Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent Signal First Steps in Bumpy Recovery - The New York Times

China’s Tech Giants Signal the First Steps in a Bumpy Recovery

"The economy is open again, helping Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent claw back in the first quarter from a miserable 2022, though they will likely face continuing skepticism from investors.

May 19, 2023, 10:54 a.m. ET

A Baidu AI robot at the company’s headquarters in Beijing in 2021.Florence Lo/Reuters

Eight months ago, the future of China’s largest internet companies looked grim. Covid-era lockdowns crushed sales and Beijing’s harsh tech regulations had spooked even audacious China investors. Shares of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent dropped to some of their lowest levels in several years.

With China’s economy now reopen, the tech giants this week released earnings reports that showed initial signs of recovery. But the financial results, the first issued since the end of “zero Covid” restrictions, also reflected the uneven pace of China’s economic rebound and signaled that the companies’ makeovers, while underway, are likely to be rocky.

Baidu, China’s leading internet search business, and Tencent, owner of the ubiquitous messaging app WeChat, both recorded double-digit revenue growth in the first three months of the year over the same period in 2022, marking the first time in over a year they had reached that level.

Revenue rose 10 percent at Baidu, which said on Tuesday that strong digital advertising sales had continued into the current quarter. Tencent on Wednesday attributed its 11 percent revenue climb in part to a rebound in digital payments as Chinese consumers began to spend money again after a long dry spell. Tencent, China’s dominant video game company, also benefited from easing restrictions on gaming licenses last year after a nine-month freeze.

On Thursday, Alibaba reported that revenue rose 2 percent compared to the year prior, below analyst estimates. Its core online e-commerce division and cloud computing unit reported sales declines in the single digits, though online shopping began to rebound in March, the company said.

The reports followed a turbulent two years for tech companies under Beijing’s tight regulatory grip. After Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, criticized financial regulators in 2020 for stifling innovation, officials halted the public offering of Ant Group, a financial technology company built by Mr. Ma.

Shanghai’s financial district last month.Qilai Shen for The New York Times

In January, a month after China abruptly reversed its “zero Covid” restrictions under public pressure, a top official at China’s central bank said the campaign against tech companies was “basically complete.” China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, is now hoping the country’s tech industry can provide a lifeline for growth. And spurred by an escalating tech competition with the United States, China is eager to nurture its beleaguered titans back to life.

“The worst time policy-wise for them is over,” said Tian Hou, the founder of TH Data Capital, a data analytics company in Beijing. “The government now wants to use these internet companies to create more jobs, innovate, and catch up with the United States.”

The initial investor reaction to the companies’ first quarter results was muted. Shares of Baidu and Tencent were roughly flat this week in Hong Kong, though both have rallied since October. Alibaba’s stock fell roughly 6 percent on Friday, but was down about 2 percent for the week.

The companies’ fortunes will remain tied to China’s economy. Local governments are saddled in debt. The property sector, long a stimulant of growth, is sputtering. Data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics for April underwhelmed analysts: Chinese were spending more on food, but appeared to avoid items like cosmetics and cars. Youth unemployment reached a record of 20.4 percent.

“People are going out on holiday, but they’re not spending compared to prepandemic levels,” said Bruce Pang, chief economist for Greater China at Jones Lang LaSalle, the global real estate and investment advisory firm. “They’re cautious because they have low confidence in job prospects and future sources of income.”

Recent retail data showed that people in China are spending more on food, but avoiding items like cosmetics and cars. Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Alibaba is in the midst of a dramatic overhaul. It announced a major reorganization in March that split the company into six units. And this week it announced a spinoff of its prized cloud division, which the company said would be completed within 12 months to prepare for a public listing. The e-commerce giant also said it is exploring a public offering for its grocery chain and logistics arm, after a series of regulatory probes held up many promising tech firms from going public.

The breakup of Alibaba, one of China’s most iconic corporate empires, showcases the level of reassessment happening in the tech sector. For years, China’s internet firms swelled as millions of Chinese went online. Recently, that migration has reached a ceiling, and companies are competing intensely for the same customers.

All three of China’s big internet companies are hoping to tell investors a new story, one pegged to artificial intelligence, the new technology underlying services like ChatGPT that are promising to unseat old ways of doing business.

Daniel Zhang, the Alibaba chairman who will also serve as chief executive of Alibaba’s soon-to-be independent cloud unit, described A.I. as a technology that will “reshape every aspect of our society.”

The companies are hoping that investments in artificial intelligence will pay off for their cloud computing units, a technology that underpins A.I. services. Baidu said its A.I. cloud division reported its first profit last quarter.

Earlier this year, Baidu and Alibaba unveiled artificial intelligence systems similar to ChatGPT, which was developed by the Silicon Valley research lab OpenAI. Baidu said it had requested approval for the go-ahead after China’s cyberspace watchdog released guidelines for the A.I. systems in April.

Tencent has made “good progress” on its own A.I. model, the company said on Wednesday, with teams planning new A.I. offerings, though it did not elaborate further. 

The companies are focusing their A.I. services on enterprises or businesses — in part because chatbots with mass appeal could disrupt China’s firm hold on information. Alibaba and Baidu each said that more than 100,000 enterprises had lined up to try their artificial intelligence products.

Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent are engaged in makeovers at a difficult time. Beijing’s grip on the economy is tighter than ever. Intensified rivalries with the United States have deprived Chinese companies of the access to some cutting edge microchips necessary to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence systems. And analysts say that a lucrative pool of domestic customers — China’s state-owned enterprises — are spurning private cloud-computing providers in favor of government-backed alternatives.

Recently, U.S. officials have called for a review of Chinese cloud providers such as Alibaba on national security grounds. Alibaba said Thursday that its cloud business declined last quarter in part because a major customer had backed out of its international service for “non-product reasons.”

Those difficulties, both in China and abroad, are keeping some investors away, knowing that the internet companies are not likely to return to the growth rates they had a decade prior. Others think they deserve a second look.

“I would suggest to forget the past,” said Kenny Wen, head of investment strategy at the asset management company KGI Asia in Hong Kong. “Now they are coming back and we’re seeing gradual improvement. We need to give them a new evaluation standard.”

Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent Signal First Steps in Bumpy Recovery - The New York Times

Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamy Is the Latest in a Line of Politically Problematic Tech Bros - The New York Times

Vivek Ramaswamy Is the Latest in a Line of Politically Problematic Tech Bros

May 18, 2023

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

"Here’s a question that vexes me: Why does it seem that so many men who have been successful in the tech sphere and then waded into politics prove so problematic on issues of diversity and equity?

Vivek Ramaswamy, a hedge fund analyst turned biotech executive, is the fifth-ranked candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, going by the Real Clear Politics polling average. But he makes up for his modest numbers in exposure — announcing his candidacy in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay, pandering to the National Rifle Association at its convention and making the cable news rounds. He’s also the author of several books, including “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” and “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence,” and ‌has largely staked his campaign‌ on anti-wokeness.

Ramaswamy has tried cozying up to ‌Donald Trump — who leads Republican primary polls by a wide margin — including by saying in February that he doubted he’d wind up as one of the targets of Trump’s trademark vitriol “because we’re friends. I think we have a deep, mutual respect for one another. We’re both energetic people.” And many of Ramaswamy’s views aren’t far from those of Gov. Ron De‌Santis‌ — who is polling a distant second behind Trump and is another anti-woke crusader.

When he began his campaign, Ramaswamy tweeted: “We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism & hard work have disappeared. Wokeism, climatism & gender ideology have replaced them.” His tweet came with a video that quotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech — the only King speech Republicans ever seem to quote.

Ramaswamy has checked many of Republicans’ current ideological boxes, sayinghe wants to “shut down” the F.B.I., declaring “I will end affirmative action in America” and calling for raising the voting age to 25 unless younger voters enroll in the military, work as first responders or pass citizenship tests. So it’s not surprising that he’s quickly become a darling of the right. What initially surprised me, though, was an essay this week in Politico Magazine by the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang — a lawyer turned tech entrepreneur turned politician — advising Ramaswamy on how to win the Republican nomination.

But after I thought about it for a moment, I realized it’s not that surprising, after all.

I started out admiring Yang. When we met on the set of “Real Time With Bill Maher” in 2019, I was impressed. He had a refreshing way of explaining his policy proposals, particularly the economic ones‌, with clarity and charm. I called him a “futurist among conventionalists and Bolsheviks.”

A few months after dropping out of the race, he voiced qualified support for reparations, telling Time: “This country was built on the backs of slaves, and we owe them a massive debt. And I’m for H.R.-40, the bill that explores what reparations would look like,” a statement that suggested that he understood the centrality of race and racism in American history, regardless of where anyone might come down on the issue of reparations.

But the more he revealed ‌himself, particularly around racial issues, the more ‌‌I was ‌put off: His campaign-trail jokes that ‌‌lean‌ed into the Asian American model minority stereotyp‌‌e — “the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math,” “I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors‌” — caused‌ ‌a lot of Asian Americans‌, and me, to bristle‌.

In the early days of the pandemic, in a ham-handed attempt to address rising anti-Asian hate, Yang wrote, “We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our Americanness in ways we never have before” — as if the problem were Asian Americans failing to prove their Americanness and not vile anti-Asian sentiment.

‌During his run for mayor of New York in 2021, he said, “I moved to Georgia to help win the Senate,” which struck me as trying to give himself too much credit for the electi‌on of two Democratic senators that year — and not enough credit to Georgians who’d worked for years to protect voting rights.

Last year ‌Yang ‌defended the podcaster Joe Rogan for his use of the N-word, tweeting, “I don’t think Joe Rogan is a racist — the man interacts with and works with black people literally all of the time,” before ‌deleting the tweet and apologiz‌‌ing.

‌‌In March on his own podcast, he questioned the Democratic Party’s decision to make South Carolina‌ — ‌a state ‌‌where most ‌Democratic voters are Black‌‌ — ‌the first primary on ‌‌its ‌calendar, suggesting ‌that ‌the move‌ ‌sent this message: “Sorry, rural white Midwesterners, not a priority for the Democratic Party anymore.‌”‌

When you add all of this up, you get the sense that what Yang is offering is a less barbed but still disingenuous platform of anti-wokeness, that now a big part of his brand is downplaying the significance of race.

Why? Was this how he always felt but he was able to hide it when he needed the votes of a diverse Democratic electorate?

Or does it illustrate the way that a type of politician — in this case, tech bros, who often position themselves as apart from career politicians and fancy themselves as forward thinkers — can perpetuate positions on race issues that are dismissive, corrosive and backward?

Ramaswamy and Yang certainly aren’t the only examples. The billionaire Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early Facebook investor, has been described by The Times as “the right’s would-be kingmaker.” When he spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, he said: “Now we are told that great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

The Republican Party that he has supported cares, and it is engaged in a relentless campaign of anti-trans legislation in states across the country. Thiel is also an author of the 1995 book “The Diversity Myth,” which argued against “the extreme focus on racism.”

At the moment, perhaps the highest-profile political tech bro is Elon Musk, who styled himself as a free-speech champion when he bought Twitter but appears to use the site mostly as a soapbox to make his views explicit. He has tweeted about “owning the libs,” encouraged people to vote Republican in last year’s midterms and mocked shirts with “#StayWoke” printed on them.

Success in the tech sector has lent all of these guys an undeserved gravitas and a gloss as unconventional businessmen. (That, you’ll recall, is part of how we wound up with Trump.)

In the end, though, they’re just pandering to voters who want to wish away the complexities of our nation’s story — those who appear to believe that making America great means condescending to so many who’ve fought, for generations, for equality. As political figures, they’re not innovating. They’re peddling ahistoric drivel."

Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamy Is the Latest in a Line of Politically Problematic Tech Bros - The New York Times

Microsoft Says New AI Shows Signs of Human Reasoning - The New York Times

I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New Is Happening in Relationships.

"For more and more of Orna Guralnik’s patients, the ideas behind Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are leading to breakthroughs at home.

May 16, 2023Updated 5:44 a.m. ET

The couples therapist Orna Guralnik at her office in New York City.Dina Litovksy for The New York Times

Listen to This Article

Audio Recording by Audm

One afternoon in 2020, early in the pandemic, I met Syl’violet and Matthew for a virtual session. Young, idealistic, deeply in love, they were also prone to dramatic fights. In this session Syl’violet, a vivacious essayist and spoken-word poet, was trying to describe the ways she felt Matthew, a measured medical student, was trying to control her, in this case by trying to dissuade her from buying a slushy. He thought they should keep to a tight budget until after he became a doctor and achieved financial stability. Then she could have “all the slushies you want later.” Syl’violet found his reasoning maddening, especially since he seemed to imply she was reckless.

On the face of it, the fight seemed insignificant, but then an exchange took place that changed the tenor of the argument, connecting us to the underlying roots of the issue. “I have trouble envisioning that finish line,” Syl’violet exclaimed, tearing up, “because the plan that he’s talking about? My life has always been: The plan never works. You can do all the right things, you can obey all the right rules and get [expletive].” For a moment, Matthew continued to try to reason with her and convince her of his sound financial strategy. “I know that sounds very conceited, cocky,” he said, to which Syl’violet whipped back: “No! It sounds privileged!” She described her family’s relationship to money; they’d had nothing but trauma for generations. Syl’violet resented Matthew’s pride in his plan. “A privileged setting gave you access to all these things,” she said. “You’re taking ownership over it like, ‘I did it according to plan,’ as if, like, if other people did it according to plan, it would work out.”

With the mention of the word “privilege,” Matthew came around to realizing they were talking about forces larger than themselves. Each of them was African American, but he came from a financially stable family; his parents, a firefighter and a bank manager, followed a middle-class trajectory and did well. “Let me rephrase,” Matthew said carefully, signaling to Syl’violet that he could see how his certainty about his future reflected his class background: “I recognize that if it wasn’t for my parents’ credit score, my loans to get — OK — so, I get that.” As the relevance of class and race came into focus, Syl’violet’s rage transformed into deep sorrow, generations of poverty weighing heavily on her. “I cannot stop thinking that we’re going to go bankrupt.” She worried that they might even be evicted. “I wish I could believe what you believe,” she told Matthew. He replied, his voice growing tender: “We have the same life now.” He looked at her, exuding care. “We have to live with the idea, the thinking, the viewpoint, that we’re going to die old together.”

Syl’violet and MatthewDina Litovksy for The New York Times

One of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical othernessand appreciate difference and sovereignty. People talk a good game about their efforts, but it’s quite a difficult psychological task. To be truly open to your partner’s experience, you must relinquish your conviction in the righteousness of your own position; this requires humility and the courage to tolerate uncertainty. Coming to see the working of implicit biases on us, grasping that our views are contingent on, let’s say, our gender, class background or skin color, is a humbling lesson. It pushes us beyond assuming sameness, opening up the possibility of seeing our partner’s point of view.

I’ve been working as a psychologist seeing individuals and couples since the mid-1990s, and in the past eight years, I’ve witnessed a tremendous change in the kinds of conversations couples can have. Not long ago, if I would ask a couple about the ways class or race played out between them, I’d typically be met with an awkward shrug and a change of topic. But recent events have reshaped the national conversation on power, privilege, gender norms, whiteness and systemic racism. Together these ideas have pushed us to think, talk, argue and become aware of the many implicit biases we all carry about our identities, unconscious assumptions that privilege some and inflict harm on others. These insights have also made it easier for people to realize there may be plenty of other unconscious assumptions undergirding their positions. I’ve been surprised and excited by the impact of this new understanding, and it has all made my work as a couples therapist easier.

There has, of course, been ferocious pushback against many of these ideas, claims that they are divisive or exclusionary. #MeToo, B.L.M. and trans rights have been weaponized in service of the culture wars dominating the media. But in my practice, I’ve found that engaging with these progressive movements has led to deep changes in our psyches. My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being. New words make new thoughts and feelings possible. As a collective we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal.

Some five years ago I started working on a documentary series called “Couples Therapy,” created by the filmmakers Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg and Eli Despres and airing on Showtime, that chronicles 18 to 20 weeks of therapy with couples who courageously volunteer to have their sessions filmed. (The couples in this essay were filmed for the show, which makes it possible for me to write about them; only some of those who are filmed end up on air.) We are now several seasons in. I was drawn to the project knowing that the directors were committed to an honest, vérité portrayal of therapy, and to looking at the social factors that thread through people’s lives and relationships.

I am also trained as a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is about exploring unconscious motivations behind thoughts or actions. It allows people to gain access to how early experiences — vicissitudes of attachment and trauma — have shaped them, and to expand their capacity for thought and feeling. For couples, I incorporate systems thinking, a practice that focuses on the system — a couple, say or a family — and interprets how each individual unconsciously behaves in ways that serve the system as a whole.

But what we mean by “unconsciously” is an ongoing debate. Freud was known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his singular focus on the private, interior world. In particular, he wrote about the epic battle between unconscious drives and forces of civilization. Traditional psychoanalysis has mostly focused on early scenes between the young and their caregivers as shaping the psyche, leaving the sociopolitical context to other disciplines. I am of a later theoretical school that, rather than seeing civilization in conflict with the self, sees the social contract, our relationship to the collectives we belong to, as nested in the deepest corners of our unconscious. For me, psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that one of the most pernicious issues couples struggle with is working through wrongdoing and blame. The claim “You hurt me” often sends couples spiraling. People want to feel like good and lovable beings; their intentions make perfect sense to themselves, and they hate being interpreted as selfish. In psychoanalytic jargon we often say, “No one likes being the ‘bad object.’” In fact, there are few things people resist more than being held responsible for causing harm. It immediately threatens to overwhelm the “offender” with shame (Am I a bad person?) and guilt (Have I caused irreparable damage? Should I be punished?). Yet serious hurt that goes unacknowledged leads to the accumulation of resentment and a deadening of the relationship.

Our ongoing national conversations about systemic biases have made it easier for couples to acknowledge wrongdoings by easing people into the idea of unconscious complicity. Accepting that you are part of a complex social system and implicated in its biases no matter what you tell yourself can also help you accept that in other aspects of your life, you are partly governed by unconscious forces you do not necessarily recognize. In Freudian terms, the ego is not a master in its own house. In other words, to know if you’ve caused harm, it is not enough to ask yourself, “Did I intend to hurt the other?”; you may need to listen to the feedback of others. These insights can have ripple effects beyond an awareness of specific biases, becoming relevant in many aspects of our lives — in our relationships with partners or children, in reviewing our life history. As my friend Nick described it: “Everything about me was raised to believe I am not racist or privileged, but in recent years I realize how easy certain things have always been for me simply because I’m white. I am humbled. And that has changed the way Rebecca and I talk with each other.”

One of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness.

A shift in our vocabularies has also played a role. Language tends to evolve to better accommodate experiences of the dominant social group, leaving other experiences obscured from collective understanding, and thus silently perpetuating bias and harm. When these gaps are filled by new concepts, social change can follow. The expanding lexicon around bias and privilege includes terms like “white fragility” or “white tears,” referring to white people’s defensive refusal to fully engage with accountability; other phrases like “virtue signaling,” being “a Karen” or “performative allyship” underline the difference between honest and fake engagement with questions of ethics, morality and responsibility. These terms have implications beyond race, and I’ve seen them work their way into the therapy room. They’ve helped couples see the difference between the wish to receive forgiveness and assurance of your goodness and actual concern for the one you offended. Analysts call this distinction the difference between guilt and guiltiness. Guilt entails feeling bad for having harmed another; guiltiness is the preoccupation with yourself — whether you are or aren’t guilty. This preoccupation is all about warding off shame, which blocks concern for others.

Questions of guilt hovered over another couple I worked with. He had recently cheated on his wife. They were generally deeply supportive of each other, but after she found out about his transgression, she was terribly upset and also confused. Their attempts to talk about what happened were halting. #MeToo rhetoric was woven into their discussions, functioning as a superego, shaping and inhibiting what they could even think. She said that she felt that the lessons of the movement were telling her not to forgive but to leave him — “Especially now, if a woman is being wronged, you get out.” It was hard for her to know how she actually felt about it all. Early on, he couldn’t separate remorse from fear. He was terrified of getting into trouble, and guiltiness prevailed. His voice was hushed while he scrutinized me intently, worried about how he would be perceived: “There are a lot of men in this business right now who have taken positions of power and use them to have sex with people.”

They were both white and understood their privilege and were apologetic about it. She often undid her own complaints — “I levitate out” — by having the thought, “Oh, poor cis white woman.” He was uncomfortable, too. He talked about reading the news “about another Black or brown person being killed. And it’s just like I feel a little — well, I feel guilty, to be honest, to be sitting here.” The lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement initially can provoke such paralyzing guilt and shame that people become defensive and stop fully thinking. Yet over time, I’ve found, the ideas can inspire deep psychological work, pushing people to reckon with the harm that has been done, the question of whom should be implicated, and the difference between virtue signaling and deeper concerns. These are tough and important lessons that can carry over into intimate relationships. In this case, the husband described a new understanding about the ways he exercised power at work: “Hold on. Have I been an ally? Has it just been optics?” These insights extended even to his way of speaking about his transgression. He had been rationalizing his behavior by saying that his wife was not giving him the attention he needed. But moving beyond what the couple called “optics,” now he was asking himself for a more thorough accounting of what his cheating was really about, and how it affected his wife. He explained how lonely he was if she traveled; he felt left behind and discarded, a feeling deeply familiar to him from early childhood. Acknowledging his vulnerability was hard for him, but it opened up a series of honest conversations between them. “I convinced myself she does not desire me,” he said. “I’m not the popular guy. I’m not the strong guy.” He linked those feelings to insecurities he felt as a teenager, when he suffered chronic teasing from kids at school for being perceived as effeminate.

This new, nondefensive way of talking made it possible for her to understand how his transgression hit her where she felt most insecure, and he could see it, generating remorse and forgiveness between them. She described how it had become easier for both of them to “check” themselves for their impact on the other person, and quickly “notice or apologize.” In one session she said, smiling: “You were a jerk to me yesterday, and then you apologized a couple hours later. You recognized that you took out your frustration there on me because I was an easy target.” He realized that he stopped skimming over ways he caused others pain: “I actually was just thinking therapy and the Black Lives Matter movement have made me keenly aware of the words that just came out of my mouth, and the understanding that she reacted adversely to that, instead of me just going, ‘We move on, because that’s awkward.’ There’s a need now to address it.” He continued: “ ‘Did I just upset you? What did I do to just upset you?’”

Couples work always goes back to the challenge of otherness. Differences can show up around philosophical questions like what is important to devote a life to, or whether it is ethical to have babies with a climate crisis looming; or it can be closer to home, like whether having a sexual fantasy about a person who is not your partner is acceptable; or even as seemingly trivial as the correct way to load a dishwasher. Whatever the issue, differences can become a point of crisis in the relationship. Immediately the question of who is right, who gets their way or who has a better handle on reality pops up. Narcissistic vulnerabilities about self-worth appear, which then trigger an impulse to devalue the other. Partners try to resolve such impasses by digging in and working hard to convince the other of their own position, becoming further polarized.

The challenge of otherness may be easiest to see when we think of racial differences. This was certainly true for James and Michelle. Michelle was a calm, gentle, somewhat reserved African American social worker, and James, at the time a police officer, was a slight, wiry white man whose face did not reveal much feeling. They came in with classic conflicts around division of labor and differing parenting styles, and then the pandemic hit. Quarantined, working remotely and home-schooling their 3-year-old son, they started fighting about Covid protocols. Michelle was aware of the way that Covid was devastating Black communities and wanted to be careful. James, along with his fellow police officers and his conservative parents, thought the concern was overblown. Discussion about how race shaped James and Michelle’s experiences and ideas routinely dead-ended. If Michelle tried to bring up the topic, James would insist, “I don’t see color,” and say he didn’t know what she was talking about. In our sessions, Michelle sounded hopeless: She wanted him to understand how traumatizing Covid had been for Black people. But she was frustrated by his inability to acknowledge real difference, as if everyone was the same race. “He’s of the mind-set that ‘I don’t see color.’” She continued setting out his thinking: “ ‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say because that’s not how I think.’” That point of view “obviously angers me,” she said. James would shrug, expressionless. Michelle was describing the infuriating experience of trying to break through a barrier: Her husband wasn’t consciously aware that whiteness was a perspective that was constricting what he could imagine or comprehend.

After George Floyd was murdered and protests of all kinds erupted across the country, the dynamic between James and Michelle started to shift. Psychoanalysts are often interested in people’s fantasies, the scenarios running under the hood of conscious thought that express hidden desires and fears. When I asked James and Michelle about theirs, they shared apocalyptic ones: Each was imagining a full-on race war. Michelle imagined loss of all contact and trust between Black people and white people. James, who seemed uncharacteristically tense, saw himself on one side of a divide and was envisioning an “all-out physical combat.” “With whom?” I asked. “With anybody outside of this household. Anybody that tries to come and take anything from us because they’re struggling to survive and they start looting to feed their family, they’re now coming to my house.” Yet over time, as the conversation about Black lives continued, his own identifications became more complex and nuanced. He still felt loyalty to his fellow police officers and his conservative family, but he became aware that those feelings were now in tension with Michelle’s beliefs and what he was witnessing on the news about police violence against Black men and loud public demand for police reform.

Michelle and James with their son.Dina Litovksy for The New York Times

James’s changing internal landscape was reflected in his clear distress about “the all-out chaos that a large conflict can bring if we’re further divided in this country. You wouldn’t know who to trust from place to place.” Not knowing whom to trust also meant he could no longer trust his old belief system — in which it was clear who was “good” and who was “bad.” This disruption was creating new concerns and fantasies. Rather than fearing looters, he now feared polarization: “Michelle might be able to seek refuge somewhere where I might get shunned, or vice versa.” He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to keep their young child safe.

Interestingly, engaging with the question of systemic racism did not polarize Michelle and James but rather helped them do the important psychological work that I doubt I, as their therapist, could have inspired in them on my own. Something began to shift inside James, and he was no longer assuming sameness. He was no longer imposing his version of reality on Michelle, but rather “mentalizing” — understanding his and her mental states as separate and different subjective experiences: thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires. In a meaningful moment he said, “I know it hits her harder than it does me.” I was moved to hear James plainly state: “We can never truly know what each other goes through because we’re not each other. So all we can do is be in as much understanding as possible.” He also recognized that he felt less defensive, “because she’s not directly attacking me.” And he saw a way for the two of them to remain connected, despite their difference. “We could get into a debate or an argument and be on opposite sides of the spectrum, completely juxtaposed, and manage to come through it and learn something about another perspective.”

Michelle, who often described herself as guarded, also began to drop her defensive posture. She was looking at him fondly, her voice warmer. “These are things that I never really heard him fully articulate, particularly about his insecurities and feeling caught in the middle. That’s helpful for me to hear, because it makes me more conscious and aware of how he’s feeling.” For the first time, they were each entertaining multiple perspectives. Love is ultimately measured by people’s capacity to see and care about the other person as they are; succeeding in this effort is how people in relationships grow.

---

Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalyst and an academic who serves on the faculty of the N.Y.U. postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis, teaching a course in identity and politics and psychoanalysis with culture in mind. She is also the therapist on the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy.” Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation and cultural studies. Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer who moved to New York in 1991. In 2020, she won the Nannen Prize, Germany’s foremost award for documentary photography.

Microsoft Says New AI Shows Signs of Human Reasoning - The New York Times

A moment’s silence, please, for the death of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse

A moment’s silence, please, for the death of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse | John Naughton | The Guardian

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the metaverse, which was quietly laid to rest a few weeks ago by its grieving adoptive parent, one Mark Zuckerberg. Those of you with long memories will remember how, in October 2021, Zuck (as he is known to his friends) excitedly announced the arrival of his new adoptee, to which he had playfully assigned the nickname “The Future”.

So delighted was he that he had even renamed his family home in her honour. Henceforth, what was formerly called “Facebook” would be known as “Meta”. In a presentation at the company’s annual conference, Zuckerberg announced the name change and detailed how his child would grow up to be a new version of cyberspace. She “will be the successor to the mobile internet”, he told a stunned audience of credulous hacks and cynical Wall Street analysts. “We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.” And no expense would be spared in ensuring that his child would fulfil her destiny.

On that last matter, at least, Zuck was as good as his word. He set out to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe alone and blow uncountable piles of money to ensure this vision would become a reality. Up to the end of last October, the project had soaked up $36bn (about £30bn), with little to show for it but an expensive video in which Zuck (who always manages to look like his virtual-reality avatar) talked about how good it was going to be – “the experiences you’re going to have, what the creative economy will build and the technology that needs to be invented”. Note that last phrase: what actually emerged was a virtual-reality platform called Horizon Worlds, accessible only via naff and clunky Oculus headsets (think an uncomfortable version of Zoom) and a virtual wasteland populated by textureless, featureless, legless avatars and landscapes that, as Forbes put it, “look like bad Roblox levels”.

Michigan boy, 13, saves sister by hitting potentialkidnapper with slingshot

Sadly, Zuck’s promising adoptee turned out to be a sickly, feeble child. And so, on or about 18 March, he quietly had her put down. For he had just discovered that a new candidate for the role of The Future had suddenly arrived, and he was chagrined to realise that while he had been nursing the weakling, he had not noticed the newcomer on the block. It went by the name “AI”, and now Meta was lagging behind in the race to get to this new Future.

In those circumstances, you’d have thought someone who had just blown $36bn of his company’s money in the pursuit of a personal obsession would have been a mite apologetic, wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it. Why? Because he has absolute control over the company. In case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s the relevant section in the company’s annual SEC filing:

“Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman, and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support … In addition, Mr Zuckerberg has the ability to control the management and major strategic investments of our company as a result of his position as our CEO and his ability to control the election or, in some cases, the replacement of our directors.”

Translation: he can do what he likes – including selling the company over the heads of its board of directors – and nobody could stop him. It’s clear that at least some shareholders had become restive about Zuckerberg’s pursuit of a fatuous virtual-reality fantasy, but that unease was mitigated by the fact that other parts of the company – boring, old-fashioned Facebook, for example, or Instagram (once it got over its near-death experience called TikTok) – continued to make healthy profits.

But what if he now decides to bet the ranch on large language models and AI? And does so in a time when the old, profitable lines of business are beginning to flag? Suppose that, next time, the unstoppable supreme leader brings the entire edifice down? In which case, the world would finally realise that it is Zuckerberg, not Rupert Murdoch, who is the Citizen Kane de nos jours. Just think: the Zuckerberg story could fill a gap in the market: after all, Successionwill soon come to an end. We just need a new Orson Welles to play the lead.“

The Biggest Explosion in the Cosmos Just Keeps Going - The New York Times

The Biggest Explosion in the Cosmos Just Keeps Going

"For three years, telescopes have monitored “one of the most luminous” events ever: a supermassive black hole consuming a gigantic cloud of interstellar gas.

May 12, 2023

An artist’s impression of a black hole accretion.John A. Paice

It’s a dog-eat-dog cosmos. Not two weeks ago, on May 3, astronomers reported observing a star that was in the process of swallowing one of its own planets. Just two days earlier, another team had described black holes that were ripping stars apart and consuming them in a process known as tidal disruption event, or T.D.E.

Now an international group of astronomers reports that it is observing one of the most violent and energetic acts of cosmic cannibalism ever witnessed, perhaps the biggest explosion seen yet in the history of the universe. Eight billion light-years from Earth, in the darkness beyond the constellation Vulpecula, a black hole perhaps a billion times as massive as the sun seems to be gorging on a humongous cloud of gas. A study of the phenomenon appeared Friday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The study began on April 13, 2021, when the Zwicky Transient Facility, a small telescope that was busy looking for exploding stars, or supernovas, spotted a bright flash that did not fit expectations. Most supernovas fade after a few weeks; this one, known as AT2021lwx, kept going — and has continued to explode for three years now.

In fact, the explosion turned out to have been first detected a year earlier by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, a network of robotic telescopes in Hawaii, South Africa and Chile. That was the actual start of the cataclysm; as it proceeded, a worldwide network of telescopes and satellites has monitored it, measuring its emanations across the electromagnetic spectrum, from high-energy X-rays down to the infrared.

“Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away,” said Philip Wiseman, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton and the lead author of the new paper. “For something to be bright for two-plus years was immediately very unusual.”

What was going on? “At first we thought this flare-up could be the result of a black hole consuming a passing star,” said Matt Nicholl of Queen’s University Belfast, who helped analyze the ongoing explosion. “But our models showed that the black hole would have to have swallowed up to 15 times the mass of our sun to stay this bright for this long.”

Another idea was that it was an outburst from a quasar — energy squirting from the edge of a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy. But there was no record of previous quasar activity at the location, nor was there any visible sign of a galaxy there.

Of the many unlikely explanations, the most likely, Dr. Wiseman and his colleagues concluded, was that a black hole as massive as a billion suns was enjoying a prolonged feast on a gigantic cloud of gas. They have encouraged colleagues to be on the lookout for similar events.

“AT2021lwx is an extraordinary event that does not fit into any common class of transient,” Dr. Wiseman said in an email. He added that, with a total radiated energy equal to 100 supernovas, “it is one of the most luminous transients ever discovered.”

Jolt for jolt, that would put it in the company of colliding black holes. “Black holes colliding release energy in gravitational waves at an extreme luminosity — 10 billion times more ‘powerful’ than this explosion,” Dr. Wiseman wrote. “But that power only lasts for 20 milliseconds,” adding that this explosion has lasted years."

The Biggest Explosion in the Cosmos Just Keeps Going - The New York Times

Canon EOS R6 MKII Definitive Review | The Mini R3?