Temporary tweaks to The Dispatch: I’m working on a new writing project, so while I’ll still share something each week, the longer essays will be intermittent, or not so long. I will also, when I don’t share a longer piece, share some evergreen pieces from the archive. More on the new project soon.
Before we get to today’s shorter but still main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…
More on La Profesora’s new book! Last issue, I shared that my wife Kathi Inman Berens and her research partner Rachel Noorda have a new book coming out: How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books. A few days later, they had the top story on The Conversation, “What the panic over Gen Z’s reading habits gets wrong,” which later got picked up by The Washington Post (here)!
I found particularly interesting their mention of “book excerpts aesthetic” where people post pictures of highlighted passages in books. This is a shared version of the old-fashioned commonplace book where folks would record passages or quotations they wanted to remember. For Shakespeare fans, when Hamlet cries out, “My tables, my tables—meet it is I set it down, that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” the tables he refers to are his commonplace books.
The Big New Mexico Verdict against Meta
In Case You Missed It (ICYMI), a huge story from last week is that a New Mexico judge ordered Meta (Facebook, Instagram) to pay $567 Million to set up a mental health fund for teens negatively impacted by the platforms. This is on top of the $375 Million penalty the judge awarded in an earlier phase, nearly $950 Million in total.
The reason this is huge is that it’s nearly a billion dollars just for New Mexico, and it sets an important precedent for other states here and in every country in the world where Meta operates to seek compensation for their failure to make the platforms safe for youth.
In Los Angeles in March, a woman successfully sued Meta and Google for her compulsive use of the platforms; she was awarded $6 Million. (Meta got $4.8 Million, Google the rest.)
As I’ve argued before, these platforms aren’t safe for anybody, but I’m OK with protecting young people first.
Back in 2019 when Meta settled with the FTC for $5 Billion, Scott Galloway described the amount as a “speeding ticket” for a company that had a $500 million market cap at the time. It’s $1.5 Trillion today. Galloway suggested that if the FTC penalty had been $50 Billion, it might have incentivized Meta to change its ways. It did not.
Today, I think it would take a $750 Billion penalty to get Meta to change. With a tidal wave of lawsuits coming at Meta HQ in Menlo Park, that’s now on the table.
By the way, if you keep that $1.5 Trillion market cap in mind, the money that Zuckerberg says Meta will give to communities where it’s installing resource-draining data centers looks more like a bribe and a press release. In the words of WSJ’s Meghan Bobrowsky:
The company will launch a $1 billion “Future Is For Everyone Fund” to directly support communities around the facilities—giving itself a new talking point to deploy against the rising tide of antidata-center activism.
Last year, the Sackler family, makers of Oxycontin, agreed to a $7.4 Billion settlement for their part in the US opioid addiction crisis. What percentage of their wealth that sum represents depends on what their wealth truly is, and estimates vary widely. However, it’s probably over 50% and could be much more. That is the kind of penalty that would get Meta to take the addictive qualities of its algorithms seriously.
“Voters have had it”: influence of pro-Israel lobby group sparks backlash in US (Financial Times $)—a worthwhile piece about backlash against SuperPAC “American Israel Public Affairs Committee” (AIPAC) given widening condemnation against Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere.
Entertainment industry stories
Your favorite TV show has taken years to return. How did we get here? (Washington Post $)—deep dive into why streaming hits take longer to get to news seasons after the first, including a profile of “Man of Recaps” Brendon Boutin.
David Ellison’s NYT Op-Ed ($) defending his plan to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery left me unconvinced. His defense of his politics (neither Trumpy nor far left) would have been more interesting if he had discussed his father (and bankroller) Larry Ellison’s profound MAGA politics. Although, really, I don’t think either Ellison is truly MAGA: they are capitalist weathervanes who blow with the political wind.
Maureen Ryan’s NYT Op-Ed ($) about Jared Leto’s alleged sexual misconduct and how it has been an open secret is both worth reading its own merits and also because it is akin to the “whither #MeToo” sentiments in a piece about why Gen Z is allegedly not having much sex that I discussed two issues back.
If you enjoy reading thrillers, NYT ($) has a nice list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century (so far). Lots of things that I now want to read.
MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna shared on LinkedIn an amazing interactive “NeuroAtlas tool” that shows how the brain lights up differently in response to different stimuli. Wow!
On the lighter side…
Instagram creator “The Big Chabowski” has a neat pair of videos: AI Girlfriend and AI Boyfriend. In addition to being funny, they’re also smart commentaries about what people think they want versus what they actually want.
Uplifiting story about a Memphis news anchor, (Washington Post $) who is the mom of young kids, who briefly fell asleep on the air, and the legions of other moms who poured out support. It’s a sweet story with the most clickbaity headline I’ve seen in a long time.
The final minute of the original pitch for The Muppet Show is funny, and it contains a deleted final moment that didn’t make it into the DVD version. (You’ll know it when you see it.) You can see the whole pitch here, excluding the last moment, and a bit more info here. (H/T William Berens.)
An absolutely classic comedy routine between Jack Benny and Mel Blanc popped up on Instagram.
Think you know all the behind-the-scenes lore for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan? I didn’t. This 19 minute YouTube video unpacks 13 things that I found interesting… although my interest level and the length of the video didn’t quite correlate.
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On to our top story... which is part of a “Keywords” series that I’ve slowly built over the history of The Dispatch. These keywords are tools that help me to think, lenses that let me see with clarity. Here’s one of my favorites.
Mathematics and human language have different flavors of precision. In math, if I add one and negative one, I get zero. Likewise, a double negative equals a positive. Negative, negative one and one are identical.
That’s not true in human language. If you make a statement to which I respond, “I don’t disagree,” that is not the same thing as saying, “I agree.”
Math sets up a territory within which things are perfectly precise, and it ignores everything outside that territory. If you multiply ten times ten and then subtract one, the answer is 99. But that’s only true if your base is 10. If you are in base six and you multiply 10 by 10 and then subtract one, the answer (converted to base 10) is 59. (Long ago, I got into an argument with a physicist fraternity brother about this, which I’ve described here.)
In human language, we use phrases like “I don’t disagree” to get closer to what we really mean in an efficient way. In other words, there’s not enough of a difference between “I don’t disagree” and “my opinion is not so distinct from yours that I can say I disagree, nor is it so close that I can say I agree” to bother with the longer version.
In classical rhetoric, this double-negative-that-isn’t-a-positive is called “litotes.” Here is a definition from Richard A. Lanham’s useful book, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms:
Litotes (LI to tes; G. “plainness, simplicity) — Antenantiosis; Moderatour
Denial of the contrary; understatement that intensifies, as when a politician once said to his garrulous subordinate, “A period of silence from you would not be unwelcome.” In litotes, “more is understood than is said,” as in “He is not the wisest man in the world” when we mean “He is a fool” (Peacham). Sister Miriam Joseph remarks: “Litotes is related to what the logicians call equipollence or observation, which consists in expressing a thought by denying its contradictory.”
The poet William Wordsworth loved to use litotes to a vexing extent: “not loathe” and “not unwelcome” in The Prelude, for example. Ick.
Litotes is different than the subjunctive case that merely puts things into a doubtful “I don’t want to commit to a statement” place. The journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher, for example, tends to say, “I would agree” rather than “I agree,” which is Swisher protecting herself from committing to a statement.
Although there is precision in litotes, there is power in direct, muscular language. When I am wrong, and I often am (just ask my family), I admit it. “I was wrong, and you were right” or “you were right, and I was wrong” dispel disagreement and move things along.
My ears always listen for litotes because it’s a flag that what looks like a clear statement isn’t. If the object of your affections ever says, “I don’t not love you,” that should translate in your ears to Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
When you hear litotes, pay attention.
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.
Love this. Karl Ludwig Selig taught me the word and I wasn't even in a class with him. We were walking from a building to the subway. He asked how it was going and I said, "Not bad." You can imagine....