In the middle of the 18th century, Francis Williams was almost certainly the most famous Black man in the English-speaking world. He was a scholar, a scientist and a gentleman, educated at Cambridge but living in Jamaica. After his death in 1762, defenders of slavery set out to prove that no person like Williams — both Black and brilliant — could possibly exist. In 1774 Edward Long wrote an account of Williams’s life that was little more than a racist diatribe, denigrating his many abilities. And for centuries, that’s where things stood.
But a portrait of Williams remains. In it he is standing in a library or study surrounded by books, his hand resting on some big, fat volume. To his right is an open window showing a strange sky. Fara Dabhoiwala, the author of “What Is Free Speech?” began examining that painting, using high-resolution image technology, to see what Williams was trying to tell us, posing in that manner.
Dabhoiwala describes his quest in a slow-building but ultimately unforgettable essay in The London Review of Books. Through his sleuthing, he discovers that on the study’s bookshelf there is a copy of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, one of the more expensive scholarly and prestigious books of the time. Williams is telling us: You are looking at a man of letters.
That’s not all. As a young man, Williams knew several of the greatest physicists of the age, including Edmund Halley, a collaborator with Isaac Newton and the discoverer of Halley’s comet. In the portrait, it turns out that Williams’s hand is resting on Newton’s “Principia,” open to page 521. That page contains representations of complex calculations about the orbit of comets. Dabhoiwala establishes that outside the window is an image of a comet streaking across the sky. Williams is saying: This is who I am, a Black man operating on the cutting edge of science, a living refutation of the pervasive racism of the day.
Dabhoiwala’s essay, “A Man of Parts and Learning,” is the first winner of this year’s Sidney Awards, which I created in honor of the philosopher and polemicist Sidney Hook and go to some of the best long-form journalism of the year. As in recent years, I’m focusing on small and medium-size publications.
Palmer Luckey is another character you won’t forget. He revolutionized the world of video gaming before selling the company he co-founded to Facebook for more than $2 billion. He then started a military technology company now worth an estimated $14 billion. He has provided the Border Patrol with artificial-intelligence-powered long-range sensors and Ukraine with attack drones. He took first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest and owns the world’s largest collection of video games, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned missile base.
So far, so tech bro. But in the essay “American Vulcan” in Tablet magazine, Jeremy Stern paints a portrait of a fascinating nonconformist. Luckey grew up amid the remnants of the old Southern California culture that combined fierce anti-Communism with an interest in aerospace and military technology. He was home-schooled by his mother, who believed that public education wasn’t personalized enough, and you walk away wondering how many eccentrics have been tamed by our conventional education system. After selling his company, he appears to have been canceled by Mark Zuckerberg and the corporate thought police at Facebook (Facebook denied this) for showing some pro-Donald Trump tendencies before it was cool.
Today Luckey is all of 32, a hyperkinetic, all-over-the-place freethinker. You may love him or hate him, but it’s interesting to see a person totally unformed by the great American conformity machine.
I’ve found it very hard to write about A.I. Some experts think it’s taking us to nirvana and some to doom. Their viewpoints seem more tied to their own temperamental pessimism or optimism than any actual evidence. But if you want to know what some people in the belly of the A.I. industry think, I’d read Leopold Aschenbrenner’s manic essay “Situational Awareness.” Here’s one quick paragraph to give you the flavor:
The A.G.I. race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the C.C.P.; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.
Speaking from inside the San Francisco A.I. subculture, Aschenbrenner makes a compelling case that this really will change everything. Is he right? Beats me.
What posture are we to take toward the incoming Trump administration? Some have opted for pre-emptive panic. I prefer the posture Jennifer Pahlka — who founded Code for America and served in the Obama administration — takes in “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight.” She writes about Elon Musk’s plans for the Department of Government Efficiency, dwelling on the policy substance, not the histrionics. She argues that government really is broken and that if you try to offer better online services for veterans or improve the way Medicare shares information about benefits, you will run into regulations, practices and bureaucratic tangles that will infuriatingly prevent you from doing a little good; while in power, Democrats could have addressed these problems, but they did not.
However, she continues, the problem is not what Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the populist outsiders think it is. They imagine that power is concentrated in the “deep state.” But, she writes, “the reality is shockingly diffuse power.’ She continues:
The bad outcomes they are fighting to prevent — burdensome, overreaching government — are the product of exactly the conditions they help create. Neither the left nor the right really has the mental models (nor, perhaps the desire) to effectively challenge the status quo of the technocracy.
I take Pahlka’s stance to be this: Trump’s people aren’t always wrong when they identify what the problems are. But they have no clue about the complicated sources of those problems, and they don’t possess the right expertise to fix them. That strikes me as a pattern that will afflict the Trump administration not only on government reform but also on a range of issues, including deportations, tariffs and relations with China.
Let me ask you a question: Why is there poverty in the world? That might be the wrong question, as Don Williams writes in an essay titled “Why Do People Believe True Things?” Poverty has been the norm through most of human history. The real question is not “Why is there poverty?” but “Why is there wealth?”
This is called an explanatory inversion, in which you flip a common question around. For example, why do people commit crimes? They commit crimes, obviously, because it’s easier to steal something than earn enough money to buy it. The real question, then, is why, in a lightly policed society, do people obey the law?
Williams points out that these days there’s a lot of commentary on misinformation and on why people believe false things. But that’s obvious. It feels good to believe what’s convenient to believe, even if it’s fake. The real question is “Why are people willing to go through the arduous process of discovering the truth and believing true things?” Those habits, he continues, require social norms about standards of evidence. They require institutions like academic journals and the scientific method that test ideas and challenge other people’s findings. Williams’s key insight is that “truth is not the default.” It took centuries of work to build a society in which more people would believe true things, work that is being undone in a jiffy.
A couple of final entries in rapid succession:
Rachel Kushner’s son became obsessed with drag racing. Her Harper’s Magazine essay “In the Rockets’ Red Glare” is a description of the unique world of drag racing aficionados, but really it’s about a parent who is willing to enter into a world that fascinates her child and how that deepens their relationship.
We tend to think that nonprofits are goody-goody organizations driven by altruism. In “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City,” published in American Affairs, Jonathan Ireland shows how naïve this can be. He describes, for example, a housing nonprofit in San Francisco that is supposed to help people find affordable housing. But, he writes, only 45 percent of the organization’s revenue went to “resident services” in 2020, down from 62 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, from 2012 to 2020 the amount of money this organization spent on lobbying increased by 95 times. What was it lobbying about? To prevent the construction of more affordable housing. Apparently, it just didn’t want the competition.
As usual, there were 20 essays I could have chosen for each one I picked. This year, as usual, I was steered toward the best essays by people who run three of the most interesting aggregators on the web: Caroline Crampton and Robert Cottrell, who edit The Browser, which gathers literary and other essays from all over the English-speaking world; Conor Friedersdorf, whose The Best of Journalism Substack hits my inbox every Sunday with the best that was written over the previous week; and Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, which has remained, for many years, the go-to blog for people seeking to arouse and satisfy their curiosity.
In selecting this year’s winners, I took a pass on a large subset of essays arguing that technological advance is overshadowing and eviscerating our humanity. I sort of agree with that analysis, but who needs a downer this time of year? These essays are a reminder that if you’re a curious person willing to sit down and read the best that’s being written, you can give yourself an amazing education. This is a great time to be alive.
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