Provocative point here in this Dissent review of the Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

What is the point of our moral ideals in a world where people can endlessly express care and concern for others—those living in zones of everyday poverty or spaces of terror like Gaza and Tigray—but do nothing in practice?

This question haunts Omar El Akkad’s new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a powerful account of our failures to stop the war in Gaza. What makes El Akkad’s book especially striking is the doubts he comes to harbor about his own profession, writing, and how it shapes our moral convictions. When Kamala Harris can stand at the Democratic National Convention one night and say she wants to end the war and then send bombs to continue it the next morning, is there any logic left to making moral arguments? In El Akkad’s painful refrain: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?”

El Akkad takes us up to the point of utter resignation before ultimately reasserting the value of this work. The journey itself, the willingness to tarry with this nihilistic possibility, is what gives this book its strength. He does not leave us in hell but insists that we recognize we are already in one.

For many of us outside the halls of power, writing remains one of the most visible means of fighting back. Even as El Akkad doubts its utility, he still writes a book that he hopes might eventually change how people treat one another—both morally and materially. He scrapes language, stories, and every element of his imagination to find some way of writing and speaking that might finally push the powerful from vague invocation to concrete action. His book is urgent as much for its potential success as for its insistence that we grapple with the painful limitations of the world of ideas and values to which many of us have dedicated our lives.

….

So he keeps telling us stories, hoping they might help get us there. He tells us of his family fleeing Egypt for Qatar, and then Qatar for Canada. He tells us of his dreams of the West, of free speech and democracy and liberalism as an embodied way of life where he can choose how to be, what to say. He tells us that he has no false consciousness about the cruelties of where he came from, that he knows it is ruled by autocrats who have no more concern for Palestinians than the extent to which supporting them subdues domestic rebellions.

Then he tells us about the path he has taken to become disenchanted with everything his younger self sought and held dear. He learns quickly that, in his privative phrasing, one finds the “harbor never as safe as the water is cold.” And he sees that Western liberalism is not a development of fiction, of narrative’s capacity to expand our ability to see through the eyes of others. Rather that very idea is itself a fiction: “the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self” comes with a “dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefitting from the systems that oppress them.”

El Akkad refers to the belief that our empathy makes us righteous even as we benefit from an uneven world as a “fortress of language.” Such fortresses “pen” some lives in a permanent elsewhere, caged on the other side of morality—“a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed.”

For the young El Akkad, it was “enough” for there to be pockets of liberalism accompanied by a general desire for freedoms to spread noncoercively. It was the job of morality to care about other people and the job of governments to put that care into action. But he learned all too quickly that there was a profound geographic fracture in our moral vision.

Everyone cares, of course, about the child being bombed. The penury of being human is that too often what follows is a second moment, a hideous and repressed moment that we rarely dare to speak aloud, when people think, “Oh, but if some child has to be bombed for the world order to continue, I don’t want it to be my child.” The deepest problem of moral scarcity that El Akkad traces occurs not when one cares about a limited number of people. It is rather this belief that life can only be good for some, that one side will always be consumed.

If we don’t confront and overcome this second moment, the goal of politics is no longer seeking justice, but rather ensuring the right to consumption—while maintaining the language of justice. “It is not without reason,” El Akkad writes, “that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on earth [Yemen] to keep a shipping lane open [the Strait of Hormuz].” Never mind that ships in the strait would not have been targeted if, instead of bombing Yemen, the United States stopped sending bombs to Israel. This is the perverted moral calculus of our age. Some lives must be made good, no matter the cost to others, no matter the logic or truth of any of it.

So I guess here’s the question–does your empathy matter at all? Or does it just make us feel good and thus is another part of the individualist fundamentalism of contemporary liberalism?

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Some interesting observations here:

In all the years of the Emmys, only two shows about espionage have ever won the Outstanding Drama Series award: Mission: Impossible in 1967 and 1968 (it was the 1960s) and Homeland in 2012 (we’d just killed Bin Laden). It’s not that the Television Academy lacked for spy series, from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alias to The Hour and The Americans. But for some reason, Emmy voters pre-2000 seemed to prefer shows about everyday folks doing everyday jobs. From 1981 to 1999, there were only two years when the Outstanding Drama winner wasn’t about cops, lawyers, or doctors (and in the case of David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, all three!). In the quarter-century since, the genres expanded to include crime shows (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad), political shows (The West Wing, The Crown), and shows about the moral decay of the American character as incubated in Manhattan office towers (Mad Men, Succession). Yes, several spy series from this period produced Emmy winners in acting and writing — Matthew Rhys got Lead Actor in a Drama for The Americans; Abi Morgan won for writing The Hour — but in many cases, you could argue they deserved much more. We had to watch Victor Garber go Emmy-less for his Alias performance three years in a row. That damages a person!

I love conversations about how genres get mainstreamed, from Westerns to gangster flicks to metal to whatever else you can imagine. I suppose, though, that I’d never really thought about where the spy genre fit into the firmament of TV. The Mission: Impossible wins are interesting as historical artifact, but I guess maybe I find them even a little less surprising than Homeland’s win. Homeland was bad, y’all. Entertainingly bad for a while but good lord, not good.*

In terms of the best that the genre has to offer… I think a lot about rewatching both Sandbaggers and the Americans to see whether they live up to my memories, but they were very, very good. To my mind they represent the Respectable Poles of spy fiction, situated between the heroic and the bureaucratic. Too heroic and you get to James Bond, which has its place but is tiresome, while too bureaucratic…. well, I just love stories about bureaucracy. The show that’s on now that I’d place in or near this rank is Slow Horses, plus possibly the recently departed Andor…

Your thoughts are welcome.

*anyone who hunts down a glowing contemporary review of Homeland from the author risks an immediate and total ban.

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Walmart (WMT) warned last week that tariffs would soon force it to raise prices, but Home Depot (HD) is taking the opposite tack.

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I was in the city a few weeks ago and exclusively used Waymo for the entire trip. My biggest complaint? I needed to walk four minutes to a pick-up spot. Other than that, the car just showed up, traversed San Francisco streets easily, and the cost was reasonable¹. Sitting in the back seat watching the robot drive through San Francisco, I realized now I was at ease with the machine taking me hither and fro. I’ve been on more than 20 rides, and I think robots can drive a car in a crowded city.

I am dissatisfied when I ask ChatGPT or Claude.ai to write something for me. The writing has no life, no flair. It’s repeating patterns it’s been trained on, and the result is a pretty good imitation, but the voice is tinny and robotic. Anyone exploring AI has a similar experience; they test the robots on topics where they are the expert and quickly find it’s not creative, but impressively derivative. No art, no flair.

The point: there is a whole class of tasks where, job loss aside¹, I am fine with robots doing the job with absolutely no flair. I need the job done safely, efficiently, and reliably. Every time. I require no flair for a car taking me from Point A to Point B. I want no pomp and circumstance. The perfect ride is one I forget immediately because nothing interesting happens.

The Trap

Problem is, I like driving. Her name is Audrey. She’s a black Porsche 718, and I love driving her. We love zipping around the small mountain roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I like the feel of her wheels on the road, I like how she growls when we decide to go fast. It’s a visceral experience full of colors, sights, and sounds.

In a hypothetical future world where all I ever knew was sitting in the back of a robot car, I would not appreciate the work involved because I’d never had the opportunity to learn to drive. This might be fine for many humans on the planet, but not for me. I learned how to drive on Highway 17, a scary mountain freeway that required me to become a competent driver as quickly as possible. I remember those lessons, they made me… me.

I liked learning to drive.

Better yet, I like learning. It gives me appreciation of the craft.

I recently received a job description from a friend. As I started to read it, here’s the vent that went through my head:

• “Robots, really?”
• “Well, Rands, not everyone is a writing zealot like you. Many humans are intimidated by writing, so chill. They completed the necessary task.”
• “Yeah, but… if they don’t learn how to write well, isn’t that a problem?”

I looked at him when done and said, “ChatGPT?”

“Is it that obvious?”

This is the problem. And it’s large. For every task we’re asking the robots to perform, there was an essential initial step where the robots were trained on data generated by hard-working humans so the robots could perform the task. It’s called machine learning. They need to learn from the hard work of our learning, except it’s not learning, it’s mimicking and repeating patterns. While it’s a joy to sit in the back of Waymo and appreciate the robot doing an effective job, it’s a trap and a familiar one.

Minimum Viable Friendship

Remember back when you first got on Facebook or your first social network. A revelation, right? Everyone is here! Suddenly, you connected with friends from high school, finding long-lost friends, and it all felt very social. Your brain told you you’d found all these valuable friends, but this is a minimum viable friendship.

What does it mean to have a friend? To have a friendship? Your definition differs from mine, but off the top of my head, it includes:

Shared and repeated in-person experiences and achievements that built familiarity and eventually trust. The magnitude and consistency of these shared experiences and stories become embedded in your brain, connecting you. Their presence in your mind moves you, often randomly, to reach out and remind all involved, “Hello. Hi. Remember. We are friends.”

Facebook or other social network connections are humans that you know, but for many, we do the minimum work to build and maintain the relationship. Brief interactions tickle the “I’m being social” bit of your brain, but you aren’t. You’re sitting in your slippers in your Cave doing the minimum viable work, telling yourself you’re being social. These services are not built to help you be social; they are designed to extract data, which ironically is being used to train the robots to help you be less social.

Maintaining any relationship is work, and like all complex skills, you start with no skill. Via repeated failures and successes, you learn the work necessary to build healthy personal and working relationships. You learn over and over again, and the act of doing work is the lesson.

Are you wondering why we’re so anxious? It’s because we’ve never been connected with more humans less. We’re forgetting about the important work of investment in relationships, or we’ve never learned how to create, develop, and maintain relationships because we think those vacuous relationships we’ve made on the Internet are substantive relationships. They are not². I believe building relationships takes time, patience, and proximity. You learn how to friendship by doing the hard work.

Do The Work

I’ve made a career being a human terrified by becoming irrelevant long before AI showed up to drive my car. You bet I am poking every bit of AI that I can. Daily. I am trying to figure out what it can and can’t do, and this article aside, I am optimistic, just like I’ve been for the last three decades, that revolutionary innovations will knock your socks off in the next few years. It’s still early days for AI. Really.

However, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand. Many humans don’t check their facts; they believe what they read in the feed. Most humans believe the manufactured reality is designed to get them to believe someone else’s agenda. The convenience of these services and tools has made us lazy and, worse, not curious.

AI does an incredible job of confidently sounding like it knows what it’s talking about, so it’s easy to imagine what it will do in the hands of those who want to manipulate you. AI does a shockingly good job at programming and other structured tasks we thought were the domain of hardworking engineers, but AI is not curious. AI is trained, but it does not learn.

My primary fear is that, like Facebook before it, those humans empowered to build, write, and create with AI stop with the slop because the act provides an unearned sense of accomplishment. The work is the trying, trying again, failing, finding inspiration in the lessons of the failure, and going one more time. Only to fail once more. Being curious. “Why am I failing?” is required reflection. You ask yourself, you ask your friends, and then sometimes a lightning bolt strikes and you realize, “This is the lesson. I understand now. I know how to improve.”

The value of creation is a function of the effort. Creation without effort is meaningless.

Waymo Paradox

I’ve been working on the ending of this article for a few months because I can’t tell if we’re screwed or blessed. I’m not excited by a world where humans aren’t required to go through trials that require them to learn.

I’ve walked close friends through the arc of this piece to get their gut read, and most have a similar initial reaction. They’re concerned about AI running wild and doing unspeakable things to humanity. Yeah, I saw Terminator, too. This opinion has a valid recency bias, but I also think this is a repeat of a core human reaction — we fear the unknown. Change is scary.

I think we’re screwed, not because of the power and potential of the tools. It starts with the greed of humans and how their machinations (and success) prey on the ignorant. We’re screwed because these nefarious humans were already wildly successful before AI matured and now we’ve given them even better tools to manufacture hate that leads to helplessness. But I have a cure for that helplessness. Curiousity.

I think we’re blessed. We live at a time when the tools we build can empower those who want to create. The barriers to creating have never been lower; all you need is a mindset. Curiousity. How does it work? Where did you come from? What does this mean? What rules does it follow? How does it fail? Who benefits most from this existing? Who benefits least? Why does it feel like magic? What is magic, anyway? It’s an endless set of situationally dependent questions requiring dedicated focus and infectious curiousity.

When faced with change or an aggressive unknown, I take a deep breath, count to four, place my feet firmly on the ground, and ask, “Do I really understand what is going on here? Really?” I start with curiousity because curiousity informs action. Action creates consequence, and when consequence shows up, you start learning.

Here’s the thing. We are equally screwed and blessed. These contradictory states exist at the same time. It’s a paradox, a confusing, in-progress, contradictory mess. It’s a state I understand because I am a human who continues to learn and I’m curious how it’s going to turn out.

Congratulations again to every reporter who took Trump’s denials of Project 2025 at face value:

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Donald Trump during his 2024 criminal trial, has been appointed acting librarian of Congress, the Justice Department said Monday. Blanche replaces longtime librarian Carla Hayden, whom the White House fired last week amid criticism from conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.

Also Monday, two other Trump appointees to the library attempted unsuccessfully to enter the Copyright Office, according to a person with knowledge of the incident. Brian Nieves, a deputy chief of staff and senior counsel in Blanche’s office, was named acting assistant librarian, Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin confirmed. And Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general and veteran Justice Department attorney, is now the acting register of copyrights and director of the Copyright Office, replacing Shira Perlmutter, whom the Trump administration pushed out last weekend.

Time for another Times editorial about how with Trump in charge race has become much less salient to federal policy!

Fired a black person who was qualified, hired a white person with no qualifications whatsoever. The Trump administration in a nutshell bsky.app/profile/axio…

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— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) May 12, 2025 at 8:58 AM

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Two major New York unions, both of which had put pressure on Andrew Cuomo to step down, have endorsed him in the mayor race.

Two influential New York City labor unions that backed Mayor Eric Adams in 2021 switched their support on Monday to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, reflecting his growing dominance as the race for mayor accelerates.

The coveted endorsements came from the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which represents building workers. Together, the unions have more than 125,000 members and typically spend millions of dollars supporting their chosen candidates.

Both unions have a contentious history with Mr. Cuomo. They worked with him to pass a statewide increase to the minimum wage and other policies as governor, but later called for his resignation in 2021 amid mounting sexual harassment accusations. (Mr. Cuomo, who resigned, denies any wrongdoing.)

Now, they have concluded that Mr. Adams is fading politically and Mr. Cuomo has an increasingly direct path to City Hall. And like much of the city’s Democratic establishment, the unions appear more interested in making amends than antagonizing a famously sharp-elbowed leader who could have influence over city contracts and other priorities.

This is almost certainly it. The NYC mayoral race is a mess. When you have like 15 candidates all vying for the anti-Cuomo vote, it means none of them are going to win. Andrew Cuomo is both powerful, competent, and a dick. Moreover, it’s quite likely that if one of the other candidates somehow actually does win, they aren’t really going to hold it over the unions because those unions can then offer them a lot of support going forward. Meanwhile, if they don’t endorse Cuomo and Cuomo wins, he will have revenge on their members. The fact of the matter is that Andrew Cuomo is going to be the next mayor of New York City and this move is very strong evidence in favor of that, as depressing as it might be. Labor is looking out for its members here, reading the landscape and realizing that none of these other people are going to separate from the pack.

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