James' World 2

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Last month I peeked my head into my son’s bed cave at 9:15 AM and whispered to him that I was off to a meeting, then to a friend’s house. When I squeezed his foot as I zipped him back in, his pre-teen body making the twin bed look tiny, I felt happy. I immediately thought of the word freedom.

And then I thought, as I often do, of a photo from 2021. In the picture, it’s also winter, and I’m hiding under that same son’s bed. We are in our tenth month of no childcare, no school, no daycare. My ear is pressed to my shoulder and my knee is in my armpit. I look like I’m playing 2-dimensional Twister, and losing. I remember the moment my daughter took the picture with her iPad, delighted because she’d found me in our game of hide and seek. In the photo, I look contorted and trapped. I am, of course, smiling.

During those lockdown months, my children were 2, 3, 4, 5. And I don’t know if you have been around any 3-year-olds lately, but there was a physical and emotional intensity to parenting during this time that is beyond any description; if you have ever been furious with a child, imagine being locked in a room with them and unable to leave for a year. Imagine how much you would want to be alone.

And so there is a part of me, emotionally but physically too, that is constantly bracing, as if I’m still alone in the house with my kids. And I can’t stop thinking about that photo because in some ways I’m still in it. I think, I know, it’s the reason that, in the years since, what I always wanted — what I still want, need, more than anything — is space. Time alone so I can breathe; unclench.

My husband, thankfully, works long days out of our house. He takes the kids out to breakfast on weekend mornings so I can have a few hours to myself; they have regular dad and kids dinners at restaurants while I exist alone in our house. A friend described herself as Gollum, the way she guards her time alone, and I felt seen. I guard my girls’ trips, my book club times, my silent baths. I curl around my precious snatches of time like Gollum with his ring, too, hissing at social obligations or even another hour of snuggles (please say I’m not the only one?).

But something has changed, and I’m only just starting to notice it. I don’t feel trapped in the same way. I don’t know if it’s that (for better or worse) social supports are back and running post-pandemic, or if it’s just my kids getting older. I do know any sliver of community care —playdates, shared pickups — still feels extraordinary.

And I know the feeling of freedom can go away at any time — a medical diagnosis, job loss, even relationships. There are many ways mothers can be trapped, and just because I feel some freedom now doesn’t mean I always will.

But still: yesterday I came out of hiding in my bedroom, where I’d holed up to get some writing in, only to find the house was quiet. I had come out into the living room, dreading the immediate dive into the what was for dinner debate, but my kids were off running around the neighborhood. My house was empty, but I was still hiding.

Who, exactly, am I hiding away from?

This possibility, this perspective, that motherhood doesn’t have to mean feeling trapped feels something like a secret. I wonder if I might be alone in this feeling, or if I’m just a selfish mother (another thing to discuss in therapy this week), or if many lockdown parents feel this way.

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CLIMATEWIRE | As historic fires rip through the Los Angeles area, President-elect Donald Trump is demanding Gov. Gavin Newsom “open up the water main” and allow “beautiful, clean, freshwater to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!”

At first glance, it seems to make sense. Why wouldn’t the leader of a state whose northern regions are currently enjoying above-average winter precipitation redirect water south to quench the burning metropolis as its fire hydrants run dry?

To start, there isn’t some central spigot nestled in the Sierra foothills that Newsom can just use a giant wrench to turn on. Then there’s the fact that firefighters were more hamstrung by the raging Santa Ana winds than empty hydrants due to a lack of water from Northern California.

Read on for a detailed explanation from our resident California water expert of the state’s complex water system and a brief history of Trump’s fixation with the issue.

What’s up with the ‘water restoration declaration?’

On Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”

Newsom’s communications director shot back: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction.”

Is it? Not quite. Trump was referring to a real document, even if he used an unknown name for it that left even the most astute California water officials scratching their heads. Karoline Leavitt, the president-elect’s press secretary, explained the reference by pointing to a five-year-old legal showdown between Newsom and Trump over how to manage the state and federal systems of pumps, reservoirs, and canals that move water around California.

In short, the two disagree about how much water should be pumped out of the state’s main rivers, which combine in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, to the much drier farms of the Central Valley and cities of Southern California and how much water should be kept in the ecosystem to keep declining fish populations alive, including the Delta smelt, a frequent Trump target. Their separate plans for the pumps make only marginal differences in actual water deliveries but have taken on a political life of their own.

The conflict peaked in 2020 when Trump unveiled the “record of decision” cementing his version of the rules at a rally in the Central Valley — only to be sued by Newsom, citing harm to the environment

“That was the last significant water policy decision made during his first term in which both President Trump and Gov. Newsom took a personal interest,” said Tom Birmingham, the former general manager of Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural irrigation district in the country that sided with Trump in that battle.

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Dressing your child appropriately for winter weather sounds simple, but according to my mom, a former preschool teacher, parents don’t always hit the mark. Between temperature changes throughout the day, your child’s activities, and what your child is actually willing to wear, there are several reasons why it’s easy to miss key details in your kid’s winter attire. As a mom to a preschooler myself, I’m certainly not immune.

I asked for my mom’s input and found 12 preschool-friendly winter clothing items to keep kids warm, dry, and comfortable during cold temperatures and fun snow days in between. From colorful merino wool socks to kids’ snow boots and a classic coat (with a removable hood!), it’s safe to say that my kiddo is ready for winter weather. Is yours? Keep scrolling to find out.

Gloves are essential in the winter, especially during recess. Since gloves can get lost easily, my mom recommends buying inexpensive pairs that come in a pack. This knit set comes in a pack of three with 12 different color combinations and multiple sizes (up to 10 years old). 

One grandma bought these gloves for her 3-year-old granddaughter, who “loves the bright colors and was happy to have gloves instead of mittens.” The gloves also “held up very well when building her snowman, and after washing and drying them,” she added.

You’ll want this Miles the Label Snowsuit on hand each year because it’s so warm and cozy. One of our writers received a sample for her 5-year-old, who couldn’t stop raving about the “extra soft” fleece lining and removable faux fur edge on the hood, which “keeps my face warm.” Our writer says she saves the snowsuit pants for snow days and sends her son to school with the jacket nearly every day when it’s cold.

This kids’ coat is wind-resistant and can withstand temperatures down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit. It also features an elastic waistband and cuffs to trap heat and a Velcro cover over the zipper for extra protection. The pants have even more thoughtful features, like reinforced knees, adjustable and removable suspenders, and more. 

Bonus: The parka includes a sewn-on label to write your child’s name. 

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Another explosive wildfire in California, driven by the region’s notorious Santa Ana winds, has burned thousands of buildings and has forced thousands of people to evacuate from their homes. The Palisades Fire began at 10:30 A.M. local time on Tuesday near Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Much of the neighborhood is under evacuation orders, which extended to northern Santa Monica. As of Thursday morning, the fire had scorched more than 17,000 acres and destroyed more than 2,000 structures.

Another blaze, the Eaton Fire, erupted on Tuesday evening in Altadena, Calif., just north of Los Angeles. As of late Wednesday, it had burned more than 10,000 acres and resulted in at least five deaths. Both fires had caused numerous injuries, according to officials.

On Wednesday evening, another fire began in the heart of Los Angeles just north of Hollywood. The fire grew rapidly to cover more than 40 acres as it spread downhill in Runyon Canyon. Though winds were not as high as Tuesday night, they were still pushing the fire and carrying embers that started spot fires. Helicopters made water drops, which helped beat back the flames.

Forecasters had warned that the risk of fire was extremely high this week, reaching “particularly dangerous situation” status as the ferocious winds combined with tinder-dry vegetation after a lack of rain during the beginning of what would usually be the wet season.

Gusts around the Palisades Fire were measured in the range of 40 to 50 miles per hour as of Tuesday afternoon, climate scientist Daniel Swain said during one of his regular “virtual climate and weather office hours,” hosted on YouTube. “Right now the winds are not extremely high, but again, they’re high enough,” said Swain, who is at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Gusts were expected to reach 70 to 80 mph as the winds would peak on Tuesday night into Wednesday, with some places potentially seeing gusts as high as 100 mph. Gusts of 99 mph was measured in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, Calif.

What Are the Santa Ana Winds?

The Santa Ana winds commonly propel fast-moving, damaging fires in this area; their characteristic dryness and speed can rapidly fan and spread flames. These winds are a result of local geography and a particular meteorological setup in which a high-pressure system sits over the Great Basin in the interior of the U.S. West and a low-pressure system hangs over California or offshore. Winds “want” to move from high to low pressure, and as they do so in this area, they travel downslope from the relatively high deserts. This descent compresses the air, warming it up and drying it out. (Such downslope winds, which happen in other locations around the world, are scientifically termed katabatic winds.)

The Santa Ana winds are additionally funneled through narrow mountain canyons, which causes them to speed up. The hot, dry, and fast nature of these winds makes them perfectly suited to spreading flames from any spark that ignites. The winds blow embers well ahead of the fire front, starting new spot fires. “Those embers are going to follow the wind and burn whatever they want,” Swain said in another video on YouTube on Tuesday.

In a couple of respects, this Santa Ana wind event isn’t a typical one: it “is especially extreme and is reaching lower elevations than usual with strong winds,” Swain said in another briefing on Wednesday morning.

Is Climate Change Playing a Role in the Los Angeles Fires?

The timing of the event is more in line with the norm: Santa Ana events typically happen from October through January. Part of what is raising fire risks from these events, though, is related to the influence of climate change on fluctuations in the region’s precipitation.

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Good morning love! I am yours from the hours of 12 to 3 tomorrow so please let me know how you would like to use me. Here are some options:

1. I come while you hang with the baby and I do laundry, bottles, cooking, buy and put away groceries.

2. I come and take care of the baby while you sleep in your room alone or you go do something by yourself or you guys go out to lunch the two of you without the baby.

3. I come and take you out to lunch with or without the baby.

4. And we sit on the couch and just chat or watch a funny movie with the baby.

You can decide whenever you want, just let me know!

The key here is that there are multiple options to choose from, each laid out clearly so the new parent only has to respond with a single number: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Rogers likes to include tasks that someone might be uncomfortable asking of a friend, like doing laundry or washing bottles.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, let me know what you want. Let me know how I can help.’ You’re so far deep in this world of postpartum ‘whatever’ that you don’t even know how to ask someone for something,” she said in her Reel. “Also, there aren’t many people, other than my sisters, that I would ask to be like, ‘Can you just come over and clean?’”

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A constitutional winter is upon us, partly enabled by last summer’s spike in the price of eggs. While the Federal Reserve battled egg inflation, angry voters reinstalled Donald Trump in the White House. Among his first acts: appointing two tech billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, as efficiency czars. What their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—more an advisory group, really—proposes to do, however, involves constitutional gambits that would rob James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” of sleep.

Trump rode to victory attacking grocery costs and convincing voters that government was wasteful and that he alone could fix their grievances. His supporters included people fed up with Bidenomics and administrative snafus, everyday bureaucratic mazes that waste time, money, and patience.

Incoming presidents have often promised to address such snafus. Most famously, former president Bill Clinton, with his vice president, Al Gore, launched a “reinventing government” initiative that sought solutions from career public servants even as the initiative trumpeted basic business principles.

In stark contrast, Trump’s first-term agenda of “deconstructing the administrative state” failed in its ultimate goal of making key federal positions at-will hires to somehow deliver better government. Through DOGE, Trump will try again to overhaul the bureaucracy, this time with the help of business people whose ideas about the Constitution presage lengthy court battles.

In November, what appeared as the DOGE plan in the Wall Street Journal revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of public administration. Rather than addressing administrative snafus with a scalpel, DOGE risks creating constitutional ones with its axe.

DOGE’s lip service to eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” thinly veils an agenda aimed at dismantling corporate watchdogs, from the EPA to the FDIC, and politicizing agencies like the DOJ and IRS to pursue presidential ends, without constitutional guardrails. This approach threatens the delicate constitutional balance that has sustained the Republic for over a century, dividing power among the three branches and the nonpartisan bureaucracy in their midst.

To nurture this balance, DOGE could consider mission-driven recommendations from the good government community of public administration scholars and nonpartisan research groups like the National Academy of Public Administration. They routinely investigate the best ways to make government more efficient and effective. Their past research findings can improve hiring, program implementation, cost management and other administrative techniques. These could have real, positive impacts on government efficiency while still allowing Trump to leave a positive legacy on the civil service. Plenty of these initiatives are already moving bureaucracy away from its technocratic, often snafu-riddled proceduralism to a more publicly engaged demonstration of outcomes.

Instead, the DOGE blueprint blatantly ignores Congress—even with GOP control—and champions the “unitary executive” theory of government by presenting normal bureaucratic rulemaking as a supposed scourge of democracy. Overstretching the summer’s Supreme Court rulings in West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the DOGE blueprint assumes that this executive, backed by a sympathetic judiciary, can “drive action” through reorganization, rule nullification, and impoundments.

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Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Lummi

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Ever since humans started gazing at the heavens through telescopes, we have discovered, bit by bit, that in celestial terms we’re apparently not so special. Earth was not the center of the universe, it turned out. It wasn’t even the center of the solar system! The solar system, unfortunately, wasn’t the center of the universe either. In fact, there were many star systems fundamentally like it, together making up a galaxy. And, wouldn’t you know, the galaxy wasn’t special but one of many, which all had their own solar systems, which also had planets, some of which presumably host their own ensemble of egoistic creatures with an overinflated sense of cosmic importance.

This notion of mediocrity has been baked into cosmology, in the form of the “cosmological principle.” Its gist is that the universe is basically the same everywhere we look—homogenized like milk, made of common materials evenly distributed in every direction. At the top of the cosmic hierarchy, giant groups of galaxies clump into sprawling, matter-rich filaments and sheets around gaping intergalactic voids, but past that, structure seems to peter out. If you could zoom way out and look at the universe’s big picture, says Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire in England, “it would look really smooth.”

Lopez compares the cosmos with a beach: If you plunked a handful of sand under a microscope, the sand grains would look like the special individuals they are. “You would see the different colors, shapes, and sizes,” she says. “But if you were to walk across the beach, looking out at the sand dunes, all you would see is a uniform golden beige color.”

That means Earth (or any of the other trillions of planets that must exist) and its tiny corner of the cosmos appear to hold no particularly privileged place in comparison to everything else. And this homogeneity is convenient for astronomers because it lets them look at the universe in part as a reliable way of making inferences about the whole; whether here in the Milky Way or in a nameless galaxy billions of light-years distant, prevailing conditions should be essentially the same.

This simplifying ethos applies to everything from understanding how dark matter weighs down galaxy clusters to estimating how common life-friendly conditions might be throughout the cosmos, and it allows astronomers to simplify their mathematical models of the universe’s past as well as their predictions of its future. “Everything is based on the idea that [the cosmological principle] is true,” Lopez says. “It is also a very vague assumption. So it’s really hard to validate.”

Validation is especially challenging when significant evidence exists to the contrary—and a host of recent observations suggest indeed that the universe could be stranger and have larger variations than cosmologists had so comfortably supposed.

If that’s the case, humans (and anyone else out there) actually might have a sort of special view of the light-years beyond—not privileged, per se, but also not average, in that “average” would no longer even be a useful concept at sufficiently large scales. “Different observers may see slightly different universes,” at least at large scales, says Valerio Marra, a professor at the Federal University of Espírito Santo in Brazil and a researcher at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste in Italy.

Astronomers haven’t thrown out the cosmological principle just yet, but they are gathering clues about its potential weaknesses. One approach involves looking for structures so large they challenge cosmic smoothness even at a hugely wide zoom. Scientists have calculated that anything wider than about 1.2 billion light-years would upset the homogeneous cosmic apple cart.

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George Wylesol

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On Nov. 30, 2022, traffic to OpenAI’s website peaked at a number a little north of zero. It was a startup so small and sleepy that the owners didn’t bother tracking their web traffic. It was a quiet day, the last the company would ever know. Within two months, OpenAI was being pounded by more than 100 million visitors trying, and freaking out about, ChatGPT. Nothing has been the same for anyone since, particularly Sam Altman. In his most wide-ranging interview as chief executive officer, Altman explains his infamous four-day firing, how he actually runs OpenAI, his plans for the Trump-Musk presidency, and his relentless pursuit of artificial general intelligence—the still-theoretical next phase of AI, in which machines will be capable of performing any intellectual task a human can do. Edited for clarity and length.

Your team suggested this would be a good moment to review the past two years, reflect on some events and decisions, to clarify a few things. But before we do that, can you tell the story of OpenAI’s founding dinner again? Because it seems like the historic value of that event increases by the day.

Everyone wants a neat story where there’s one moment when a thing happened. Conservatively, I would say there were 20 founding dinners that year [2015], and then one ends up being entered into the canon, and everyone talks about that. The most important one to me personally was Ilya 1 and I at the Counter in Mountain View [California]. Just the two of us.

And to rewind even back from that, I was always really interested in AI. I had studied it as an undergrad. I got distracted for a while, and then 2012 comes along. Ilya and others do AlexNet. 2 I keep watching the progress, and I’m like, “Man, deep learning seems real. Also, it seems like it scales. That’s a big, big deal. Someone should do something.”

² AlexNet, created by Alex Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, used a deep convolutional neural network (CNN)—a powerful new type of computer program—to recognize images far more accurately than ever, kick-starting major progress in AI.

So I started meeting a bunch of people, asking who would be good to do this with. It’s impossible to overstate how nonmainstream AGI was in 2014. People were afraid to talk to me, because I was saying I wanted to start an AGI effort. It was, like, cancelable. It could ruin your career. But a lot of people said there’s one person you really gotta talk to, and that was Ilya. So I stalked Ilya at a conference, got him in the hallway, and we talked. I was like, “This is a smart guy.” I kind of told him what I was thinking, and we agreed we’d meet up for a dinner. At our first dinner, he articulated—not in the same words he’d use now—but basically articulated our strategy for how to build AGI.

What from the spirit of that dinner remains in the company today?

Kind of all of it. There’s additional things on top of it, but this idea that we believed in deep learning, we believed in a particular technical approach to get there and a way to do research and engineering together—it’s incredible to me how well that’s worked. Usually when you have these ideas, they don’t quite work, and there were clearly some things about our original conception that didn’t work at all. Structure. 3 All of that. But [believing] AGI was possible, that this was the approach to bet on, and if it were possible it would be a big deal to society? That’s been remarkably true.

One of the strengths of that original OpenAI group was recruiting. Somehow you managed to corner the market on a ton of the top AI research talent, often with much less money to offer than your competitors. What was the pitch?

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Photo illustration by Danielle Del Plato for Bloomberg Businessweek; Background illustration: Chuck Anderson/Krea, Photo: Bloomberg

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