Just some stuff to consider today.  It's busy here--ch-ch-changes.  Good, but busy.

A nice collection of mementos for those of you who, like me, are from “Generation X”.

Robert Caro has sold his archives--which are still growing, because he's still working--to the New York Historical Society.  I suspect it will take decades of researcher-hours to archive the tens of thousands of pages, files, primary documents, and much more.  And I suspect there will be treasures buried therein for whomever discovers them.  (Also, the picture in the article of the cork-board wall, where Caro writes his outlines--that is a great way to map out a book.  Faulker did the same.)  

Ward Just, a classic "Washington Novelist," died in December.  (Here's another obit.)  He was a famous journalist in the Vietnam era, but turned to writing novels, it seems as a way for him of telling a deeper truth about his subjects.  His book Echo House is worth your time, and a reading of his A Dangerous Friend might have been good for Obama's foreign policy.  In a way I think of him as a bit like Louis Auchincloss, a currently significantly underappreciated writer who will one day rise to a more proper valuation--not in the first rank of writers, but an estimable second-tier status.   

Interesting to think about, both because I do think that much of the stuff around Ai is a matter of PR, not ethics, and also as a window into how one person in technology at least––namely, the author––thinks about the meaning of “ethics” as a disciplined form of study.

Well this is a blow to our self image (though one that Ward Just, for instance, would appreciate).  "Could the division of labor in an anthill be driven by the same social dynamics governing the gap between liberals and conservatives?"