Mark Zuckerburg wants to sell you new AI friends

     Jim and I rode our bikes over to Wallace Lake to check out a lifeguard, Laura. I can still see her, 16 years old, in her white bathing suit, gazing over the splashing crowd.
     That sounds creepier than it actually was since, at the time, almost half a century ago, Jim and I were also teenagers. Jim and Laura have been married for 42 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren.
     Kier and I drove to New York City once. We had dinner at Thai Hut on Devon Avenue, then 12 hours straight east, hitting Manhattan at dawn, just as Little Feat sang, "Don't the sunlight look so pretty, never saw a sight, like rolling into New York City, with the skyline in the morning light."

Me, Cate and Robert, 1983

   And Cate, well, where do I begin? She wanted to be one of my groomsmen, but my wife-to-be put her foot down. I did throw Cate a bachelor party when she got married, with our mutual friend Robert, that involved securing a banquet room at the Como Inn, writing a script and hiring actors. Which was only fair, because Rob and Cate did the same for my bachelor party, at the old Get Me High Lounge in Wicker Park.
     Oh wait, that's four friends. I've gone over my limit, according to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, who imagines the average American "has fewer than three friends" — where did he come up with that figure? — and could use AI buddies to hang around with. Which he will be happy to sell us.
     The idea being that we're going to pour out our hearts to our AI soulmates and they will — what? Reassure us? Suggest comfort food to buy on Amazon?
     Is that what friends do? Sometimes they're just there. I've been working on not trying to fix friends' problems. Just listen, nod or say, "That's terrible." Will that be any use coming from a silicon chip? Won't it be like writing "there there" on an index card and referring to it when you're blue?
     There are levels of friendship. Outlined above are the best kind: old friends. There are also new friends, work friends, friendly neighbors, Facebook friends, friends-with-benefits, fair weather friends. Friends who are always there when they need you.
     Those friends tend to be situational and transactional, to quote my friend Lynn Sweet's useful description of Barack Obama's approach to relationships. They can be quite real when we're all in the same lifeboat, furiously bailing. Then quickly fade back on dry land.
     Friends ideally are around your level on the struggle up the greased pole of life. I've had good friends who, inflated with success, float off, as if cash were helium. Loyal myself, I cargo cult them, staring at the patch of blue they vanished into. Sometimes for quite a long while. Years. But eventually I sigh, turn away, resigned they're never coming back. And they never do.
     Some friends are like comets — gone for quite some time, then suddenly back, illuminating the night sky again. My former college roommate Didier worked with Catholic Relief and never calls.

Me, Cate and Rob, 2024

     We would have the best conversations — when I phone. I used to say, it's because if he called me, he'd have to take the rag soaked in sugar water off the lips of whatever emaciated child he's succoring. If he ever phoned, a child would die.
     I feared he just didn't want to talk with me. But when my older boy needed to spend the summer at an internship in Washington, D.C., where Di lives, I called him to ask about the various sketchy neighborhoods my kid was considering. Is this safe? Is that?
     He kept saying, "I have a spare bedroom. He can stay with me." The third time he said that, I responded: If you make that offer again, I'll take you up on it, and you'll be sorry. He did. I did, and both parties seemed to enjoy a fun summer together.
     You go out of your way for your friends. Friendship is not, Zuckerberg take note, a moneymaking scheme. And they do the same for you.
     I only lived in Los Angeles for three months, but Jim and Laura, freshly married, came to visit. One night Laura stayed in, and I took Jim in my 1963 Volvo P1800 to go clubbing. At one point he said: "Neil — you're a writer in Los Angeles. You've got this sports car. I'm still in Berea, working for my dad. Why are we friends?"
     We were at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. I turned and looked closely at Jim, then gave an answer that stuck with me:
     "Because most people are assholes, and you're not."

To read the version in the newspaper, click here.

Ingenious device

     

     The tendency is to throw stuff away. So when I noticed a two-inch tear in the fabric at the collar of a blue pajama top, my first impulse was just to rip it open furrther, for good measure, and turn it into rags. I have plenty of pairs of J. Crew pajamas; this one is well worn, obviously. Move forward.
     However. I could also, I realized, sew it. Closing the rend, well, the top could last for ... quite a bit longer. I went to my wife's sewing box, removed one of those little sewing kits you get at hotels. There was a needle and white thread. The needle was very small and I had difficulty threading it. One, two, three, four tries.
     The needle was cheap, its eye very small. I thought I might have a better needle in my desk, with a bigger, more threadable eye, so pulled open the center drawer. There was a second kit, including a device I had never noticed before, nor realized existed. A diamond-shaped wire attacked to a small round metal tab depicting the profile of a woman's face. It was obvious what this thing did — you push the wire through the needle's eye, feed in the thread and pull it back.
   Worked like a charm. I stitched over the rend twice, to make sure it was securely sewn. When I finished I looked at the clock. It had taken exactly 10 minutes. A men's pajama set on J. Crew is $94. Ballpark the top as half that, $47. Factor in depreciation, let's say the value left in the top I repaired is $15. 
    Meaning, doing the math, that I earned more sewing an old pajama top than I earn writing a column for the Sun-Times, because there are 60 minutes in an hour, and six times $15 is $90 — the newspaper does not pay me $90 an hour.

    A sobering thought. Or a liberating one.  A lot of guys would never sew a rip — I wonder if they might now that they know how profitable it can be.
     Leaving me with only two questions: first, who's the lady? Prof. Google has no idea, guessing Arachne or Minerva, Greek gods skilled in needlework. My brother, drawn into the question, put it to Chat GBT, which came up with an answer that sounds right:

     The woman depicted on this item is not a specific historical or famous figure; it is a generic classical or Greco-Roman-style profile, commonly used in the design of needle threaders like the one shown in your photo.
     This image is a traditional decorative motif, not meant to represent an identifiable individual. The design has been used for decades by various manufacturers, often inspired by classical art or a stylized “seamstress” figure.     

     The second question was: who invented this handy gizmo? Searching patent records, the closest I found was the above, from 1859. If you look hard, it's not the same — a sort of tiny tongs, to pull the thread through, as opposed to a diamond shape wire, which is thinner, easier and cheaper to construct. I imagine it's there, in the records, as a later development, but don't feel particularly inclined to search it out. There were also indications it was cooked up in England a few decades earlier.

    As a rule, I assume that if I don't know about something, nobody knows. Though my wife knew about the threader, suggesting that its inventor was probably an unheralded woman. Though she admitted that, in the 19th century, many tailors were men, so a man could have developed the ingenious device as well. 

    Anyway, I thought, with intelligence hit upon hard times, almost any evidence of human cleverness is worthy of mention. 

Scam Likely

 

     I've carried a phone in my pocket for 23 years, ever since my wife bought me a little Nokia flip phone for my 42nd birthday. A gift that, at the time, seemed such an intrusion into regular life that I considered throwing it in the river.
     But I kept the phone, through increasingly complicated incarnations, to my latest iPhone 12, which I bought instead of a 15 because it does everything I want at a third of the price.
     In all that time, I've never felt the need to shut off notification of phone calls. But since I signed up for Medicare last month, the spam calls have been so frequent, they grew bothersome. Fraudsters from overseas now show a 312 area code, so I don't know if it's a basement call center in Africa or the official I phoned an hour ago, seeking a comment.

     Now, if you aren't in my contact list, then your call gets dumped straight to voicemail. Which itself is a theft — of time. Friday my mother's doctor's office called, going straight to voicemail, meaning that instead of just fielding the call and dealing with it, I got to play telephone tag for a few hours.  
     In the past, occasionally, Congress would provide some kind of relief from scam calls. Yes, enforcement was spotty and they'd find a way rear up again. 

    But now the problem is bad, and will only get worse, as Trump takes his chainsaw to regulatory agencies, that were already doing a subpar job, allowing us to sometimes carry phones unmolested by crude attempts to rob us. Consumer watchdogs. Regulations against spam. Prosecution of rip-off artists. Out the window.

     When the president is selling access and hawking bitcoin and monetizing fear in an administration that is one giant ongoing grift, it might seem petty to focus on a minor inconvenience like spam calls. But they are also the vanguard of more to come, and we must be constantly on our guard. Years of thefts, large and small, are on deck. We have to try not to fall in, ourselves as individuals, while doing what we can to help our poor country escape from the trick we played on ourselves, the pit we've ... not fallen into. Worse. Dove into, eyes wide open. Climbing out will take all we've got.

World Press Day, an ideal moment to back the media

      "We never make mistakes."
      A credo for totalitarianism, echoing in my brain like a clanking chain after seeing the latest MAGA red hat slogan, "Trump was right about everything," sported by President Trump's adviser, Elon Musk.
     Hard to believe people pay $19.99 to brand that on their foreheads. Points for candor, because belief in the infallibility of Donald Trump is the guiding principle of this American era. As if the flesh of modern democratic society suddenly melted away to reveal the grinning skull of 18th century monarchism that was always underneath.

     "We never make mistakes."
     The stock market disagrees. The American people increasingly disagree. To believe the past three months have been anything but a tearing down of American prosperity, freedom, influence, and prestige, you have to suspend all verifiable reality. Accept empty ports. Accept legal residents yanked off the street without due process and shipped to foreign prisons.
     Who will stop this? Not Congress, clapping like seals. Not the courts, already being ignored and ridiculed by Trump, undercutting anyone who points out that the law and whatever he says today are not the same thing, yet.
     “We cannot allow a handful of communist, radical-left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws,” Trump said. And by "our laws" he means, "my will."
     The only avenue open to resist what is happening is to tell the truth, as clearly and frequently and forcefully as possible.
     And who is doing that?
     The media, or what is left of it. Which is why World Press Day — Saturday, May 3 — is extra important. Because if unfettered and fair reporting is valuable during normal times, it is absolutely essential now, if there is to be any hope to thwart gathering authoritarianism. 
     "We never make mistakes."
     Everyone makes mistakes. Some acknowledge it. Tyrants can't. And a few seek to cast light on errors. Since 1948, the Chicago Sun-Times has been in the business of finding mistakes, of honestly assessing and analyzing the world, from the smallest community problem to the largest global crisis. Such as the one we're in right now.
     Like America, we've come on lean times. The Sun-Times has suffered losses — 20% of our staff in March as a cost-cutting move, including the editorial board. Our business model — sell ads and subscriptions — undercut by the digital revolution. Now we depend on donations, as part of the Chicago Public Media 501(c)3 nonprofit. 

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2004: Too cool to cavort 'round the maypole? Your loss

 

The Maypole, British, 1770s (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I smiled, reading this after 20 years. I don't think I could quite manage its tone anymore — late blooming maturity, perhaps, or creeping exhaustion, or sedimentary kindness. Maybe it's an improvement; maybe not. Walter Jacobson did leave Fox, in 2006, and Al Cubbage retired, still as vice president for university relations at Northwestern, in 2018.

     'It's May," I said to my wife. "Where are the maypoles?" She gave me a look of bewilderment. "What's a maypole?" she said.
     Now it was my turn to be bewildered.
     "What's a maypole!?!" I said, almost shouting, spreading my arms. "What's a maypole?" I repeated, lost in one of those bursts of boggled pedantry that people find so annoying in me. "You must know . . ."
     "I've heard of them . . ." she ventured.
     A maypole, I explained, is a tall pole, festooned with flowers and trailing ribbons from the top. You grab a ribbon and dance about the pole: here I did my version of a prance, leaping into the air as best I could and fluttering my hands, little birdie-like, at my sides.
     "They do it," I said. "To joyfully greet the spring." She gazed at me.
     I should probably pause here to explain the chain of logic that led to maypoles, lest readers think I've completely lost my mind. I mocked Fox news anchor Walter Jacobson in my last column and had expected his legions of fans to rush to his defense. So I was shocked when no one supported him. Nada. Not one kind word. Sad, particularly for someone paid big bucks supposedly because people like him. It seemed clear that his time is ebbing, and I wondered how Fox would mark the finish.
     Perhaps, I mused, they could put Walter in a tumbrel — a rough wheeled cart, for the dictionary-averse — and drag him past jeering mobs to the city limits. Tar and feathers might also be involved.
     Too busy watching TV to frolic
     Doubtful, I thought, given our reluctance toward public display. And not just derisive display . . . and here maypoles bubbled up. What a pleasant practice! People dressed in white, decorated in the flowers they collected in a process known as "maying." Gathering in parks and dancing, unembarrassed, around a beribboned pole.
     Before I pronounced the practice extinct, I thought I'd better check. If any place would have them, it is the sororities at Northwestern. I reached an "Ellen" at the sorority council. I tried to pry a few words out of her about maypoles, but she referred me to the NU public relations department.
     See? That's what's wrong with people today. Not just too uptight to prance happily in public. But unable to even talk about it . . .
     I understand why women don't dance around maypoles anymore — it smacks of that purity myth they spent centuries escaping. Though frankly, I think a sign of true liberation would be the ability to enjoy yourself without worrying that if it looks wrong you'll have to go back to corsets and slapping laundry against a rock.
     Not to put the onus on women. Men are even less inclined to giddy celebration — unless of course it's connected with sports. Make a touchdown, you get to do an idiotic, wobbly-kneed turkey dance on national TV. Without the touchdown, any cavorting will tar you as a siss as surely as appearing in leather chaps on the cover of the Windy City Times.
     I defy that. I would rather gambol down the center of Michigan Avenue tossing flower petals out of a basket than spend the rest of my life in lockstep with all the other grim, pasty-faced commuters I see trudging toward the grave through the urine-scented netherworld of Union Station.
     More than once — either after catching a glimpse of one of my steadily receding goals, or at the momentary defeat of an enemy — I have managed, if not quite a prance, then a happy sort of a skip through the newsroom. Frankly, I don't think anybody noticed. Then again, the young grinds who increasingly serve as my colleagues wouldn't look up if a calliope hitched to two circus ponies went bloop-bloop-bloopiting past.
     I found record of a few maypoles in recent years at street fairs and, hope blooming, called Al Cubbage, the vice president for university relations at Northwestern, to double check. He fondly remembered delivering May baskets back home in Dubuque, Iowa, and at least knew of maypoles at NU.
     "It was a big deal for years," he said. "There are archival photos, in the early 20th century, of entire groups of spring-clad women dancing around the maypole."
     Cubbage thought that a vestige survived in the school's annual "Maysing."
     "We had it Tuesday night this week," he said. "The men of the Greek houses serenade the women of the sorority houses."
     That sounded sweet. I imagined the guys, dressed in white linen, playing ukuleles and crooning "Harvest Moon" to their sweethearts. I asked him to check into it; he did, but the news was bad.
     College girls don't need wooing
     "They don't even go serenade the girls anymore," he said, I believe, with a trace of sadness. "They no longer dress up. "
     Of course not. They're too cool. We're all too cool to risk looking ridiculous — though why a grown man in spandex undershorts twirling a skateboard is hip, while the same guy manfully capering around a maypole is not, is one of those cultural insanities that defy understanding. Frankly, I'm sorry I brought the whole thing up.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 14, 2004

Tolstoy offers a primer on Trump's power and its limits

Leo Tolstoy

     "War and Peace" is a great book.
     That might come as a surprise, since most people have only one thought regarding the novel: "'War and Peace' is a big book."
     Also true. My copy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larisssa Voldkhonsky, is 1,215 pages long. The current thought is that such weighty classics as "War and Peace," written by dead white males such as Leo Tolstoy, are something of a scam, a burden unfairly imposed by society to keep young readers from sharper, more relevant authors.
     I promise you that isn't true, as somebody who has read it twice, the second time aloud to my older son. "War and Peace" is the original romance novel, filled with love, adventure, war and, umm, peace.
     The book sticks with you. I finished reading it last 10 years ago, the night before my son left for college. (I began the habit of reading aloud to him at bedtime, with "Alice in Wonderland" when he was about 2, progressed through a variety of classics, such as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." It was a real struggle to finish "War and Peace," not because of its length, but because he was staying up later than I did.)
     "War and Peace" is worth the effort. When Tolstoy writes about a horse, it's like an actual horse canters into the room, twitching and snorting, redolent of hay and sweat, and you remember Tolstoy ran a farm.
     When Natasha tucks herself into her mother's bed to tell the old countess about Prince Andrei, it could be any 16-year-old today gushing about her crush.
     And one section, toward the end, a rumination on power.
     How, Tolstoy wonders, did Napoleon — a character in the book — get 600,000 French soldiers to march 2,800 miles into Russia? In winter?
     "Napoleon gave orders to gather troops and go to war," he muses. "We are so accustomed to this notion, we have grown so used to this view, that the question of why six hundred thousand men go to war when Napoleon says such-and-such words seems senseless to us. He had power, and therefore what he ordered was done."
     Not physical power — the 600,000 soldiers have that. Nor moral power, certainly not with a Napoleon. Instead: "Power is the sum total of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit agreement to rules chosen by the masses."
     Trigger alert: In groping for an answer, Tolstoy grows almost woke:
     "As long as histories of separate persons are written — be they Caesars, Alexanders, or Luthers and Voltaires — and not the history of all the people, all without a single exception, who participate in an event, it is absolutely impossible to describe the movement of mankind without the concept of a force that makes people direct their activity toward a single goal. And the only such concept known to historians is power."
     Being Tolstoy, he goes on for pages, evaluating various theories. But he keeps circling back to:
     "Power is based on the conditional handing over to rulers of the sum total of the wills of the masses, and that historical figures have power only on conditions of carrying out the programs which the will of the people has tacitly agreed to prescribe to them."
     Americans are beginning to realize — took them long enough — that electing a guy who will trash the economy, persecute immigrants, ignore law, scrap our government and set himself up as king, might not have been the best idea. This is not the program they tacitly agreed to.
     As his polls crater, you can see Donald Trump thrashing, shrinking, like the Wicked Witch of the West doused with a bucket. He's ready to prosecute the pollsters, calling them "Negative Criminals."
    We follow rulers because they follow us, leading us where we want to go. This is obviously true for Trump, who plays on the fears and resentments already bone deep. Not a cause, as I've said for years, but a symptom.

To continue reading, click here.

' Do you attend library board meetings?'

     

    Yesterday's column on wanting to keep my Chicago Public Library card was supposed to be a fun ode to libraries. I had not considered the depth of class resentment. Living in Northbrook — which apparently is a Shangri La of wealth and privilege — I have no right to read the Chicago Defender archives online. Not paying Chicago taxes, I deserve no more expectation of enjoying CPL access than a visitor from the suburbs could hope to blithely drive down Halsted Street, walk unhindered into Grant Park or assume a response from a Chicago police officer...
    Oh wait...
    In addition to my being Louis XIV for wanting to use the CPL online resources, there was the wrath of librarians.  This letter, sent to me and to the paper's top editors, was the far end of the bell curve.  Notice how she drags in literally every issue facing libraries and lays them at my feet. The boldface was added by me to a sentence I felt you should notice. The author wanted her full name used, but I made an executive decision, and shielded it. Good library jobs are hard to come by, and by the time we finished communicating — there was much more — I felt some progress had been made. Though it is a stark reminder that the Left eats its own. Beaten by librarians AND thrashed by a university press — I'll be happy to say goodbye to April. The subject line was "Publishing Steinberg's Unverified Lies." 

     I am writing because I am incredibly disappointed in the literal lies recently published in Neil Steinberg's article "Why should suburbanites have to bang on the Chicago library door, pleading to be let in?" The library's reciprocal borrowing policy has been and remains the following: "Reciprocal cardholders can check out books, DVDs and other materials, and use our online resources. Reciprocal cardholders cannot check out Digital Museum Passes or Internet to Go WiFi hotspots, or use OverDrive eBooks, audiobooks and magazines or hoopla videos, music and audiobooks."
     The library is discontinuing eCards, which were never available to suburban borrowers in the first place. Any suburban borrower who has an eCard has one because they falsified their address when filling out the eCard form. The form would not let you create a card without a Chicago address. And I know this because I work in the library where I had to deny renewal to thousands of eCards created with the addresses 1060 W Addison St (Wrigley Field).
     I also know that Neil contacted the library on April 22nd via email and a library staff member clarified that there would be no changes to reciprocal borrowing privileges, so I'm wondering he went ahead and wrote this strange attack piece on the library when he was already told that he can continue to use it access physical books and the online newspapers he falsely laments about losing access to.
     If Mr. Steinberg was truly a "library geek...who takes his libraries very seriously," then he would know that libraries are currently facing an unprecedented barrage of attacks from the far right and federal government. As of April 28th, 2025, there are 130 bills proposed in state legislatures throughout the US that threaten access to library materials. (Source: Legislation of Concern in 2025 - EveryLibrary). In Illinois, there are currently two proposed anti-library bills, IL SB1783 and IL HB2817. These bills claim to be about protecting minors for "pornography and obscene materials," which any librarian knows is dog whistle for any book that includes LGBTQ content or provides grade appropriate sexual education. Mr. Steinberg's own home library of Northbrook was part of a large controversy last year where pro-censorship advocates tried to prevent a screening of the film Israelism and successfully delayed it twice. On March 14th 2025, the Federal Government issued an Executive Order to severely cut IMLS funding, which will put the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled at risk. Unlike Mr. Steinberg, whose library privileges will remain exactly the same, the disabled citizens who rely on the Talking Books program may completely lose access to accessible materials. Those are the real tragedies and threats facing our libraries.
     While Mr Steinberg sits at his desk and writes false information he didn't bother verifying, as a librarian, I'm personally gearing up for the inevitable hate messages we will receive once the library releases its Pride Programming schedule in the next month. I'm hoping that none of them are threats of violence, though if they follow in the footsteps of years past, they will be. Later today, I'll be teaching a class on computer basics to patrons who are building the skills to complete tasks like sending an email or uploading a resume to a website - skills that a very large portion of our library users do not have. These classes are free and open to anyone — no need to have a library card or be a Chicago resident. On the seventh floor of Harold Washington Library, social workers are helping connect patrons to housing, food stamps, medical assistance, and free legal help. No card required. We offer study rooms and music practice rooms, public computers with internet access and basic programs like Microsoft Word, and 10 free printing pages a day. Once again, none of these services require a library card or Chicago residency. The Chicago Public Library system provides a plethora of resources to anyone who walks through our doors, no matter where they are from. We are simply asking that eBooks and eAudiobooks, which cost more than double the price of a physical book and can only be purchased for short term contracts (the library cannot outright purchase an eBook), are only circulated to tax paying residents. It would be nice if instead of attacking those of us on the front lines of the war on information and access, Mr. Steiberg took his energy to fight for the library. It seems like many people take for granted the fact that libraries still exist in a world where those in power are trying to gut every single service that can't be milked for profit.
     So my question to the Sun Times is, why did no one bother to research this policy change closely enough to realize that Neil made false statements about policy changes? And even if Neil's piece was accurate, why would you publish something so incredibly tone deaf while public librarians are facing some of the worst working conditions they ever have in this country? This piece is an entitled temper tantrum. While I would expect nonsense like this from the Tribune, I thought more highly of the Sun Times.
     And my question to Neil is, what are you doing to support libraries besides using our free services and then complaining that we're not doing enough for you when you're not even a resident of this city? Do you attend library board meetings? Do you use your position as a journalist to advocate for more library funding and social service funding (which directly affects the conditions inside the library)? Did you speak out against censorship at your own public library? Will you show up to defend CPL if protestors try to sabotage LGBTQ programming at the library? Every day, libraries get less funding while both the public and the city ask us to do more, but we cannot do more with less. And unless the public starts standing up for libraries, you might find that the information you treasure so much isn't accessible to anyone anymore because of censorship and funding cuts.
     Sincerely,
     GAR., disappointed public librarian