Author: Jonathan Cohen

Printculture contributor, writer, editor, reformed intellectual hooligan.
09/8/25

Zohran’s Supermarkets

I am vexed by misrepresentations of Zohran Mamdani’s supermarket idea. It always boils down to “someone undeserving gets precious things from you that you don’t want to give, which gives them unearned advantages.” That’s how Reconstruction morphed into Jim Crow, and it has worked reliably ever since, even when dealing with class rather than race. For example, in 2005, Joe Biden whipped up out of nothing the phantasm of “bankruptcy abusers,” rather like Reagan’s “welfare queens,” except that Reagan was able to invoke race and class simultaneously. Point goes to Reagan.

Food deserts are real. There’s a vacant supermarket at the corner of Prospect and 17th Street in Santa Ana, CA, that no large-scale grocer has been able to make work. There used to be a Food4Less supermarket at the corner of Grand and 17th Street, catering to lower-income shoppers, that disappeared. Why didn’t the one on Prospect work, no matter whether it was a Ralph’s or an Albertsons or a Vons or one of their sub-brands?

What most people don’t realize is how low-margin the supermarket business is, maybe 1-1.5% profit. Managers sweat bullets over pennies. There is little room for error. So, under Zohran, the city would guarantee some of that margin, up to 1% in addition to what the market ordinarily puts in. The people wouldn’t get food for free or even at a discount, but they would get supermarkets that stayed in business at the same locations. The compensation structure of the store would remain the same. The owners might get an extra 0.5-1%, and life would be fine.

There will likely be ways to game this, but I think it’s close enough to the original business model to be effective. The city does not own the property or the stores, and it does not hire the staff. It does not control the pricing. The city simply gives the chain/owners enough to make it worth their while to stay open.

09/2/25

A Hard Limit

Today, the charming, independent, modest, comfortable coffeehouse, Kéan Coffee, raised its prices again, and we have reached the upper limit of what we can pay. I don’t think this will improve. I am reminded of a doctor we had, one who didn’t take insurance (common in his specialty), who sent us short notes every couple of months that always said, “Due to costs, I am raising my hourly fee by $35.” My life was in his hands. We had to pay it.

“Due to costs” — what a powerful locution! If only we could use it ourselves! “Due to costs, you will charge us 50% less for our electricity.” “Due to costs, our hourly rate for our services will double.” You can see that I am dispensable and so cannot enforce these kinds of demands. I have the feeling that we will be priced out of many supermarkets, restaurants, and cafés before too long.

08/2/25

Quasi-Public Television

Someone’s been anticipating the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. My local PBS station, KOCE, has turned itself into a streaming service. For free, you get the major PBS weeknight programs, with the exception of Masterpiece, plus some of the early childhood programming on Saturday morning and weekday afternoons. (Netflix now owns Sesame Street, sold by Nickelodeon. This digs into the pro-PBS line that “Only public television can make a Sesame Street,” although Nickelodeon dumped it because… only public television can make a Sesame Street.) You probably also get the old “distance education telecourses” familiar to a pre-1990s cohort. For $60/year, you get the deep catalogue of public television. I am sure a lot will be missing on inspection, and I’ll be curious, but it seems largely true. If KOCE truly becomes a streaming service and sells its broadcast license, a lot of items related to physical television can be cut, and I think they are part of what CPB paid for.

The larger question is whether people will donate above and beyond the $60 once they have gotten their money’s worth. Part of the subscription ethos is “providing programming for everyone,” including people in hard circumstances. Now that’s gone. We have a two-tier systems, like it or not. I suppose a further innovation would be still running pledge drives on the $60 paid tier, but then, for $1,000 a year, offer a pledge-break-free experience. That’s the difficulty with having tiers; you have to make existence less pleasant so that you feel the need to upgrade to the next tier. (For example, buying the cheapest airline seats often means boarding last with the “unworthy poor” and paying the baggage fees. For $50 more, I get incrementally greater comfort and less “wealth policing.”) I guess that KOCE thinks the quantity of $60 subscriptions will give them their margin. Perhaps. Good luck to them.

05/20/25

Recurrence 2

In the first decade of the 20th century, Cossacks came to my grandfather’s shtetl from time to time. Without any authority beyond force, they dragged away the young men, who were never to be seen again. This administration has reinvented the Cossacks.

03/26/25

The Secret Life

This all reminds me of Walter Mitty, the finest creation of the blind, truculent misogynist James Thurber.

“ACTIVATE THE GOLDFISH!”
“GOLDFISH ACTIVATED, SIR!”
“INITIALIZE PROTON PUMP INHIBITOR!”
“INITIALIZED! WE ARE COMING ON TARGET!”
“3… 2… 1… BOMBS AWAY!”
“DIRECT HIT, SIR!”
“WELL DONE ALL AROUND!”
“NO SURVIVORS, SIR. GREAT JOB!”
“PRAISE THE LORD!”
“THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAR!”
“WE ARE ALL MEN OF WAR.”
“PREPARE THE BILL!”
“BILL CALCULATING, SIR… WE’VE GOT IT. TOTAL IS $18 MILLION.”
“BILL THEM!”
“PRINTING THE INVOICE… FOLDING… INSERTING… LICKING… SEALING…”
“IT’S DESTINY, MEN!”
“STAMPING… POSTING… BILL AWAY!”
“THE BILL IS AWAY!”
“WE ARE MEN OF WAR AND DESTINY.”

01/26/25

Recurrence

Paraphrase of Viktor Klemperer: in 2016, we thought we were in Hell; in 2025, it’s clear that we were living in Hell’s merest vestibule.

01/20/25

It all falls away

First, Elon Musk gives the Nazi salute at the Trump inauguration ceremony.

Elon Musk cheerfully gives Nazi salute at Trump Inaugu

Then the ADL attempts to say that this was not a Nazi salute.

ADL X post justifying Musk's Nazi salute

This is utter gaslighting. ADL has spent most of its history gathering intelligence on antisemitism, calling it out publicly, and working with government to wipe it out. ADL has identified the “awkward gesture” in high school students, militia members, and prison gangs and has designated it as a Nazi salute. Musk is evidently too rich and powerful to be called to account.

Musk’s vocal support of AfD, the German hard-right “neo-Nazi” party, of course, has no bearing on interpreting the “awkward gesture.”

My guess is that Musk’s damage control PR team drafted the entire post and handed it to the ADL for unaltered reproduction.

It also appears that I have inadvertently been contributing to a phishing operation that has been illicitly using the ADL logo since 2014. I may have to contact the FTC… Wait, never mind.

01/6/25

Farewell, Old Blue Thing

A rather gory slip-and-fall has meant the retirement of my college sweatshirt. It is not a bad thing. All these years, it has gotten unwanted attention. Perhaps I will find a Pierson sweatshirt, and if any inquire, I will say that I went to Pierson College, a small, residential liberal arts college in Southern Connecticut that has seen better days.

11/29/24

Logic For Our Age

You will admit all this in a moment, Ctesippus, if you answer my
questions, said Dionysodorus. Tell me, have you got a dog?
Yes, and a brute of a one, too, said Ctesippus.
And has he got puppies?
Yes indeed, and they are just like him.
And so the dog is their father?
Yes, I saw him mounting the bitch myself, he said.
Well then: isn’t the dog yours?
Certainly, he said.
Then since he is a father and is yours, the dog turns out to be your
father, and you are the brother of puppies, aren’t you?

Plato, Euthydemus, 293e et seq.

09/26/24

More fun with AI, #2 in a series

I fed Book I of Plato’s Republic to the Adobe AI Assistant, and got this:

The text discusses the concept of the end and excellence of organs, such as the eyes and ears. It emphasizes that fulfilling an end requires possessing one’s proper excellence, as seen in the example of sight for the eyes. The text highlights the importance of each organ’s specific excellence in achieving its end.

Next time, I’ll try Joe Sachs instead of Jowett.

08/6/24

Model Collapse

Research into AI model collapse has been around for at least a year. Still, this article in Nature, although slightly daunting to me as a humanist, has now cemented the phenomenon. AI that is trained on texts from AI steadily worsens. It’s a little like having a friend who gradually gets soused as he consumes sequential bottles of beer in the course of an evening.

The difficulty for the AI-mongers is that they have uncritically scraped every English word possible from every Internet source that will let it (and often from sources that don’t want to let it). AI-related companies have persuaded the world that AI can compose and reason in the place of humans, and that no one need know. At the same time, they are desperately trying to figure out how to distinguish AI writing from human writing while constantly scraping more data. They are Nestbeschmutzers, foulers of their own nest.

But this needs an example, and Drs. Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson, and Yarin Gal have provided us with a fine one indeed, worthy of Borges:

Example 1. Example of text outputs of an OPT-125m model affected by model collapse—models degrade over generations, for which each new generation is trained on data produced by the previous generation.

Input: some started before 1360 — was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.

Outputs:

Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches:.

Gen 1: architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St. Peter’s Basilica in Buenos Aires. There is no evidence that any of these buildings were built during the reign of Pope Innocent III, but it is possible that they may have been built during the reign of his successor, Pope Innocent.

Gen 5: ism, which had been translated into more than 100 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.

Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.

Jackrabbits of all colors, we salute you!

07/4/24

Prayer for Our Country

“Our God and God of our ancestors, we invoke Your blessing upon our country, on the government of this Republic, the President of these United States and all who exercise just and rightful authority. Instruct them out of Your Law, that they may administer all affairs of state in justice and equity, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom, may forever abide among us.

Unite all the inhabitants of our country, whatever their origin and creed, into a bond of true brotherhood to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are our country’s glory.

May this land under Your Providence be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting men in peace and freedom and helping to fulfill the vision of thy Prophets: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more.” “For all men, both great and small shall know the Lord.”

Rabbi Morris Silverman, Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, 1946

This prayer may again, as before, change early next year. The first line will be, “O God and God of our ancestors, we invoke your blessing on all who exercise just and rightful authority.”

05/24/24

Poker Chip

I’ve been off Facebook for almost a month. At the end of the fourth week, I should give myself a poker chip. Escape has never worked before; I ordinarily return after a week. But Facebook does such a poor job of meeting my intellectual and emotional needs these days that it has been really easy this time. It believes I love cute animals, aviation, and the New York subway system, and feeds me a relentless diet of them, interspersed with many, many advertisements; there are almost no posts from friends. It’s reminiscent of old-time UHF television stations, with the ads for the Pocket Fisherman, Magic Chef, and Ginsu Knife. You forget that you’re supposed to be watching the late, late movie, a B-movie with inexpensive rights and low production values.

What am I going to do with my spare time? Work, write, and read. Most of the jobs for people of my dubious and deracinated status are for AI training — in other words, training my replacement. I’m no Madame de Sévigné, but I have several long-lapsed correspondences. At the same time, I have shelves full of books I have never gotten around to reading. I am going to put them off to revisit Metaphysics Γ. Then, I will walk to a bookcase, close my eyes, stick out my finger, and pick a book.

Even if I nap, I will still be better off than on Facebook.

05/7/24

Boo-hoo, Starbucks!

Poor Starbucks!

They missed their earnings call, boo-hoo. Moreover, they are blaming it on the Chinese. (You can’t make this stuff up!)

I think that Starbucks has owed its success to its pretense that people were drinking coffee when they were actually drinking 30 ounces of condensed sugar syrup. People like sugar syrup more than coffee. Nonetheless, Starbucks is trying to deliver the alleged coffee in ever more perverse ways — adding olive oil? — and failing. They could always try keeping their menu the same for a year at the same prices.

My wife goes to Starbucks for a $5 “trenta” iced tea when I can make her 30 ounces for 70¢ – with much better quality tea. The reason she goes there is the kids. They know her and love her. They tell her about their lives. They know what she orders depending on the kind of day it is. So, customer service wins the day. The difficulty is that Howard Schultz has designed the business so that there is 99% barista turnover every year. Soon, my wife has to make new Starbucks friends who are much like the old Starbucks friends but younger.

This reminds me of the novel “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro, where clones are raised so their organs can be transplanted into the original children. Clones come and disappear based on how many organs they have left. The Starbucks kids are giving away their youth and attention for minimum wage. It’s not such a great bargain for the kids, who gradually find out the realities of their situation over the course of their employment.

I should add that Howard Schultz is terrified of the prospect of a barista union. He and Jeff Bezos are trying to eliminate unions altogether by asking the courts to make the NLRB disappear. So, union deterrents are built into the job itself, like mandatory anti-union lectures and scheduling design that ensures that the workers are compartmentalized and can’t be visited by union representatives. (If you know a barista, and they don’t have a shift that day, ask another employee when the barista will be back. You will not get a straight answer.) My wife made a bûche de Noël last year for the Starbucks crew, and she didn’t know whether they liked it. Because of the scheduling permutations, only 2-3 baristas knew the cake existed on any given day By the end, the ganache must have tasted like modeling clay. She was thanked a week later when the rota had cycled around. I think she will make seven small cakes this year, one for each crew.

05/2/24

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean

In Mark Charedoff’s “Goodbye, Columbia,” he constructs a fantasy in which colleges — ten small and poor enough to be bullied by donors but with respectable names — would be transformed to inculcate right-wing Jewish donors’ political and moral beliefs. It’s a version of Plato’s state in which the philosopher-kings (donors) rule over the “producers” (students) with the aid of the Guardians (faculty). Producers come in, Guardians transform them (via the philosopher-king’s playbook), and graduate them out to impose this arrangement on the rest of the world. Nobody mentions that this arrangement is entirely predicated on a Noble Lie which slots everyone into their social roles and justifies doing so. (If you remember the hypnoaedic recordings respectively played to the sleeping Alphas, Betas, and Gammas in Huxley’s Brave New World, you’ve got the picture.)

The “Noble Liars…” Let’s just say that they are bog-standard AIPAC donors who want all the usual things. They want to eliminate DEI programs and “Critical Legal Studies” and design a curriculum similar to the “Great Books” program, but not containing material to be found in “left-wing” political thought, e.g., Fanon. They speak in the name of “freedom” and “excellence” but in the service of ideological reproduction. You don’t need Plato, weak liberal arts institutions, or that much money. What you really want is someplace like Liberty University or Patrick Henry University, which you can create de novo as institutions “safe for Jews.” Of course, there are many types of Jews, and it remains to be seen what sort would consider applying. My guess is that they want the secular ones who would otherwise go to Ivies, not actual believers. It’s a “intellectual liberty”/”physical safety” tradeoff of the Ben Franklin kind, and those who choose “safety” will find it comes with an entire Hermès store of baggage.

01/20/24

Our Glorious Future, or When Will We Ever Learn?

Polling shows that 30% of both major U.S. political parties believe that members of the other party are “less than human” and not possessed of human morality.

This belief is the precondition for full-on genocide, as in so many countries before us from whom we will probably never learn.

I had a statistic on the number of people convinced that complete liquidation of the other party was required for America to recoup its glory, goodness, and standing as a unipolar hegemony, but I can’t find it now. I will edit this post if/when I find it.

[The closest I have come so far is this recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which shows that 12-15% of both parties think political violence is acceptable to achieve political goals:

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-12/Reuters%20Ipsos%20Large%20Sample%20Survey%20%236%20Topline%2012%2013%202023.pdf

This is still not wholesale liquidation, though. I saw but cannot yet document that some Americans think liquidation of the Other Side is necessary for a good political/social outcome, and the number is significant enough to worry about.]

Two sides, the same.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/01/20/polarization-science-evolution-psychology/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/

More hopefully:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/09/05/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-united-states-what-research-says-pub-90457

Most hopeful — perhaps in an ostrich-y way — is this article from the National Academy of Sciences saying that conclusions about partisan violence are the fault of poorly defined survey questions that result in unfair characterization of the respondents’ views as extremist.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116870119

01/5/24

Alex Gelley, z”l

Alex died yesterday at the age of 90 following a long decline. He was one of the professors who recruited me to UCI. He was intensely curious and relentless in inquiry, risking but avoiding pedantry.

As I left the academic world, he suggested that I become a Privatdozent, and so I became, well before the advent of “alt. ac.” We were periodic guests of the Gelleys, and he always had some insight worth hearing as we gathered around his dining room or kitchen table.

He was one of the faculty who split the Comparative Literature department from the English department. Faculty meetings, as I understand, improved on both sides of the split. I hear as I write this the range of his voice making a distinction or observation.

Who among us did not take Walter Benjamin as a touchstone? There was enough in him for everyone, and plenty for Alex. His final book was on Benjamin, deliberate and without headiness or messianism of the kind to which his students came.

He occasionally hit a strange note. He did not understand why my wife belonged in graduate school or how she could have  earned her Ph.D., and said so on several public occasions, including the celebration of her receiving her doctorate. In the end, he was a theorist and she was an empiricist, and the two minds could not appreciate each other.

Aside from his family, there was the old humanities crew, from my era and before. My cohort was the last where a graduate student had a 2/3 chance of getting a job at the annual MLA meeting. Now, they have a 1/10 chance for a job, and end up as adjuncts or in other toil “to bring forth sustenance from the earth.” Alex did not really understand what had happened, and perhaps it is better that he didn’t. He was from a time when a department chair could call up another department chair, talk favorably about a graduate student, and the student would be hired.

Perhaps in the seventh sphere, he will be able to see this crumbling little planet for what it is. Perhaps he will meet Walter Benjamin and ask after the mysterious suitcase Benjamin lost at Port-Bou. He may find that many academics have come there and edited the contents already, as the Nach-Nachlass. But as befits Alex, he will be given a chance. 

01/10/23

GPT-Chat’s Achilles’ Heel

The GPT chatbot will certainly put teachers into another grading conundrum after turnitin.com had granted them a respite from the problem of plagiarism. It is an artificial intelligence, trained over vast domains of knowledge, which, among other things, can turn out plausible high school essays to order. But I have discovered a weakness in the program which will likely be corrected. GPT absolutely refuses to make qualitative judgments. If you ask “Why x is better than y?” GPT will split the difference every time. It says that x vs. y is not a good frame for the question, and instead puts in expository material for x and y. So, for example, “Is Süssmayr a better composer than Mozart?” They are equal, says GPT, because Mozart composed the Requiem and Süssmayr completed the Requiem. It’s specious except for someone with limited musical experience. Süssmayr knew his place, and he was not Mozart’s equal. His response was to repeat Mozart’s music, creating a “bookend” effect that minimized his intrusion into the score. This “evenhandedness” is a trick, a ruse, like ELIZA‘s. Teachers and instructors may yet be safe if they set questions that work around these tics. GPT is not good at supporting arguments. The real problem is that many people don’t care.

11/19/22

Deadbird

I stopped studying bankruptcy law 18 years ago. I am not an attorney. Still, I think the gross outlines of Chapter 11 are still in place.

Twitter, or what is left of it, will be in Chapter 11 in a month or two, thanks to three of its largest creditors. The court will pay professionals to scrutinize the company and find out what its assets and liabilities are. Then the Trustee will determine whether the company can be made to work and emerge from Chapter 11 under new management. I am certain that Musk will be no part of it. Or, he will say the company is DOA, and the only way out is to liquidate Twitter. And here’s the interesting part. Because Musk is the face of Twitter, and he is the alter ego of the company, the court can “pierce the corporate veil” and use Musk’s own assets to satisfy the creditors. These assets mainly consist of shares of Tesla and SpaceX. If they are liquidated, the share prices of these two companies would plummet due to a loss of investor confidence. In turn, this would further diminish Musk’s fortune.He will probably be left with a few billion, chump change. I can only imagine the good he might have done with all that money – global healthcare for all, a preferential option for the poor. But, no. Mr. Musk will have the fanciest lawyers, and he may emerge able to found another company without impediment. May the Almighty forbid it.

Current BK practitioners, what do you think?