Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 8, 2026 • 6:45 am

There will be a shortish version of Hili today as I’m not feeling that well (yes, the eye, which is ok but focusing makes me nauseated).

Welcome to Thursday, October 8, 2026 and National Pierogi Day. I eat a lot of pierogi in Poland, and here’s some blueberry dessert pierogi I had in a restaurant:

It’s also Alvin C. York Day, honoring the day in 1918 when York killed 25 enemy soldiers and captured 132, earning the Medal of Honor; International Lesbian Day; National Fluffernutter Day; World Octopus Day; and National Salmon Day (best smoked on a bagel with a schmear).

There is a Google Doodle today honoring World Space Week.  Click to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 8 Wikipedia page.

As I have mentioned several times before, this website seems moribund: comments are few, and the content doesn’t seem to appeal to potential readers. This is depressing, and it can’t continue at the present rate. I am not seeking reassurance here, as I write what I want. This is just a notice. Few people send in readers’ wildlife (it used to be a daily feature), and comments are waning. All the signs are that the website’s life is moving peacefully to its close.

Da Nooz:

*A column in the WaPo, “Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated,” is an extract of author James Marriott’s book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (article archived here).  There are lots of data:

Once upon a time, the idea that the world was growing stupider was mostly confined to the realm of dyspeptic reactionary polemic. But nowadays, the idea is increasingly mainstream. The belief that smartphones are “rotting our brains” is a widely repeated cliché. Data seems to corroborate this feeling, too: Studies have shown declines in IQ over the past two decades, with the sharpest drops among age brackets that use their phones the most. Students themselves have reported since the 2010s that they have difficulty concentrating and remembering. One study found that even having a phone turned off on a table nearby may be enough to impair a student’s academic performance.

But perhaps another reason that people feel this way is that cultural output — not just short-form videos or Instagram posts but films, television, music and books — is becoming simplified, too. The smartphone’s constant distraction and hostility to complex thought is reshaping almost every aspect of culture. Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification.

Take the Netflix film “Irish Wish,” which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” He replies, “Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”

In a world of constant distraction, scriptwriters can no longer rely on audiences to pay attention. Executives at Netflix have reportedly demanded simpler scripts in which characters repeatedly announce what they are doing, so that scrolling viewers can keep track of what is going on.

According to actor Matt Damon, filmmakers are told: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” The result is the inverse of the traditional creative writing advice “show, don’t tell.” It is hard to sustain interiority or nuance in a film in which every action must be clearly signposted. Not every Netflix film needs to be a masterpiece of insinuation and subtext, and good, challenging films are still being made — but nonetheless, complexity seems to be rapidly draining out of culture.

. . .The same relentless pressures toward simplification are at work in almost every creative industry. A 2024 statistical analysis of more than 350,000 songs between 1970 and 2020 found that lyrics are becoming simpler, more repetitive and less rich in their vocabulary. Another study suggests that melodies are becoming less complex, too.

. . . Equally striking is what is happening in the publishing industry. Books are getting simpler and easier to read. An Economist analysis of New York Times best-selling books from the 1930s to the 2020s found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” Long sentences are not easy to grapple with in an age when, according to one estimate, the average American checks his or her smartphone 186 times per day. The audiences for serious nonfiction and literary fiction have declined steeply in recent decades. Sales of books about economics, current affairs and politics have fallen particularly sharply. [JAC: If the average American is awake 17 hours, then the average rate of phone-checking is 11 times an hour, or about once every 5.5 minutes!]

By contrast, best-selling books of the 1960s included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” In 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of essays “The Liberal Imagination” was a bestseller in the United States, with more than 100,000 copies sold.

It is not easy to imagine such books commanding mainstream audiences today.

. . .Getting to grips with a new book, film or song requires a special and sometimes painful effort of concentration.

I think this attention may partly explain why studios opt for remakes, franchises and “extended universes.” Before the turn of the millennium, only about 25 percent of top-grossing films were spin-offs or sequels; by the 2020s the figure had risen to 75 percent.

. . . Not everything can be said simply, and understanding requires sustained concentration from readers, viewers or listeners. If they are distracted and unfocused, culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

The statistics speak for themselves. (Don’t forget the “reading time” put before many printed articles so you can see if they are too long to read!) The good news is that I can read or watch whatever I want, and, fortunately, good books and good movies are still available.

*Matthew sent this video about the sentencing of a military soldier to death by firing squad—the first such sentence since World War II. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, and has been on death row ever since.  The sentence, signed by Donald Trump, is to be carried out on December 1.  While firing squad is probably among the most humane methods of execution, I oppose it, as does Matthew, who labeled his email, “Barbarians.”  He’s right.  Life without parole is sufficient.

*The WSJ reports that AI has just solved hundreds of previously intractable mathematical puzzles.

Since you last thought about math, the people who think about math every day have been freaking out.

A month ago, when OpenAI announced that one of its powerful internal models had cracked a notoriously difficult Millennium Prize Problem, it looked like the most spectacular demonstration yet of AI’s progress in mathematics.

Then mathematicians revolted.

The backlash from the math world coincided with a global reckoning about Silicon Valley labs racing to build technology that could spiral beyond their control. On the same day that OpenAI published its landmark proof, a researcher quit Anthropic over safety concerns. Within hours, the AI breakthrough was overshadowed by fears that AI could destroy humanity.

Meanwhile, mathematicians were dealing with existential questions of their own.

But as they publicly debated the future of their ancient field, OpenAI’s model kept churning out new proofs behind closed doors. This left the company with a problem for a bunch of humans to solve: what to do with all that AI-generated math.

On Tuesday night, OpenAI published hundreds of proofs for mathematicians to wrap their minds around.

An unprecedented number of answers that had eluded mathematicians for decades arrived in a single night. The deluge included AI solutions to more than 300 problems across number theory, algebraic geometry and other fields with names that could give anyone haunted by high-school math a migraine. Among the major findings in a collection of 722 papers were advances related to three of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, including the Riemann hypothesis.

“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers University distinguished math professor, wrote on X about the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” proof.

The understated rollout of such monumental results marked a shift in OpenAI’s approach to publishing scientific discoveries, part of an effort to win back mathematicians who have become allergic to AI hype in recent months. On late Tuesday and early Wednesday, many of them reported feeling a sense of awe.

As stunned math experts scrolled through the results and began to absorb them, even a researcher inside Anthropic called the release “obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.”

. . . Instead of dripping out findings one by one, OpenAI dropped them all at once. The company released 372 groups of results and said the model attempted roughly 4,000 problems in total. It also provided summaries of the model’s “chain of thought” and estimated the average result required only a fraction of the computing power that went into the Millennium Prize triumph.

Mathematicians are naturally flummoxed by this, as AI is doing what they can’t do. Further, they can’t kvetch that AI is stealing their results, because if it’s using published work to get a head start, well, that’s what regular mathematicians have always done when solving hard problems. Perhaps they’re beefing because this AI work threatens to put a lot of them out of business.

*Here are adjacent articles in yesterday’s (Oct. 7) New York Times.  This is a pathetic attempt to be objective in their reporting.  I’d blame those bodies on Hamas. The NYT has become hopelessly slanted in its coverage of Israel, and not in favor of Isael.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej engage in badinage:

Hili: I’m walking into the future, leaving the present behind.
Andrzej: At my age, I prefer to do that sitting down.

In Polish:

Hili: Idę ku przyszłości i zostawiam za sobą teraźniejszość.
Ja: Jestem już bardzo stary i robię to na siedząco.

*******************

From Stacy:

From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:

From CinEmma:

From Masih: “Aimless strolling” is now verboten in Iran:

*Here’s the odious NYC Mayor pretending to honor dead Jews when in fact he accuses Israel of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, while Hamas gets accused of none of these, but is the subject of 3/4 of the Mayor’s tweet.  I detest this man and still can’t believe that New Yorkers—including many Jews—voted for him. But just wait until they get their subsidized grocery stores and free daycare!

From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana; the “gender equality paradox for STEM.  Fewer women go into STEM fields in nations that have greater equality between men and women. This holds for other counterintuitive indices of “accomplishment”.

From Jay, a joke from The Babylon Bee:

From Malcolm; a great collection of hidden moggies:

Two from my feed:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb, urging people to read this paper about Rosalind Franklin and”photographs 49 and 51″, and giving his take on the whole issue:

A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T13:23:45.341Z

Today’s music is from a group that readers either have forgotten or are too young to know about: the Kingston Trio (all the members of the original group have expired). This is one of the old folk songs they rearranged: “The Wagoner’s Lad,” first recorded in the 1920s. It’s a sad song about young lovers forced to separate because the lad drives wagons. The first verse is an paean to first-wave feminism.

From the link just preceding:

One of the things that I have always loved about folk music is its capacity to surprise. You can be humming along through all the wonderful chanteys and cowboy songs and ballads and love songs…and then stumble unexpectedly on the surpassingly beautiful (like “Shenandoah” or “The Mountains of Mourne”) or the darkly tragic (like “The Sloop John B”) – or amazingly modern sentiments in a very old song, like “The Wagoner’s Lad.”

The very first verse of the song, which is known in a host of variants including “My Horses Ain’t Hungry” (recorded famously by Peter, Paul and Mary as “Pretty Mary”) and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and which dates to the early nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, tells us that we are not in the standard folk universe in this song, where women are usually the objects of either romantic desire or borderline misogynistic humor or scorn. Instead, “Wagoner’s Lad” opens with a plaint as old as time, one that remains distressingly true for a really unthinkable percentage of the world’s women today – in the Middle East, in most of South Asia and much of East Asia, and in large parts of Africa. Perhaps half of the women in the world today do not choose their husbands freely, making that opening verse perpetually relevant:

The link to the song’s name will take you to several recorded versions, including ones by Joan Baez, Sarah McQuaid,  John Denver, and one by Burt Jansch and John Renbourn, which I finally found on YouTube.

2 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I start looking for your letter before it’s ever posted, and I always learn something. A lot of things. I make a point of looking at the faces of the people murdered by the Nazis. I don’t comment because nobody cares what I think but I definitely care what you think! Everybody seems worn down and depressed. Terrifying times, and you help me cope with them.

    Reply

  2. Phillip Greenspun addressed the current Mayor of New York as “Ayatollah Mamdani”.

    I thought that was accurate.

    Reply

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