thing didn't work out so well for the Germans."

     It really didn't. What gets overlooked in the glare of their crimes — at least 70 million people killed in World War II — this toll includes 7 or 8 million German citizens and soldiers. Quite a lot really. Not to mention their country pulverized and divided in half, with the Soviets ushering in a half century of jackboot repression.
     What I'm really saying is, "Look to history." Because history is a guide.
     We see how hatred blows back in the face of the hater. The old adage "hatred is taking poison and expecting someone else to die," is true, and on a national scale, multiplies. Didn't end well for Hitler. Despots, surrounded by yes men, make awful blunders. Mao's Communists remained in power, so got to write their history. But 30 million Chinese died in Mao's incompetence-induced famines.
     They don't teach that in China. Squelching history is what totalitarians do. And budding totalitarians.
     This past week, the U.S. Interior Department announced it will be putting warning signs outside the Smithsonian, advising the displays within are hopelessly biased (every accusation of this administration is a confession) because they include bad stuff, and not the cavalcade of greatness leading up to the apotheosis of national joy, triumph and achievement of Donald Trump, Imperator Supremus Maximae Gloriae.

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Farm kitten

 

      Cute kitten, right?
      I try to have a point to these posts and columns, but can today's be simply that? A kitten that is cute. Do we really need more?
      Perhaps. There could be more. Cats are certainly having a good week. The first new cat species identified in more than a century, leopardus tilcayo — or the tilcayo tiger cat — was discovered in the Bolivian cloud forest.
     Admit it — just reading "cloud forest" gave you a certain thrill, did it not? Our reward for pushing for something beyond "cute kitten." The very cute kitten above was one of five kittens crawling around a tractor at a farm I was visiting Friday. My first thought was to simply put out my hand and say, "I'll take this one," as my wife and I are currently catless, a condition underlined by minding, for the past month, Casper and Boo, the pair of troublemakers that belong to a certain peripatetic lad, his equally peripatetic wife and their surprisingly-peripatetic-for-a-4-month-old child (peripatetic adj. traveling from place to place).
     But nobody offered me the kitten and though rich in chutzpah, I'm not forward enough to ask, remembering the demands of caring for kittens, which might involve eye droppers and expensive vet visits and general household disruption. Plus she (or he) might not be weaned. Plus I don't think we're ready for one, the departure of Natasha still being too fresh. My wife says she's just not ready for a new cat. And I'm trying to make my life easier any way I can, not more complex.
     There was a moment when all five kittens and their mom were gathered in one spot, but I was slow on whipping out my phone for a shot and they scattered. Just as well. The concentrated cuteness might be overwhelming.