My mother, Sherry, died 29 years ago today. On this birthday she would have been 100.

Here’s what my sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis (“Sue” to us) posted on Facebook about her.

This would have been the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Sherry Weinberger, Andy and Ellen and David’s mom. She was a magnificent lady, a left-liberal activist, a folk guitarist and guitar teacher, a gifted friend. She used to put out a meal for twenty on the lake house porch, wearing hoop earrings a lavender and blue outfit, drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette. Then the party started. She was what they call a balabusta in the home and an organizer in the neighborhood. I, like dozens of others, was fascinated and lifted up by her generosity and vivacity.  

Sue captures much of my mother in those few details. You won’t be surprised to hear that Sue is a wonderful and respected novelist.

I am loathe to say more because I won’t get it right, but I’m going to anyway.

She was a wonderful mother who sacrificed much to devote herself to her children. That includes giving up on a career she had just begun at The New Republic, which was at that time the intellectual center of the Left.

She was so, so social, hospitable to all, making parties but never pushing her way to the center of them. She was happy to talk, and laugh, and wouldn’t say no to a little flirting. So many people thought they were very special to her. And they were.

And when we said she was a balabusta, I don’t think we meant it in its actual Yiddish meaning (“homemaker”) which I just learned, but rather as a ball-buster: She didn’t take shit from anyone, especially from men. In the early 1950s (I was born in 1950) she was well-aware of the inequality among the sexes (as we used to say), including in her own marriage.

As Sue notes, she taught folk guitar, and she did so in the 1950s before the big Folk Music Boom in the early ’60s when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary were stars, and there were actual folk singing shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig! on the national networks.

She cared about folk music because it gave literal voice to Black people and to all the workers whose lives are so hard that we avert our eyes. She cared about folk music because it brought the world’s cultures into our community and household. She cared about folk music because it gave her work while being a “homemaker” and mother. She cared about folk music because it gave her a little financial independence from Dad. She cared about folk music because she was a proficient guitarist with a beautiful voice.

She cared about many other things and people, but always with the same mix of personal connection, love of differences, and a commitment to a world in which there is more music, more love, and more justice.

PS: She hated Donald Trump from the moment he got the public’s eye. I wouldn’t know how to break it to her that the worst person in America actually became president.

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There are no spoilers in what follows because I couldn’t spoil Tenet if I tried.

I am a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. Several of his movies rank among my favorites, including Memento, Inception, and Interstellar. But I like and admire all of his movies for their ideas, technical virtuosity, music, and sometimes unnecessary cleverness.

But I’ve just watched Tenet for the second time and it’s a bad movie. Oh, sure, it’s got some good points, but it doesn’t make sense to anyone except Nolan, and it is not fun to watch. It’s as if he decided to really outdo himself this time, so he goes over the top via a path that leads up his own ass.

Remember The Prestige? It’s structured like a magic trick (sorry, illusion) with the “prestige” — the big payoff — at the end. Tenet has a couple of moments at the end that made me say “Oh, cool!” to myself. But that was followed by a “Wait. What?” They don’t see how they make any stinking sense.

Except I am sure they do to Nolan. This is a prestige that only works for the magician. Which means it’s not a good trick. Sorry, illusion. In fact, there’s exposition at the end to explain the movie’s prestige, which is like a magician, “So, here’s why you should have been amazed at what I just did. “

Despite the staggering amount of exposition in the movie — so very much exposition — the initial premise introduced after the opening set piece has consequences that I cannot make sense of. the movie seem at times to operate under arbitrary but convenient rules.

What’s worse, the movie fails — I’n my opinion, d’uh — as a movie. While John David Washington is good in the lead role, there really isn’t much at stake for him. I mean, the entire world is under threat, but we’re given little reason to care about him personally. The only person we actually care about is one of the very few women in the movie, a damsel in distress. (Really.) She’s paired with a Russian oligarch (really) that Kenneth Branagh struggles to give even one dimension. Could not be more cartoony. I did develop an affection for Robert Pattinson’s role, even though his character is also terribly underdeveloped; he’s there to get things done so the movie can move ahead even though they’d be impossible in real life. Because of my No Spoilers policy, here’s a made-up example: If Washington’s character — called only “The Protagonist” for reasons that make me think I’m missing the entire point — needed an armed tank to show up in Times Square, Pattinson would say “How big?”.

Nolan had a cool idea for a movie with a science fiction premise: “Suppose X”. X is promising. But then he had to make up a plot in which to deploy his idea. The plot is cliched and results in completely arbitrary set pieces that could have been replaced with an infinite number of set pieces without having any effect on anything else in the movie. Another made-up example: The bad guy could be smuggling a McGuffin through Mardi Gras, a White House briefing, or a climbing expedition in the Alps. And that plot and those set pieces are the bulk of the movie.

There are scenes and moments to like about Tenet because it is, after all, a Christopher Nolan movie. But I am not tempted to see it a third time, and am a little pissed off that I thought a second watching would help.

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This probably is not about what you think it is. It doesn’t take a moral stand about Parler or about its being chased off the major platforms and, in effect, off the Internet. Yet the title of this post is accurate: it’s about why moral frameworks don’t help us solve problems like those posed by Parler.

Traditional moral frameworks

The two major philosophical frameworks we use in the West to assess moral situations are consequentialism (mainly utilitarianism) and deontology. Utilitarianism assesses the morality of a choice based on the cumulative amount of happiness it will bring across the entire population (or how much it diminishes unhappiness). Deontology applies moral principles to cases, such as “It’s wrong to steal.”

Each has its advantages, but I don’t see how to apply them in a way that settles the issues about Parler. Or about most other things.

For example, from almost its very beginning (J.S. Mill, but not Bentham, as far as I remember), utilitarians have had to institute a hierarchy of pleasures in order to meet the objection that if we adopt that framework we should morally prefer policies that promote drunkenness and sex, over funding free Mozart concerts. (Just a tad of class bias showing there :) Worse, in a global space, do we declare a small culture’s happiness of less worth than those of a culture with a larger population? Should we declare a small culture’s happiness of less worth? Indeed, how do we apply utilitarianism to a single culture’s access to, for example,  pornography?

That last question raises a different, and common, objection with utilitarianism: suppose overall happiness is increased by ignoring the rights of others? It’s hard for utilitarianism to get over the conclusion that slavery is ok  so long as the people held slaves are greatly outnumbered by those who benefit from them. The other standard example is a contrivance in which a town’s overall happiness is greatly increased by allowing a person known by the authorities to be innocent to nevertheless be hanged. That’s because it turns out that most of us have a sense of deontological principles: We don’t care if slavery or hanging innocent people results in an overall happier society because it’s wrong on principle. 

But deontology has its own issues with being applied. The closest Immanuel Kant — the most prominent deontologist — gets to putting some particular value into his Categorical Imperative is to phrase it in terms of treating people as ends, not means, i.e., valuing autonomy. Kant argues that it is central because without it we can’t be moral creatures. But it’s not obvious that that is the highest value for humans especially in difficult moral situations,We can’t be fully moral without empathy nor is it clear how and when to limit people’s autonomy. (Many of us believe we also can’t be fully moral without empathy, but that’s a different argument.)

The relatively new  — 30 year old  — ethics of care avoids many of the issues with both of these moral frameworks by losing primary interest in general principles or generalized happiness, and instead thinking about morality in terms of relationships with distinct and particular individuals to whom we owe some responsibility of care; it takes as its fundamental and grounding moral behavior the caring of a mother for a child.  (Yes, it recognizes that fathers also care for children.) It begins with the particular, not an attempt at the general.

Applying the frameworks to Parler

So, how do any of these help us with the question of de-platforming Parler?

Utilitarians might argue that the existence of Parler as an amplifier of hate threatens to bring down the overall happiness of the world. Of course, the right-wing extremists on Parler would argue exactly the opposite, and would point to the detrimental consequences of giving the monopoly platforms this power.  I don’t see how either side convinces the other on this basis.

Deontologists might argue that the de-platforming violates the rights of the users and readers of Parler. the rights threatened by fascismOther deontologists  might talk about the rights threatened by the consequences of the growth of fascism enabled by Parler. Or they might simply make the utilitarian argument. Again, I don’t see how these frameworks lead to convincing the other side.

While there has been work done on figuring out how to apply the ethics of care to policy, it generally doesn’t make big claims about settling this sort of issue. But it may be that moral frameworks should not be measured by how effectively they convert opponents, but rather by how well they help us come to our own moral beliefs about issues. In that case, I still don’t see how they much help. 

If forced to have an opinion about Parler  — andI don’t think I have one worth stating  — I’d probably find a way to believe that the harmful consequences of Parler outweigh hindering the  human right of the participants to hang out with people they want to talk with and to say whatever they want. My point is definitely not that you ought to believe the same thing, because I’m very uncomfortable with it myself. My point is that moral frameworks don’t help us much.

And, finally, as I posted recently, I think moral questions are getting harder and harder now that we are ever more aware of more people, more opinions, and the complex dynamic networks of people, beliefs, behavior, and policies.

* * *

My old friend AKMA — so learned, wise, and kind that you could plotz — takes me to task in a very thought-provoking way. I reply in the comments.

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Twitter’s reasons for permanent banning Donald Tr*mp acknowledge a way in which post-modernists (an attribution that virtually no post-modernist claims, so pardon my short hand) anticipated the Web’s effect on the relationship of author and reader. While the author’s intentions have not been erased, the reader’s understanding is becoming far more actionable.

Twitter’s lucid explanation of why it (finally) threw Tr*mp off its platform not only looks at the context of his tweets, it also considers how his tweets were being understood on Twitter and other platforms. For example:

“President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate…” 

and

The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

and

The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” …

Now, Twitter cares about how his tweets are being received because that reception is, in Twitter’s judgment, likely to incite further violence. That violates Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy, so I am not attributing any purist post-modern intentions (!) to Twitter.

But this is a pretty clear instance of the way in which the Web is changing the authority of the author to argue against misreadings as not their intention. The public may indeed be misinterpreting the author’s intended meaning, but it’s now clearer than ever that those intentions are not all we need to know. Published works are not subservient to authors.

I continue to think there’s value in trying to understand a work within the context of what we can gather about the author’s intentions. I’m a writer, so of course I would think that. But the point of publishing one’s writings is to put them out on their own where they have value only to the extent to which they are appropriated — absorbed and made one’s own — by readers.

The days of the Author as Monarch are long over because now how readers appropriate an author’s work is even more public than that work itself.

(Note: I put an asterisk into Tr*mp’s name because I cannot stand looking at his name, much less repeating it.)

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I’m drinking more during this pandemic than I ever had: I’m up to having a cocktail 3-4 times a week. Pre-pandemic I’d have perhaps two a month, so this is statistically a serious increase, but does not yet concern me or my wife.

There aren’t a lot of cocktails that I like, although there are many that I’ll drink. I actively enjoy Negronis, but now I feel obliged to point out that I started drinking them about 6 months before they became hip. I can promise you I am not hip. Well, in my own way…never mind.

But here’s a drink I invented in the sense that people have undoubtedly been drinking them forever but no one told me. I call it:

The Orange Bee Martini

Pour a good slosh of Barr Hill Gin into a class larger than that slosh. I’m not (just) being a snob here. Barr Hill uses honey as a “botanical”, giving it a honey flavor without actually being sweet. That makes it a lousy gin for a plain old non-hip martini that the squares drink, but it’s good for my new ultra-hip libation.

Add less of a slosh of white vermouth. Until I achieved adulthood around the age of 55, I disliked martinis because I thought you were supposed to drink them in the sophisticated “dry” fashion by asking the bartender to drink a shot of vermouth and then breathe out through his nose into the shaker. It turns out that I’m not that crazy about gin, although the olives were good.

So now I put about half as much vermouth as gin into my martinis. I can do that because I’m no longer a child of 54.

Then add even less of a slosh, but more than a hint, of the orange liqueur that you bought to bake with and haven’t used since because how often do you make a cake soaked in orange liqueur? If your answer is more than twice a year, then you have a problem. With orange cake, not with alcohol.

Mix it all in a glass and put the glass in the freezer for an hour because alcohol tastes terrible.

Enjoy!

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When I was 10 and my next-door-neighbor, David Stolzenberg, was probably 13, we wrote a short story and submitted it to Boys’ Life, the magazine for Boy Scouts.

In an ancient box in a forgotten corner of our basement, I found the rejection letter. It is, I believe, my very first, kicking off a series of maybe a thousand. The tape marks in the corners suggest that I this pasted into a scrapbook at one point in my youth.

I don’t remember what the story was about. Maybe science fiction.

I do remember David well, though. He became a doctor, married, had children, and died in his thirties of cancer. I am still processing that.

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I move my laptop from my home office to other rooms of the house after I realize, as I do at least twice a day, that my office looks like a hoarder’s storage locker. Rather than cleaning it up, I decided to make it slightly easier for me to make those moves.

The problem is that if I move my MacBookPro (2019) out of bluetooth range of my Apple MagicMouse, the trackpad doesn’t accept input. And that means I have to trudge the entire 15 feet back to my office to get my mouse. That obviously is simply not acceptable, so I instead spent several hours writing a shell script that I can run in a terminal that will toggle my mouse (or any other bluetooth device) on or off.

It requires you to install blueutil, an open source set of command line tools for managing your bluetooth connections. (Thank you, Ivan Kuchin). To install blueutil, in a terminal type “brew install blueutil”. If you don’t have Homebrew installed, you’ll get an error message, in which case install Homebrew. It’s very useful.

You also will need to know the bluetooth ID of the device you want to control. You can find that by going to your Mac’s Settings and clicking on the bluetooth icon, or by running blueutil in a terminal with the parameter “–paired.”

To use this script, copy and paste it into a text editor and save it with a “.sh” extension. To let your Mac know that this is a text file that should be run, not just read, you need to go to a terminal and change its permissions to 755. (For instructions on how to do that and how to run it from a terminal, check here.) (I have bound the crl-alt-com B key to running it, thanks to KeyboardMaestro.)

Note that I am a bad writer of shell scripts. I had to look up just about everything except how to write a comment. Have some compassion, people! And if not that, how about some pity?

#!/bin/zsh
# Toggles a device's bluetooth activity on and off.
# Useful for when you move out of range of your bluetooth
#   mouse and your Mac's trackpad becomes 
#   unresponsive. For example.
# Requires installing Blueutil:
# https://github.com/toy/blueutil/blob/master/README.md
#
# I post this as Creative Commons Zero, i.e., public domain. 
# David Weinberger, Sept. 24, 2020 [email protected]

# Add your device's bluetooth ID here.
# If you don't know it, run "blueutil --paired"
# in a terminal window to find out.
ID="04-4b-ed-d2-ef-23" # Just an example

echo "Toggles bluetooth device. Requires blueutils be installed.";
echo "USAGE: bluetoggle. No parameters";
echo "Device ID: ${ID}"
echo "--------";

# is the device connected?
# Run blueutil and returns the text.
STATUS=`blueutil --paired`

# is the ID mentioned in the status?
# If not, then it hasn't been connected, so there's
# nothing for this  script to do
if [[ $STATUS != *"${ID}"* ]]
then
    echo "Device not found. Edit bluetoggle.sh to add device's bluetooth ID. Exiting."
    exit
fi

# Look for the ID followed by ", not connected"
if [[ $STATUS == *"${ID}, not"* ]]
then
    echo "${ID} is not connected. Connecting..."
    CL=`blueutil --connect ${ID}` # Create command string
    NEWSTATUS=`${CL}` # Run the command
else
    echo "Disconnecting device..."
    CL=`blueutil --disconnect ${ID}`
    NEWSTATUS=`${CL}`
fi

exit

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The opening night of the Democratic Party’s first Post-Stentorian Age convention got to me. Of course I loved Michelle Obama’s profoundly righteous talk. But what really got to me were the faces we saw. It was on purpose and it worked. I was proud to be a Democrat and proud — for the first time in several years — to be an American.

No, we are not unique in our diversity. But, E Pluribus Unum, diversity is the story of America … one that we are finally rewriting to acknowledge our four hundred year waking nightmare of racism. To say that we did not live up to our self-image and ideals is to mumble “I think I smell something” in a theater that burned all but to the ground. And note the implicit racism of my unassuming “we” in that sentence.

The Democrats made a proper show of the party’s commitment to diversity, to the point that when a small group of youngsters — who turned out to be Biden’s grandchildren — recited the Pledge of Allegiance, I was shocked to see a screen with only white faces on it.

We all know it’s time to turn the Party over to people of color. More than time. Yes, we are nominating an old white man because we’re afraid in this exceptional election to stray from what we perceive as the safest possible choice. I understand that. But now the Democrats have the beginnings of a diverse bench to draw from. Good.

No more excuses. Time’s up.

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Google has just launched a new podcast that Yannick Assogba (twitter: @tafsiri) and I put together. Yannick is a software engineer at Google PAIR where I was a writer-in-residence for two years, until mid-June. I am notably not a software engineer. Throughout the course of the nine episodes, Yannick helps me train machine learning models to play Tic Tac Toe and then a much more complex version of it. Then our models fight! (Guess who wins? Never mind.)

This is definitely not a tutorial. We’re focused on getting beneath the metaphors we usually use when talking about machine learning. In so doing, we keep coming back to the many human decisions that have to be made along the way.

So the podcast is for anyone who wants to get a more vivid sense of how ML works and the ways in which human intentions and assumptions shape each and every ML application. The podcast doesn’t require any math or programming skills.

It’s chatty and fun, and full of me getting simple things wrong. And Yannick is a fantastic teacher. I miss seeing him every day :(

All nine episodes are up now. They’re about 25 mins each. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts, so long as it carries ours.

Podcast: https://pair.withgoogle.com/thehardway/

Two-minute teaser:  https://share.transistor.fm/s/6768a641

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I just listened to an excellent Marc Maron interview with Jerry Seinfeld.

When I first saw Seinfeld’s post-series 2002 documentary, Comedian, I really enjoyed it, although like many, I was made queasy by the film’s portrayal of the far lesser-known comedian Orny Adams — talk about punching down! Seinfeld’s idolization of Bill Cosby also has not aged well, to put it mildly; I don’t know how widely known Cosby’s decades of drugging and raping women were — Tina Fey was making references to it by 2005 — and I don’t know the degree to which Seinfeld should have known, should have heard, should have listened.

So within those two large moral bookends, one of which is overwhelming, what I liked about the documentary was its portrayal of the craft of comedy. I’m not the biggest fan of Seinfeld’s stand-up, but “I admire his dedication to, and clarity about, the work of getting a laugh”I admire his dedication to, and clarity about, the work of getting a laugh. I’ve always been interested in this, and if you are too, in addition to Maron’s WTF podcast, I recommend Jesse David Fox’s Good One.

Maron’s interview revealed rifts between the him and Seinfeld. Maron thinks, I believe, those rifts expose weaknesses in Seinfeld. I think they’re strengths.

First, Maron wants comedy to make a difference personally, socially, and politically. For him, subject matter matters. Not to Seinfeld. He’s famous for “observational” humor that gets laughs about the little things in life. In fact, part of observational humor’s humor is its finding humor in the trivia of everyday life. As Seinfeld says repeatedly in the interview, all that matters is the laugh.

Second, Maron wants to be authentic on stage. He wants people to see who he is. Seinfeld just wants his audience to laugh. To Maron, that seems superficial. To Seinfeld, Maron’s style — which is more or less the style these days— is self-indulgent.

These rifts meant that when Maron tried to get Seinfeld to talk about the psychology of comics, Seinfeld wasn’t biting. There isn’t any one psychology, Seinfeld responds. “Delving into comedy’s psychological roots therefore doesn’t tell you anything about comedy”Delving into comedy’s psychological roots therefore doesn’t tell you anything about comedy, although it does tell you something about the comedian. So long as you’re getting laughs, you’re a good comedian in Seinfeld’s book.

Focusing on craft is perhaps easier for Seinfeld — no, not because of his psychology, but because he is a comedy formalist. He likes to build a structure for his jokes so they are not just one-liners. The normal way to do this is to tell a comedic story that puts the joke into a richer context. Seinfeld doesn’t do that so much as build a structure in which the jokes are related by their ideas. It is a purer structure than most, just as Seinfeld’s process is purer than most: he writes jokes for two hours every day, or at least he used to.

I say all of this without counting myself as being much of a fan of Seinfeld’s standup. I was a big fan of his TV series, largely because of its formalist perfection, the stories folding in on themselves…and folding in on the characters’ exaggerated psychologies. You can probably guess how I feel about Hannah Gadsby whose formalism goes far beyond that of an exquisitely constructed farce; it is art and philosophy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated craft more and more. I“ used to be ashamed of standing close to a great painting to see the brushstrokes” used to be ashamed of standing close to a great painting to see the brushstrokes that from further back turn into a sunlit church facade or a weary face. I like that magical transformation as much as I like feeling the painting’s sunlight or weariness. I am no longer ashamed.

This probably has something to do with my life as a working writer. As I’ve had the privilege to write what I want over the past twenty years, I’ve found that my main satisfaction is the process of trying to get sentences, paragraphs, or chapters to work. Publishing or posting them brings far more anxiety and remorse than pleasure.

As many have said, humor is as sensitive to words and rhythms as is poetry. In the case of a Seinfeld, we often laugh because of the joke’s formal perfection, even if all it reveals is our attitude toward Pop-Tarts. It seems I like watching craftwork purely formally as well. And as I write that, I’m only a little ashamed.

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