In which a simulacrum of a mutual admiration society holds court

Just finished: Nothing, this book is 768 pages long.

Currently reading:  Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. It's so good. The middle of the book tells the story of 15 Renaissance figures, both famous and obscure, on various sides of factional political fights, theology, and modernity. After a sympathetic look at Lucrezia Borgia (who did nothing wrong), I just finished the chapter on Michelangelo, which despite being one of the longer chapters (I am weirdly relieved whenever we hit someone I like who didn't die horribly and prematurely) and focusing on the political infighting of the time, didn't even cover his imprisonment. To be fair, he did a lot of stuff, and it covers his love life admirably, which is juicier. She uses it in part to talk about the degree to which art was wielded as a weapon of political influence, often at the expense of the artists and craftspeople themselves, and also the complex history of queerness in the era.

There's a particularly good exchange between Galeazzo Sanseverino (the lover of Duke Ludovico Sforza, who lived openly with him along with his wife Beatrice) and Francesco Gonzaga, husband of Isabella d'Este. Sanseverino had challenged Gongzaga to a duel, to which Gonzaga replied, "Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture and a fig sign," and that when he had gay sex, "I do it at the door of others while you do it at your own." (I.e., he was a top.) 

Anyway this book is great. I'm only highlighting this because it was the last thing I read before I passed out last night. It's all like this, though.

 I'm behind on my podcasts as usual but "AI Minstrel Shows" on It Could Happen Here aired a few days ago and was really good. Apparently there's a whole genre of AI video that I'd managed to avoid but should have guessed at. Racist buffoons on the internet now have the technology to generate completely fake Black people saying things that conform to white supremacists' ideology, which means that they can now do minstrel shows again. For free. Because AI content creators are the worst people imaginable so of course they have to do the worst things imaginable and this is one of them.

Bridget Todd does a great public service in not only making us aware of this shit but in tying it to historical uses of blackface and the ways in which punching-down "comedy" was used to create propaganda, enforce white supremacist institutional power, and transmit ideology. It's truly horrifying stuff and yet another reason to oppose the use of so-called AI in any creative space.