A 1.5 pages in and Mamie has invited a who's who of Newport to her home to meet a European Prince who turns out to be a monkey in a costume. Unhinged. I love her.

That's the way it's been for most of history. And, as someone who still thinks that democracy is, at least, a nice idea, it's fairly horrifying to me.

I have a few (very wealthy) friends who have argued that if you have a new generation of people who can't think critically, read deeply and are cheerfully distracted by slop, well, that's their choice. They can just do servile work for their betters.

He can't argue for the choices he's making, because he does not have those skills BECAUSE of the choice he's made.

Today, commoners are embracing a tool that makes them less likely to be able to make a convincing argument about anything without assistance. One of the most striking parts of this article to me was how dumb and dull the man who uses ChatGPT is in conversation. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

One of the reasons monarchs were so horrified by the invention of the printing press was that it might enable charismatic commoners who knew how to write to share their ideas widely. A lot of those ideas had to do with overthrowing the monarchy.

It really comes back to Atwood's claim that "a word after a word after a word is power." If you cede that power willingly, you will have one less essential weapon against demagoguery.