The Summer Vibes Never Die

 On Sunday, 15 June 2025, I do what we all do. I wake up and check in on the world.

Then I see this beauty, shot at a Beirut rooftop club:

 

“Missiles in the sky, but the summer vibes never die.” Sun emoji.

Click the link for the funky beats and Baker Street-level sax solo: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK5Z41RMRkz/ 

Netanyahu, of course, is hiding out in Greece right now. The Israeli Air Force One is apparently called “Wing of Zion.” Maybe he wanted summer vibes too.

The water is for the coffee is taking too long to boil. 

Meanwhile, back in my country, one Minnesota Democratic lawmaker has been killed, another injured. The presumed killer was the head of a security company called “Praetorian Guard,” but was apparently debased to living with a roommate, an old buddy. His CV said he’d worked for “the world’s largest convenience store chain” as a flex, meaning he had managed a 7-Eleven. Said roommate seemed to be a Papa John’s employee, and now the image everyone is going to remember of that poor bastard is him crying and reading text messages to the news cameras as he sweats through the Papa John’s polo stretched over his gut.

The suspect was experiencing “mental health challenges” per the local sheriff’s office. “Challenges.” 

I got baked last night and made post-midnight eggs au gratin with hella hot sauce. Probably a bad idea.

There’s probably still shit going on in Los Angeles, but Trump had a birthday rally in DC so all eyes were there, with troops failing to march in time to generic rawk and roll music that sounds suspiciously AI-generated. Sponsored by Coinbase, Palantir, UFC (natch), and Scott’s Miracle Gro. 

Miracle Gro.

Who’s been sending me messages? Seoul, Paris, Kyoto, and New York all send their regards, or at least their memes. I send back a picture of the pool outside (there are summer vibes, we must remember, even if it’s the bleak and rainy monsoon season here) and I have to ask myself whether to use the sunglasses emoji, or to playfully allude to the fact that I want to use the sunglasses emoji. 

The signs at the other rallies read “No Kings!” and I genuinely can’t figure out what this means. General dissensus, I suppose. I don’t see much in the way of concrete policy goals, mostly just one big frowny-face emoji.

Meanwhile, marines are detaining US citizens in Los Angeles after storming elementary schools, cops firing, point blank and with intent, at an Australian journalist reporting on the scene, Latino cops roughing up Latino protesters, LAPD and LASD shooting rubber bullets at each other, and Brian Wilson is dead.

 

But I repeat, “summer vibes never die.” Brian Wilson, at least you were given the dignity of being called profoundly mentally ill, not challenged. 

I really shouldn’t have had those late-night eggs.

The coffee is almost ready, though. 

What they tell you, five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Zero things you can vibe on, summer or otherwise.

I don’t know that that necessarily works. 

But I hadn’t even noticed my foot was bleeding.

I Miss Duolingo

Only one joke got an audible laugh from me in the Barbie movie. When America Ferrera and her daughter disappear into the Barbieverse, daughter asks about what her dad is going to do, and Betty who was never ugly says “he’ll be fine.”

Cut to the feckless white dude on the couch. 

(Happy chime sound, owl flips wings in joy)

Because that’s the degree to which Duolingo has become part of the zeitgeist. You know the person who’s “brushing up on their Spanish” or “dusting off their French.” Or you know someone who, just for the fuck of it, decided that Romanian or Norwegian was the way to go. 

And into that context, a little over a decade ago, I too decided to dust off my French.

It was another era, back then in the second Obama term, when I learned about Duolingo from some article or forum post back at a time when Cracked and Gawker seemed to be the wave of the future. Widespread pessimism had not yet transmogrified into widespread nihilism, and the question was what to do on the internet that wasn’t just a waste of time. So Duolingo was the answer, back when it was just a plucky little startup without a premium option (as I recall), and as was the standard at that time, the path to monetization was vague. 

Which says something about how optimistic the technological environment of the time was. People –including, tentatively, myself, as ashamed as I am to admit it – fully believed that Twitter had brought down Hosni Mubarak. I never fully embraced technical solutions to political problems, but the mere fact that I was not a full-throated enthusiast made me an outsider. And when I discovered professional buzzkills like Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas Carr, it felt like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with the Obama-era consensus but also wasn’t some conservative mouthbreather.

It was a time when many technologies indeed seemed like “tools for conviviality,” as Ivan Illich put it. Who needs long-distance phone calls? We got Skype now! And WhatsApp for sending each other dumb memes. And even a skeptical fuck like me thought that maybe, just maybe, things might get better. 

And re: Duolingo, I was Duo-brained. To the max.

Well, Duolingo did, actually, show us the way – it all turns to shit.

As for when and how the decline started, different users have different opinions. Real heads would point to the increasingly heavy hand of investors during Series E and Series F funding in 2015 and 2017, and the consequent decline in the expansion of quality course material, but most would peg it around the time the “tree” model of language learning – modules one after another, but with some flexibility as to how that is approached -- was abandoned in favor of the “worm” model – do this, one after the other, with the option to just press skip if so desired -- in 2022. While this may seem trivial, it actually is pretty important. The former is a structure designed to guide language learners through a series of steps, with some options for individual patterns, but a focus on building the basics. The latter is a pure gamification. At the same time, forums were discontinued, meaning that users could no longer comment on the quality of the lessons or interact with one another, but were forced to simply play the game.

And this is perhaps the crux of the issue, something we never noticed, but should have. If you gamify learning, the goal ceases to be to learn. The goal becomes to win the game. I’m not the first to observe this. Nassim Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to describe the misapplication of game-theoretic concepts nearly 20 years ago.

But the thing is, as I’ve learned as Duolingo has enshittified, I don’t give a fuck about the game itself, or the dumb challenges and different types of points and health bars and shit. I just want to improve my French and Spanish. I really, really don’t care whether or not I’m beating Slytherin1990 in the Diamond Tournament or whatever.

Despite this, things continue to be getting progressively worse. Consider the memo by CEO Luis Von Ahn several weeks ago in which he announced his intention to replace as many human workers with AI as possible, and the following dragging in the media, which he seems to be walking back in a panic, given how quickly the exuberance over AI is fading, although I doubt that that any reconsideration will amount to anything more than rhetoric.

“One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well.”

 The pod-person phrasing doesn’t assuage my skepticism.

But this is hardly the first time that shitty AI has reared its ugly head. I’ve noticed more and more illogical translations, some of them laughable (“y” in a French sentence, meaning, for instance, “there,” pronounced as “i grec,” the French word for the letter Y). And with the option for Duolingo “Max” users (anything max is bound to be maximally crap) to have conversations with the cast of Duolingo cartoons (whom I also once found hentai of, SAD!) as AIs almost certainly being worse – not like I’d ever pay them a dime to test that hypothesis. Or, even more sinisterly, mistakes made while learning now prevent learners from moving forward, unless they pay for a premium subscription, functionally preventing anyone without a preexisting knowledge base of the language being learned from making any kind of progress. 

As with all products being undergoing this Ludovico technique, the self-consciously quirky humor (Duo died lol OMG Youtube-face) makes the ugliness all the more jarring. Please don’t show me Duolingo as a wrinkled old man or a fatass unicorn again.

But this is what happens when you take a good product, and let the private-equity goons have their way with it. This is what happens when you have an economic system that financially rewards the pillaging of the temple and disincentivizes building anything long-term which might negatively affect the profit margin this Q2. Those innovators and trailblazers – the ones who get treated with hagiographic praise at every keynote speech, state of the union address, and graduation commencement – either become con men, or reveal themselves to have been con men at their core, or are quietly marginalized by the professional con men. 

At least Tesla had the fortune to die before he could see what products his name was being slapped onto.

Aufhebung at Nottoway

When the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, the American South’s largest remaining plantation home, burned last week, what was interesting was the degree to which the response was gleeful. Obviously, the media is going to focus on this response, but this was borne out by a quick foray into the social media space – something that would have been difficult to imagine 20 or perhaps even 10 years ago. And the reply from the reactionary right has been tepid, at least publicly, although I imagine what’s being said in upper middle class parlors throughout the South is somewhat less so. And this is something worth inquiring into.

 

I mean the reason people are celebrating is obvious. It’s a goddamn plantation. It’s a place built using the forced labor of slaves, and unlike, say, Monticello or Mount Vernon, the owners of Nottoway deliberately avoided using the buzzkill language of slavery – “antebellum home,” not plantation. The history section of their website says a lot about their lovingly named oak trees, and nothing about the people who were tortured and worked to death there. The picture of the couple celebrating their wedding on the property is decidedly racially ambiguous. It was, according to the owners, restored to its “days of glory.”

So before you read any further and willfully jump to any conclusions about my affiliations, I do want to underline the fact that antebellum nostalgists can fucking suck it.

But while I can empathize, I can’t celebrate. Because the fact remains that this is a historically important property, one of the sort that I think worth preserving because of course it is, especially if one wants to understand the role that industrialized slavery had in my nation’s history. The Grecian columns reflect a particularly pernicious belief among the ruling classes of their own natural aristocracy, a view of themselves as modern-day Solons. Architecture is perhaps the most potent of object lessons.

And it is/was just very pretty. In the same way a delicate moonflower blossom dripping with neurotoxins is.

So, as usual, the liberal consensus gets in my craw. I have to wonder how many of the choir of voices knew anything about the Nottoway Plantation beforehand (I certainly didn’t), and how many just checked their social media feeds for right-think, and responded accordingly. How much critical thinking about the whitewashing of history is going on here? And how much is just the kind of binary thinking that, at the end of the day, is little more than John Calvin hitting the pulpit and contrasting the total depravity of the world with the perseverance of the saints?

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves – what isn’t a product of horror? What cultural capital isn’t contingent upon suffering? Who do you think built those elegant Georgian townhomes that line the streets of London, and how many of those lords’ names are also found in remarkable number among black people in the West Indies? And who do you think owns those Georgian townhomes today, and how much unspeakable suffering do they continue to perpetrate throughout the tropical resource belt in the name of capital accumulation?

Who do you think built Rockefeller Center, and what do you think Standard Oil was up to? Is that what we think of when we see Jimmy Fallon yuk it up with background banter from The Roots?

But I don’t wish to moralize. Instead, I turn to the Marxian concept of aufhebung – a difficult term to pin down, but, more or less, holding the past condition of man and the ugly truth of material conditions, placing them in contrast, and arriving at a more humane synthesis.

History proceeds not through winners and losers, but through a more complex process. And so perhaps it’s best to admire the graceful line of an ancient oak, at the same time as one sees it nourished by human blood and sugarcane stubble. And after observing this contrast, it is perhaps helpful to admit that there perhaps really is a specter haunting the world.

Or maybe I’m just good at pissing all sides off. Worth a game attempt at honesty all the same.

The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.

Sipping Wine with the Fascisti

Over the past couple years, as anyone who knows me personally knows, I’ve become the worst sort of insufferable wine dork. The sort of person who enthusiastically reaches for the wine list, only to go “oh…” and say to the table “well, this should probably be OK…”

Which is how I got to watching Mondovino, the 2004 documentary about the battle within the wine world between global capital – represented by mogul Robert Mondavi coming off bluff and American, wine consultant Michel Rolland who comes off like a full-on action movie Euro-villain, complete with pointy beard, car phone, cigarillo, and namedrops of Charles Aznavour and Gérard Depardieu, and finally the legendary wine critic Robert Parker (who honestly just seems like a bit of a sweetheart) – on one side, and a plucky set of artisanal producers in goofy rustic hats on the other side, as well as NYC wine distributor Neal Rosenthal, who compares the big names to George W. Bush (hell yeah).

Throughout, one thing that all say, though, is that wine is a civilizing factor. Not only does it elevate the discourse – “symposium,” let it be remembered, once meant a party where you got schnockered on the stuff – but they repeat that it is a consummate art, blending the lessons of nature with the handicraft of  man, something I myself pretty much believe. But in conveying this message, here are some choice quotes on the subject, taken from the film.

“I think [Berlusconi] is helping, not just with wine, he’s much more open, trying to make things work better, trying to make the bureaucracy more modern.” – James Suckling, then senior editor, Wine Enthusiast

OK, we all have our moments… eh…

“Without art, without culture, it’s virtually impossible to make great wine. Generally, the indigenous people here have no sense of initiative.” – Arnaldo Eckart, Vinos Cafayate, the flagship producer in the Argentinean appellation of the same name

Great job guys. Amazing.

“In [the fascist period], Italian industry was stimulated and encouraged.” – Piero Antinori, of the legendary Antinori wine dynasty, and founder of Tignanello, the wine bougie enough to lend its name to Meghan Markle’s lifestyle blog

“Italy at that time needed a strong energetic hand. And fascism did bring about a certain order.” - Albiera Antinori, his niece

Well fuck!

It’s a funny word, “fascism.” Widely misapplied of course. In my youth, for instance, it generally applied to teachers enforcing quiet rules during study hall, and much abused since. It’s an epithet I’m particularly skeptical of, considering how broadly it can be applied (regardless of the Umberto Eco definition or any other attempt to define the concept), but these guys are at the very least amiable to the idea not just in practice but in name, despite decades of reflection on the insanity of Europe 1930-45.

I’ve long been confused by this aristocratic version of conservatism, which bears little in common with its American counterpart, other than an opposition to liberal and leftist views. Its roots are instead in blood and soil, or after the Second World War, a nebulous conception of “culture.” And therein lies the rub, as these conservatives deem themselves to be cultured, that thereby justifies the actions that follow suit as those of virtuous men, and the resultant barbarity is merely deemed an unfortunate epiphenomenon of their actions, rather than an essential characteristic.

This stands in stark contrast to the American vision of conservatism, particularly in an era in which the grandes dames Eastern establishment Republicans – Nelson Rockefeller, et al. – have long since faded into memory. Rather, the boorish and suburbanized American right has a bit of a tendency to devalue the concept of high culture writ large, instead favoring a point of origin not in laissez-faire capitalism and/or Evangelical Christianity – two things that have a bit of a tendency to go together, a conflation of the Kingdom of Heaven and the C-Suite. Sure, they fight culture wars, but these culture wars are decidedly not over Vivaldi’s status within the canon or the nature of an authentic Roquefort, but over salacious Megan Thee Stallion lyrics and M&Ms.

Given this relegation of conservative principle to religious and market forces, the Vivaldi and Roquefort wind up being liberal-coded, at least among the professional classes. The PMC finds themselves drawn to the local and the refined, regardless of the political valences by which that expresses itself in the world writ large. The actual material implications are irrelevant, because in a post-1960s world, this attitude constitutes both distinction (Bourdieu shout out whaaaaaa!!) and a rejection of the admitted plastic ugliness of mainstream American society. And in this way, there is a mistaken conflation of values and consumption, a Frasier Crane attitude that cannot bear the idea that its stated values and its explicit desires are incommensurate.

This isn’t too complicated, and one thing Mondovino points out, as they discuss the market cap and production statistics of every winery they visit, is that this level of artisanship is largely illusory. The great Bordeaux houses are shown to be what they are, which is to say savvy business enterprises that rely largely on the allure and aura of terroir and tradition as marketing devices.

Let it be remembered that despite what the European nostalgists of food and wine might say, this is nothing new. When the famed 1855 Classification was instituted in Bordeaux, it was not based on the unique qualities of the soil and climate – geology, meteorology, and agronomy still being infant sciences at the time – or even the subjective taste of some initial panel of gouty barons. Rather, the basis was simply the market prices as they existed in 1855, with Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion being the most expensive at the time and therefore earning the title of “first growth.” The 1855 Classification then cemented this status (humming “reification” under my breath right now), with the only substantive change coming in 1973 when Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was promoted from second to first growth – and in certain sectors, c’était une scandale.

Post-1960s, and back in the Anglosphere, this became the model for the corporate artisanal, exploited en masse. Think about the early days of Starbucks, back in the ‘90s. This wasn’t just a cuppa joe, this was craft, complete with global-village aesthetics in the storefronts and the names of exotic destinations for the beans – you’re not just having a cup of coffee, you’re going to Bali, man! Never mind that it is an industrial product just like any other produced in the sorts of appalling conditions that one can get away with in the Global South, never mind that the company that produces it will mercilessly crush any attempt at union organizing and aggressively greenwashes its activities, this is “fair trade” coffee, even if it’s the diarrheaccino that Jenny from Sales is sipping on her way into the office. You consume the good thing, and you yourself become the good thing.

The conservatives – whether the Ferragamo-wearing gout cases or the American boors – have no such hang-ups.

For a point of comparison to all these types, think about the Ratliff family in the most recent season of White Lotus. We have Saxon, the punchable-face finance bro eldest son, who makes a point of demonstrating how much he doesn’t give a fuck, and his mother Victoria (played to a T by Parker Posey), who fawns over luxury scents – “cut grass, tuberose” – while complaining in equal measure about the various filths and impurities and affronts to her Carolinian upper-class propriety, whether in the form of Southeast Asia being Southeast Asian, or the army of uncouth and mildly criminal wealthy expats (more later, a whole essay worth there), and in between there’s the father, Timothy, a bit of a white-collar crook himself just starting to face the consequences of his actions. On the other side, we have the daughter, Piper, the not-quite-Buddhist seeker who eventually realizes what a princess she actually is, and between all of them there is the younger son, Lochlan, the teenage dope who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and occasionally gives out a handy to blood relatives. I could keep going, trope upon trope, extending the metaphor to its breaking point, but let’s stop there. 

But I’m writing this cynical take as they’re delivering the carciofi alla giudia with a glass of Fiano. I am clearly part of the problem.

So what do I do with that? Do I hem and haw about my consumer choices in a desperate attempt to find morality and authenticity?

Indeed, it’s in my recent position as an actual food and drink editor (ayyyyyy) that I actually have to be around all of these tropes (in addition to a large number of actually lovely people), and at least attempt to make nice-nice with them, even as I clench my molars. As much as I like the foie gras and the pigeon, I am ill-equipped for the social dimension of this world.

For now, I order the grappa – the carciofi and the amatriciana were perfectly fine – made from the must of the legendary Ornellaia wine. Even if I can’t help but side-eye the name “Antinori” on the bottle.