Not sure a hugely topical and well-reported piece in The New York Times needs any amplification from me but….this just in … “the Times has uncovered nearly 50 cases of people having mental health crises during conversations with ChatGPT. Nine were hospitalized; three died”

You should read their report about what went on the inside, at OpenAI.

A big part of the culprit? Maximizing metrics for user engagement.

Lots of internal warnings were ignored.

Here’s Kashmir Hill’s own summary, followed by a gift link to the essay. It’s long but with lots of new insights into how OpenAI rolls — and by extension insights what that might mean for the future of AI safety.

You can read the essay here.

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It’s hard to picture the end-game of renewables’ full takeover of the energy sector—but it will happen. Wind and solar both have their shortcomings, but with the astonishing collapse of battery storage costs over the past decade, intermittency is no longer an issue. Hydro works well in many places, but even where it’s dry, a new generation of geothermal power is coming to provide baseload power and district heating from the Gobi Desert to Antarctica. By the time nuclear fusion arrives, we won’t need it; fusion is fundamentally centralized anyway, and renewables are pushing us to decentralize our grids—to decouple them from big, centralized baseload sources. Fusion will be an awkward partner in this mix.

It’s even harder to imagine what the world will look like when precision fermentation comes into its own. We already have Solein, and precision-fermentation replacements for milk and cheese. Solein in particular, with its promise of providing food anywhere that electricity is available (which is now everywhere, see the above paragraph) points towards a future where a minimum of nutrition can be guaranteed in almost any nation on Earth.

Combine just these two trends—cheap power anywhere, and basic nutrition anywhere—and what does this revolutionary future look like?

The Metabolic Floor

The world already produces enough food for everyone, and climate change is not going to change this. (If even the smallest African village has its own solar-powered Solein plant, drought and ecosystem collapse impacts will be strongly reduced; projections of famine based on climate change assume that our food system will not evolve, but it will and it is.) Right now, true production‑side scarcity still occurs due to droughts, wildfires, and the collapse of fisheries, but it is usually localized (e.g., a failed harvest in a remote valley) and quickly mitigated by international trade—provided that trade routes remain open and purchasing power exists. It’s when those conditions break down that the scarcity becomes effective rather than physical. The current famines in the Middle East and Sudan are instances of the weaponization of food access—not actual scarcity.

Taking our notional African village as an example, we can imagine a near-future system of fully distributed energy and basic nutrition. Imagine how hard it would be to track down and destroy every solar panel and satellite dish in a region thousands of kilometers in extent, and then imagine that each of those panels is powering a small family- or neighbourhood-sized precision fermentation vat. It will be possible, but difficult, to generate famine except when one has complete control over a geographic area, and many regions are simply too large to be policed in this way.

Considering that solar panels and LED lights can last for decades, then as long as communities have access to the additional mix of minerals that go into the feedstock for Solein or comparable photosynthesizing microbes (these additives being the only major source of potential scarcity now) then a community can be physically isolated for years but remain alive, connected to the web and with all the lights on.

What I’m describing here is a form of New Medievalism. Even a couple of years ago I would not have considered it a likely outcome in the near future; but times have changed, and quickly. It has its upsides and downsides, but in either case this is a very different picture of the world our children will have to live in.

Imagine renewables everywhere and inland bioreactors feeding millions, the provision of those two services being a basic subsistence layer of civilization that is automated, boring, and reliable. They are the basis for meeting the fundamental needs of your citizens. Together they form what I’m calling a “metabolic floor”—a stable, low-growth infrastructure that keeps societies lit, fed, hydrated, and warm. Unlike traditional subsistence economies, this floor is industrial, modular, and scalable.

Once a nation crosses the threshold into metabolic self-sufficiency, its vulnerability to global shocks collapses, and its political imagination broadens. But different countries cross this threshold in radically different ways.

Post-Scarcity Does Not Mean Post-Politics

The European Union could become the first major example of what metabolic integration looks like. Under the unexpected pressure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European states have accelerated their transition to energy independence. Offshore wind grids, cross-border HVDC links, and a coordinated climate policy create a continental metabolic commons. Solein is a Finnish invention, ready to provide the protein component of the metabolic floor if needed. The more self-sufficient the infrastructure becomes, the more viable integration will feel. In this case, metabolic security can encourage political cohesion rather than fragmentation.

Russia represents a very different pathway. Instead of using energy independence to integrate, it’s been doubling down on autarky, nationalism, and territorial aggression. Hydro, nuclear, and domestic gas have given Moscow its own version of a metabolic floor, but one that is used as insulation rather than as a platform for cooperation. The parallel wars in Ukraine and other regions demonstrate that metabolic independence doesn’t pacify states. It frees them to pursue the particular politics they already favored. Europe integrates; Russia isolates and expands.

Uruguay offers a third path—one that is neither imperial nor integrationist. The country is closing rapidly on 100% renewable energy use. It’s agriculturally independent as well. Uruguay might become the prototype of a small, steady-state, quietly prosperous, locally anchored society. Ironically, it (like Canada and Norway) is aggressively pursuing the export of fossil fuels as a cash crop. We can’t expect this to last, as the Carbon Bubble will pop soon and fossil fuels will cease to be a viable export market, likely within twenty years. For Uruguay the next decade gives it an opportunity to cash in on oil while building a sovereign wealth fund (similar to the UAE’s $2 trillion one) that it can use to invest and attract business and commodities it needs.

So metabolic independence can support small democracies and middle powers, and opens the door to prosperity that need not be growth-oriented.

No Single Narrative

Metabolic independence, if it occurs, doesn’t lead to a uniform zero-growth world. Once every region can feed and power itself, the world stops being a single economic game and becomes a mosaic of metabolic regimes—some cooperative, some predatory, some isolationist, some experimental. When we talk about this possible regime, we’re no longer in the business of predicting a future, we are mapping a branching space of possible futures that’s already emerging in front of us.

In other words, we’re not facing Utopia or Dystopia, but both, overlaid, combined and recombined, rebranded and executed differently, in bewildering ways, across a future world both fragmented and tightly integrated by information, trade, and a planetary commons of ecological limits and tipping-points.

This brand of New Medievalism might serve as an amplifier of cultural, historical, and political differences, rather than the stabilizer that Globalism provided. Metabolic independence won’t eliminate geopolitical competition—it will redirect it toward minerals, knowledge, ecological sinks, and symbolic power. Some regions may slip below the metabolic floor due to climate damage or political mismanagement, creating islands of instability in an otherwise self-sufficient world. The result is not global collapse but uneven resilience—an archipelago world where safe and unsafe zones coexist, and where the moral burden of abundance becomes harder to ignore.

We may be entering an era when where the fundamentals of life are locally secured while the higher-order complexities of culture, governance, and identity diversify beyond anything the twentieth century predicted. This is the invitation hidden in the energy transition—a chance to embrace regional plurality without giving up global responsibility.

We’re already charting a clear path in Canada—though the new budget of the Carney government is a curious mix of visionary and arch-conservative, it does point the way towards a more self-sufficient future for my country.

Your task is to imagine what your region’s metabolic future could look like. How might your city, state, or nation contribute to a world defined not by scarcity but by a metabolic floor that supports and encourages diversity and independence?

—K

A Slack friend polled the group for thoughts on teaching art direction, and I thought I’d share with you all what I shared with her. Art direction something I touch on in my UX/IXD classes, and I realized it’s very similar to how I teach UX patterns. To me, there are 3 steps.

1. Develop your vocabulary

First you need to know what’s already out there; it’s all part of our baseline for usability or aesthetics. I bucket the ocean like college level classes:

101: general standards

• UX Patterns 101 would be the default interface elements like buttons, links, checkboxes, radio buttons, lists, tables, date pickers, color pickers. Also major templates You could learn these by looking at developer documentation, like the W3 docs on HTML elements, or old classics like Designing Interfaces or the polar bear book (Information Architecture).

• Art Direction 101 might be your most popular art movements, artists, photographers, and directors. You could fluently say “in the style of Dadaism, Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, or Wes Anderson.” There are lots of free art history courses online to explore.

201: professional best practices

• UX Patterns 201 might be common design system components like accordions, panels, chips, facepiles, or tunnels. You could learn these by exploring Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines or Google’s Material Design guidelines, or the component libraries for popular JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, etc.)

• Art Direction 201 might expand your vocabulary of movements, artists, or brands: Russian Constructivism, Corporate Memphis, Web 2.0, Vaporware, and more. I love this giant List of Aesthetics on Fandom.

301: cultural specifics

• UX Patterns 301 could get into cultural and subcultural variations — art world vs gaming vs e-commerce vs editorial expectations. You can see lots of different corporate components in Figma’s Design Systems site or Storybook’s component library showcase, and also find dedicated directories like the Game UI database or Data Viz Project.

• Art Direction 301 might be more niche aesthetics and trends. ’s Casual Archivist newsletter pulls up great gems and trends from history, and she’s shared her whole list of public archives too.

401: emerging trends

• UX Patterns 401 might include novel interfaces (like Soot’s spiral image browser or Hume’s expressive voice AI) or emerging patterns from new technologies or companies (e.g. The Shape of AI or Awwwards). To learn these, nerd out. Dedicate the time to explore and absorb. I like godly.website and 60fps.design and there’s also a million other resources in my Notion Toolkit.

• Art Direction 401 might draw from the most contemporary trends and styles. Cosmos is a beautiful new exploration tool, and Are.na is probably the most popular way to keep up. Again start with Elizabeth Goodspeed and explore from there. also writes a newsletter entirely about art direction.

Can you tell I’m a strategist who loves nothing more than creating another framework? lol

My book has a full spread of common UX patterns to help people with their development here. It’s a vocabulary quiz and a visual reference, grouped into practical clusters. How many have you used?

2. Sharpen your eye

Next, you have to be able to see the small differences between things. What’s the difference between portraits by Annie Leibowitz and Richard Avedon? Between rounded corners of 5px vs 8px? Between #F5F5F5 and #F3F3F3?

I gave my current grad students an optional packet of Mystery Grid puzzles (carefully curated from Teachers Pay Teachers worksheets) as a fun way to sharpen their eyes. I did tons of these drawing exercises as a kid (plus other how-to-draw books from the school book fair), and they made my hand-eye relationship sharp enough to skip Drawing II in art school. I put one of them in my book too.

Another good exercise is to try and recreate an interface or artwork you love. You’ll really notice all the details once you get into the canvas and work with them.

When you see all the tiny choices, and how they affect the overall gestalt, you start to become a real craftsperson.

3. Define your personal point of view

Once you’re able to see all those patterns and details, you’re able to take a position on them. Defining your personal design principles will help you cut a steady path through the world of inspirations and options (rather than drifting from possibility to possibility).

For me, teaching was the activity that forced me to draw my line in the sand. I had to tell students what was good, and what was not so good, and why.

For other people, a public channel like a blog or social media presence becomes an arena for them to present, defend, and refine their preferences.

MFA programs also focus on supporting this important accomplishment (which sometimes disappoints the students who prioritize technical skills, as if the programs are very expensive boot camps). teaches a whole class on Point of View in SVA’s Products of Design program (where I currently teach too).

Find some way to express your principles. (Or just quote Dieter Rams like everyone else.)

Keep learning

Boss lady Martha Stewart says that one of her mottos is “learn something new every day.” What’s missing from the lists above? I’d love to hear any resources or frameworks that helped you learn art direction or UX. What’s your POV?

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day. The V&A does an unboxing of a half dozen tarot card decks from the last 500 years.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Edward O. Wilson in 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Long before the first shots were fired in the Civil War, beginning early in the 19th century, Americans had been fighting a protracted war of words over slavery.

On one side, Southern planters and slavery apologists portrayed the practice of human bondage as sanctioned by God and beneficial even to enslaved people.

On the other side, opponents of slavery painted a picture of violence, injustice and the hypocrisy of professed Christians defending the sin of slavery.

But to the abolitionists, it became crucial to transcend mere rhetoric. They wanted to show Americans uncomfortable truths about the practice of slavery – a strategy that is happening again as activists and citizens fight modern-day attempts at historical whitewashing.

As a media scholar who has studied the history of abolitionist journalism, I hear echoes of that two-century-old narrative battle in President Donald Trump’s effort to purge public memorials and markers honoring the suffering and heroism of the enslaved as well as those who championed their freedom.

Celebration vs. reality

Among the materials reportedly flagged for removal from history museums, national parks, and other government facilities is a disturbing but powerful photograph known as “The Scourged Back.”

The 1863 image depicts a formerly enslaved man, his back horrifically scarred by whipping. It’s certainly hard to look at, yet to look away or try to forget it means to ignore what it has to say about the complicated and often brutal history of the nation.

In Trump’s view, these memorials are “revisionist” and “driven by ideology rather than truth.” In an executive order named Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Trump said public materials should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

Essentially, the president appears to want a history that celebrates American achievement rather than being forced to look at “The Scourged Back” and other historical realities that document aspects of the American story that don’t warrant celebration.

Combating ignorance of slavery’s horrors

Thinking back to the decades leading up to the Civil War, facts were the weapon abolitionists wielded in their fight against the distortions of pro-slavery forces. It was an uphill battle in the face of indifference by many in the North. After a visit to Massachusetts in 1830, abolitionist writer William Lloyd Garrison blamed such attitudes on “exceeding ignorance of the horrors of slavery.”

It is not surprising that in the early 19th century many Americans would have had limited knowledge of slavery. Travel was arduous, time-consuming and expensive, and most Northerners had little firsthand exposure to slave societies. Abolitionists argued that those who did visit the South were often shielded from the harsher realities of slavery. This extended to the media ecosystem, which lacked any real national news organizations.

Moreover, Southern plantation owners carried out a robust propaganda effort to extol the beneficence of their economic system. In letters, pamphlets and books, they argued that slavery was beneficial to all and that the enslaved were happy and well-treated. They also attacked their opponents as evil and dishonest.

As abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote in 1838: “The apologists of Southern slavery are accustomed to brand every picture of slavery and its fruits as exaggeration or calumny.”

Don’t look away

Thus, the challenge for abolitionists was to show slavery as it really was – and to compel people to look. An emphasis on hard evidence took firm hold in the wave of abolitionism in the 1830s.

Activists didn’t yet have photography, so they relied on accounts from eyewitnesses and formerly enslaved people, official reports and even some plantation owners’ own words in Southern newspaper advertisements seeking the return of runaways.

“Until the pictures of the slave’s sufferings were drawn up and held up to public gaze, no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system,” abolitionist Angelina Grimké wrote in her famous “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” in 1836.

“It never entered their minds that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican America; they never suspected that many of the gentlemen and ladies who came from the South to spend the summer months in travelling among them, were petty tyrants at home,” Grimké wrote.

In pamphlets and newspapers, Grimké and others laid down a documentary record of the abuses of slavery, naming names and emphasizing legal evidence of their claims. In my research, I have argued that while abolitionists didn’t invent the journalistic exposé, they did develop the first fully articulated methodology for confronting abuses of power through carefully documented facts – laying the groundwork for later generations of investigative reporters and fact-checkers.

Most critically, what they did is point a finger at injustice and demand that America not look away. In its first issue, in 1835, the newspaper Human Rights emphasized “the importance of first settling what slavery really is.” Inside, it included a series of advertisements documenting slave sales and rewards for runaways reprinted from Southern newspapers.

The headline: “ ”

Tried and acquitted

One of the most remarkable efforts in this abolitionist campaign was a 233-page pamphlet called “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.” Published in 1839 by Theodore Dwight Weld along with his wife, Angelina Grimké, and her sister, it was an exhaustively documented exposé of floggings, torture, killings, overwork and undernourishment.

One example involved a wealthy tobacconist who whipped a 15-year-old girl to death: “While he was whipping her, his wife heated a smoothing iron, put it on her body in various places, and burned her severely. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest was, ‘Died of excessive whipping.’ He was tried in Richmond and acquitted.”

It is difficult reading, to be sure, and certainly the kind of material that might foster “a national sense of shame,” as Trump’s executive order claims. But getting rid of the evils of slavery meant first acknowledging them. And the second part – critical to avoiding the mistakes of the past – is remembering them.

‘Consciences shocked’

So how effective was this abolitionist campaign to lay bare the terrible facts about slavery?

At least some readers of “” had their consciences shocked. : “We thought we knew something of the horrid character of slavery before, but upon looking over the pages of this book, we find that we had no adequate idea of the number and enormity of the cruelties which are constantly being perpetrated under this system of all abominations.”

And one famous reader was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who drew on the book as inspiration for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published more than a decade later.

The 1830s reflected the height of the abolitionist movement in books, pamphlets and newspapers. While the activism continued in the 1840s and 1850s, ultimately it took secession and civil war to finally end slavery. But, of course, it didn’t take long for the country to fall into a prolonged period of formal and informal segregation in both the North and the South, many vestiges of which remain.

That reality of a history that doesn’t proceed along a straight path to justice underscores the importance of preserving, remembering and teaching difficult parts of the past such as “The Scourged Back.”

On the title page of “American Slavery As It Is,” Weld and the Grimkés printed a quote from the biblical book of Ezekiel: “Behold the wicked abominations that they do.” It was a command to the nation to look without flinching at what it was, and it is as pertinent today as it was then.

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Written by Gerry Lanosga, Associate Professor of Journalism, Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.