Month: August 2025

The phrase “The Gilded Age” has got me thinking of the man who originally coined that phrase — Charles Dudley Warner. His novel “The Gilded Age”, co-written with Mark Twain, painted a vivid picture of that shallow and corrupt time, when most Americans fell into one of two categories — the obscenely wealthy few, and the many poor folk who were reduced to being the servants of the wealthy few.

In that time, which our current administration is, in their own words, deliberately trying to re-create, white privilege could get you through any door. The word “gilded” — rather than “golden” — was an aptly chosen term to describe a time when ugliness was covered over with a thin layer of shiny metal, with no substance underneath.

Warner, who also wrote the delightful memoir “My Summer in a Garden”, was also the originator of the phrase “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it” (often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain). This very resonant observation has continued to echo within the U.S., generally resurfacing during times of when its government does not serve the interests of its people.

More tomorrow.

There was an article in today’s New York Times about the way the U.S. president is brazenly trying to usher in a new Gilded Age. That was the last time in U.S. history when there was no real middle class – mostly just very wealthy people and the desperately poor people who served their needs, hoping for crumbs and handouts in return. The median age of death in the U.S. was 45, and a disturbingly large proportion of children died before they turned 5 (but not the children of the rich).

The article pointed out that the president is probably enjoying the current miniseries about the Gilded Age, with its focus on the fabulous life of the upper class. But unlike the TV show, which is a fantasy, the economic choices being made by the current administration are heading us toward a repeat of the real thing: Turning our nation into a playground for the rich. For most Americans these policies, if allowed to continue, will usher in a time of darkness, despair, decline in health benefits and other services, and learning to live as a permanent underclass.

In his headlong rush to create a new Gilded Age, the U.S. president seems to essentially be modeling himself on Lonesome Rhodes, the main character in the excellent film “A Face in the Crowd” — a man who rises politically by speaking in folksy tones, while actually harboring deep contempt for anyone who is not possessed of power and privilege.

More tomorrow.

Today I am, for the first time, meeting people whom I have heard about for a long time but never had a chance to meet before.

There is something uniquely exciting about that. Filling in the missing chapters of an ongoing story.

I’m sure that there will be more chapters, even more interesting, to follow.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that a recent pandemic killed more than seven million people around the world, and that many more people would have died except that an effective vaccine was quickly developed and distributed, thanks to the efforts and cooperation of many brilliant people.

Now let’s say, again hypothetically, that a creepy conman is elected to lead one of the world’s largest democracies, and that conman then proceeds to appoint an even more creepy guy as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.

If that second creepy guy institutes a policy to withhold support for continued development of the effective vaccine, then the next pandemic might end up killing a lot more than seven million people. So here is my question:

When that second pandemic hits, one of those two creepy guys has just committed mass murder. But which one?

Is it the creepy guy who squashed the effective vaccine, or the creepy guy who hired the other creepy guy, knowing full well that he might do something this awful? Which one of them has the blood of millions of fellow humans on their hands?

I’ve been thinking recently about provenance. The question of provenance is not a question of whether something is genuine, but rather of whether people know that it is genuine.

Case in point: Some years back I received a gift from an acquaintance of mine who is quite well to do and is very into the history of space travel. He is one of those people who has genuine artifacts from the USSR space program in his house.

The gift was a vial of genuine moon dust. Given who I received it from, I am quite sure it was genuine. Had he held it up in public and said what it was, nobody would have doubted the truth of his statement.

However, the moment he handed it to me, it lost all provenance. It was still the same vial of moon dust, but it was no longer believably a vial of moon dust.

Sure, theoretically I could send it in to NASA for analysis, and they would be able to confirm that it is the genuine article. But who would pay for that, and what exactly would be the point?

So now that vial sits on my shelf, filled with genuine moon dust which has no provenance. But that’s not why I keep it there. It also happens to be filled with something even more precious — genuine sentimental value.

That guy in the White House seems to be considering getting involved in our upcoming NYC Mayor’s race. I can see the appeal for him.

One of the candidates is the incoming mayor, a guy so corrupt that he would likely be in prison by now if he hadn’t made a deal to sell his soul to you-know-who. The other is the former governor, a man who seems to be running only to get past the sordid reason that he was forced from office.

I can see how the guy in the White House would want either of these people as NYC Mayor. After all, each represents an aspect of his own personality. When you sum them together, you end up with his own unique combination of corruption and creepiness.

Meanwhile, their opponent running on the Democratic ticket represents everything he hates: Running on a platform of compassion, standing up for working people, looking out for those New Yorkers who ride the bus every day, for those who work hard to get food on the table for their families, speaking to the openminded multiculturalism that is NY’s great pride and strength.

In short, everything the guy in the White House is trying to destroy. It’s no wonder he wants to get involved.

The silver lining here is that he may actually do it — he be so self-absorbed that he doesn’t realize how deeply he is loathed in NY City. And if he does endorse either of those other two candidates, New Yorkers will respond by voting in Mamdani by a landslide.

When I think of the absurdity of our current reality, my mind often drifts to the 1989 movie sequel Back to the Future Part II. That’s the one where an aged Biff Tannen steals Doc Brown’s time machine to give his younger self a sports almanac that lets him amass a fortune by betting on horse races.

In this alternate reality, Biff grows ever richer and more powerful, and the town itself becomes ever more nightmarish and dystopian, until Marty and Doc show up to undo the damage. It’s sort of like if The Man in the High Castle were about teenagers.

Curious to see how Biff is described on Wikipedia, I came upon this description of the man:

Biff is portrayed as a hulking, belligerent, dim-witted bully who obtains what he wants by intimidating others into doing his work for him, or by cheating.

That, of course, is an eerily accurate description of a certain other well known person in our own reality. Now if only we could find that darned DeLorean and undo the damage…

Many of the current visions for mixed reality glasses position them as a tool for a single user. You have your own private view of digital information, superimposed on the physical world around you, and I have mine.

This mirrors much of our use of smartphones. While you are sitting on the subway looking at something on your phone, the person sitting next to you staring into their phone is probably looking at something completely different.

But there is an opportunity for us to do better. If we establish a convention of symmetrical information — that by default, we are all looking into the same digital enhancement of reality — then we might end up with something more powerful.

Of course, as in the physical world, we might see that digital information from differing points of view. Yet we will all have access to it.

Sure, we can also add asymmetrical information to the mix. You might not want me reading your email, and I probably don’t care about pop-up alerts telling you that your mom called.

But the more we allow symmetric digital information into the mix, the more social will be the experience. Let’s take old fashioned restaurant menus as an example.

When a waiter hands us each our menu, we literally cannot see the contents of each other’s menu. Yet we know that we are all ordering from the same menu.

This is because one important goal of a visit to a restaurant is to have a shared social experience. It’s not a question of technology, but of design — and of the purpose of that design.

I think that we need more social sharing in our future, not less. I hope that as we evolve the technology of smart glasses, our default designs will move into that general direction.

One thing that the COVID pandemic changed fundamentally was the way we meet each other. Before 2020, a meeting was generally understood to be something you did in person, not on-line.

Now that has been flipped. In many industries, people meet on-line via Zoom far more often than they meet in person.

And in a way, that is partially saving us, since our current federal administration is acting much like a second pandemic.

For one thing, the administration is doing everything possible to destroy scientific research in the United States. And by extension, its inane policies are rapidly destroying our nation’s ability to compete in the ever evolving technological space of the global economy.

In many cases, my international graduate students don’t dare to go to leading conferences outside the U.S. these days, because they don’t know whether they will be allowed back in to continue their studies at NYU. But because science has now widely adopted Zoom, those students are still able to participate, although not nearly to the same extent.

Of course they won’t get the same opportunities to meet colleagues in person, to find new professional friends and mentors, and in general to advance their careers and their ability to contribute to scientific progress in the way that one would hope.

But because we had the first pandemic, we now have the tools to limp along until this second pandemic is over.

The United States is going through such a strange period in its history that it may be difficult for future generations to understand how truly bizarre things are right now. To that end, I wonder whether it might be useful to describe our current situation in a way that would be comprehensive to small children.

One traditional way to do this is through nursery rhymes. So here is an attempt to start the process.

You might want to try your hand at it as well. For the children.

Trumpty Dumpty said he’d build a wall,
Then Trumpy Dumpty caused our country to fall.
And all of our women, and all of our men
Could not put our country together again.