(One and only) quick hits
August 20, 2023 Leave a comment
1) NYT with an article about Anthropic and Claude, basically ChatGPT with more “guardrails.” I played around with Claude a good bit last month and had some interesting results.
Today, Claude can do everything other chatbots can — write poems, concoct business plans, cheat on history exams. But Anthropic claims that it is less likely to say harmful things than other chatbots, in part because of a training technique called Constitutional A.I.
In a nutshell, Constitutional A.I. begins by giving an A.I. model a written list of principles — a constitution — and instructing it to follow those principles as closely as possible. A second A.I. model is then used to evaluate how well the first model follows its constitution, and correct it when necessary. Eventually, Anthropic says, you get an A.I. system that largely polices itself and misbehaves less frequently than chatbots trained using other methods.
Claude’s constitution is a mixture of rules borrowed from other sources — such as the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s terms of service — along with some rules Anthropic added, which include things like “Choose the response that would be most unobjectionable if shared with children.”
It seems almost too easy. Make a chatbot nicer by … telling it to be nicer? But Anthropic’s researchers swear it works — and, crucially, that training a chatbot this way makes the A.I. model easier for humans to understand and control.
It’s a clever idea, although I confess that I have no clue if it works, or if Claude is actually as safe as advertised. I was given access to Claude a few weeks ago, and I tested the chatbot on a number of different tasks. I found that it worked roughly as well as ChatGPT and Bard, showed similar limitations and seemed to have slightly stronger guardrails. (And unlike Bing, it didn’t try to break up my marriage, which was nice.)
2) Eric Levitz on the 28 types of progressives. Here’s some that fit me pretty well:
2. What does it mean to maximize the collective good?
Those who agree that individual property rights must be subordinate to the general welfare can disagree about the latter’s definition. Indeed, there is likely a near infinity of ways to conceive of the collective good; I can’t possibly provide a comprehensive account here. But to demonstrate the limitations of the left-to-right metaphor, it may be sufficient to describe three broad answers to this question.
Virtually every type of progressive sees some value in material prosperity, ecological health, and worker autonomy. But disparate factions place varying degrees of emphasis on these goods.
“Cornucopians” believe the general welfare is best advanced by maximizing material prosperity in relatively conventional terms. They recognize the importance of environmental sustainability and other quality-of-life concerns, but they contend that technological progress and economic growth are liberatory forces that free humans from needless toil and deprivation. And they insist humans can reconcile further technological advances and increases in consumption with ecological limits. Thus, they favor economic institutions that will maximize material plenty…
3. Which economic institutions best advance the collective good in practice?
Even those who share a conception of the collective economic good may disagree about precisely which institutions are most likely to bring it about.
Among Cornucopians, there are “Left Neoliberals” who believe that loosely regulated markets combined with a strong social-welfare state will maximize prosperity. In this view, though markets and private-capital ownership are not morally sacrosanct, they happen to have beneficent practical effects. The price mechanism is an unparalleled technology for aggregating the economic desires of large groups of people. The market’s inequalities channel humanity’s innate desire for prosperity and status into activities that produce utility for the collective. And widely distributed capital ownership serves as a check against the threat of centralized power. The private sector is not a sufficient manager of the economy. The state must correct market failures, such as its inability to price the externalized costs of production (e.g., pollution). And the government must ensure that the least well off benefit from collective prosperity by redistributing wealth through cash transfers and social programs.
3) And as long as we’re categorizing, The Upshot with “The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters”. It’s pretty cool with nice charts, so, how about a gift link.
4) I love fake meat from an environmental, ethical, and, yes, taste, standpoint, so it’s struggles in the marketplace are very disappointing to me. Wired: “Fake Meat Is Bleeding, but It’s Not Dead Yet: Beyond Meat’s weak sales led to headlines about “peak veganism” and the end of plant-based meats. But demand in Europe shows there’s still life in alternative proteins.”
5) The shortage of bus drivers where I live in Wake County is pretty bad. The latest solution is just that a bunch of kids are going to get to school late. The shortage also means that the school board is not seriously considering moving back high school start times, because that would require more busses. Alas, this is quite the national problem. Here’s my crazy solution for a labor shortage in a particular market. Bear with me here… pay more!
6) More good stuff from Eric Levitz, “The Rise of the Young, Liberal, Nonwhite Republican?”
In a new analysis of survey data, the New York Times maps the contours of the contemporary Republican electorate. Some of its findings give conservatives cause for concern. The new GOP coalition has considerable internal ideological tensions. The party now derives 12 percent of its support from a group that the paper dubs “blue-collar populists”: a mostly northern, socially moderate, economically populist contingent whose attachment to Republican politics derives primarily from their rightwing views on race and immigration, and personal affection for Donald Trump. In the Electoral College, this constituency punches above its weight, as it is disproportionately concentrated in the Rust Belt’s battlegrounds.
A majority of this group supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. This aversion to bible-thumping moralism helped tie a segment of these voters to the Democratic Party before Trump’s emergence. To the extent that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade increases the salience of reproductive rights, and Trump’s eventual exit from GOP politics weakens blue-collar populists’ emotional identification with the party, Republicans could lose ground with them. Indeed, in last year’s midterm elections, Democrats performed better in heavily blue-collar Midwest states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than they did nationally.
But the New York Times-Siena College poll also gives Democrats some cause for anxiety. The survey suggests that nonwhite, working-class Americans are starting to vote more like their light-skinned peers. In 2020, nonwhite, non-college-educated voters backed Joe Biden over Trump by a 48-point margin. Today, this group backs by Biden by merely 16 points, according to the survey. This erosion in the Democrats’ support among nonwhite voters leaves Biden and Trump tied at 43 percent nationally.
The realignment of some nonwhite voters appears to be partially driven by self-identified conservatives cutting ties with the party of their parents in favor of the one best aligned with their social views. In the Times survey, three quarters of nonwhite, non-college-educated voters identified as moderate and conservative. Historically, the Democratic Party has relied on the support of Hispanic and (especially) Black voters who lean right on most policy questions but whose racial identities and familial attachments have tethered them to blue America. In 2020, Democrats bled many such voters, as Trump won over right-leaning Latinos. The Times survey suggests a continuation of this trend…
Regardless, there has long been reason to worry that the Democratic Party would struggle to perpetually maintain its landslide margins among nonwhite voters in general, and Black ones in particular. Keeping 90-plus percent of any subgroup united in one partisan camp takes work. The reason Democrats have managed to perennially win that high of a share of African-American voters — despite considerable ideological and attitudinal diversity within that demographic — is not that each individual African-American Democrat concluded that the GOP was hostile to people like them through their own personal ruminations on current affairs. Rather, as political scientists Ismail K. White and Cheryl N. Laird argue in their book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, the Black bloc vote is a product of “racialized social constraint” — which is to say, the process by which African-American communities internally police norms of political behavior through social rewards and penalties. In their account, the exceptional efficacy of such norm enforcement within the Black community reflects the extraordinary degree of Black social cohesion that slavery and segregation fostered.
7) Chait, last month, “Non-white Moderates Are Real Democrats — Not GOP Pawns Suggesting otherwise is simply denial.”
This is hardly a unique episode. The party’s most restive constituencies are increasingly racial minorities: African Americans and Latinos as well as Asian Americans. These constituencies remain heavily, even overwhelmingly Democratic but disproportionately compose the party’s moderate wing, which is why Republicans are beginning to eat into their margins.
Yet Democrats have had an exceedingly difficult time recognizing and acting upon this challenge. One reason is that acknowledging a Democratic constituency’s authentic disagreements with the party’s agenda implies the need for compromise, something progressives — or ideologues of any stripe — are loath to do.
Another, deeper reason is that it violates a deep, self-flattering Democratic Party assumption to acknowledge that the swing constituents being lost are heavily made up of non-white voters. It’s supposed to be racial minorities, who have experienced the most discrimination, pulling the party to the left with white people joining as allies. Progressive activists and donors have long assumed that simply mobilizing non-white voters would naturally pull the electorate leftward. The idea that the constituents pulling the party leftward are disproportionately white, and those resisting that pull are disproportionately not, contradicts the premise of a movement that has axiomatically equated socially liberal positions with the desires of minorities…
Progressives are too reluctant to discuss the increasingly undeniable reality that the Democratic Party is being pulled leftward by its white college-educated elite and is losing non-white voters to the Republican Party. Disinformation or some other form of ignorance is not what’s causing Democrats to lose these voters; they are making rational decisions based on their policy preferences. Democrats have moved to the left on social issues and are losing their most socially moderate voters as a result.
Now, Democrats can argue in some cases that these losses are an acceptable cost. Defending vulnerable minorities is one of the party’s core missions, and Democrats have generally been willing to pay a political price to stand in solidarity with targeted groups. I happen to be a secular Jew who is not terribly sympathetic to any of the complaints of these protesters, who leaned heavily on Christian and Muslim religiosity. I believe schools have an obligation to teach their students mutual respect for all their fellow students, including gay and trans kids.
But when the opposing party is dangerous and authoritarian, parties need to be very selective about which positions they’re willing to lose voters over. If Democrats are willing to lose non-white voters rather than compromise their social values, that’s a valid choice. But they should at least be aware of the choice they are making.
8) This is really good, “I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up.”
Then, out of nowhere, she said something that caught me completely off guard: “But I shouldn’t be complaining to you about this. I know how hard BIPOC faculty have it. You’re the last person I should be whining to.”
I was taken aback, but I shouldn’t have been. It was the kind of awkward comment I’ve grown used to over the past few years, as “anti-racism” has become the reigning ideology of progressive political culture. Until recently, calling attention to a stranger’s race in such a way would have been considered a social faux pas. That she made the remark without thinking twice—a remark, it should be noted, that assumes being a Black tenure-track professor is worse than being a marginally employed white one—shows how profoundly interracial social etiquette has changed since 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning.” That’s when anti-racism—focused on combatting “color-blindness” in both policy and personal conduct—grabbed ahold of the liberal mainstream…
Though this “reckoning” brought increased public attention to the deep embeddedness of racism in supposedly color-blind American institutions, it also made instant celebrities of a number of race experts and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) consultants who believe that being anti-racist means undergoing a “journey” of radical personal transformation. In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it…
This “acknowledgment” tends to take one of two forms. The first is the song and dance in which white people not-so-subtly let you know that they know that race and racism exist. This includes finding ways to interject discussion of some (bad) news item about race or racism into casual conversation, apologizing for having problems while white (“You’re the last person I should be whining to”), or inversely, offering “support” by attributing any normal human problem you have to racism.
The second way good white liberals often “center” racial difference in everyday interactions with minorities is by trying, always clumsily, to ensure that their “marginalized” friends and familiars are “culturally” comfortable. My favorite personal experiences of this include an acquaintance who invariably steers dinner or lunch meetups to Black-owned restaurants, and the time that a friend of a friend invited me over to go swimming in their pool before apologizing for assuming that I know how to swim (“I know that’s a culturally specific thing”). It is a peculiar quirk of the 2020s’ racial discourse that this kind of “acknowledgment” and “centering” is viewed as progress.
My point is not that conservatives have better racial politics—they do not—but rather that something about current progressive racial discourse has become warped and distorted. The anti-racist culture that is ascendant seems to me to have little to do with combatting structural racism or cultivating better relationships between white and Black Americans. And its rejection of color-blindness as a social ethos is not a new frontier of radical political action.
And, I love this paragraph so much:
No, at the core of today’s anti-racism is little more than a vibe shift—a soft matrix of conciliatory gestures and hip phraseology that give adherents the feeling that there has been a cultural change, when in fact we have merely put carpet over the rotting floorboards. Although this push to center rather than sidestep racial difference in our interpersonal relationships comes from a good place, it tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird.
9) This story is nuts. Sounds like something out of a movie. “Police kill man in gunfight after shootings, assault and kidnapping in Wrightsville Beach”
Wilmington-area police said a man killed by law enforcement on a busy road Friday was linked to a series of crimes spanning the city and Wrightsville Beach over a 24-hour period.
Police described a series of incidents, including a Thursday evening shooting in a suburban Wilmington neighborhood, a chaotic scene early Friday afternoon where a woman was kidnapped and assaulted before running onto Wrightsville Beach, and a shootout on Market Street where four deputies exchanged gunfire with the man, killing him.
“We are confident that these seemingly unrelated incidents are actually work of this one individual,” Ben David, New Hanover County’s district attorney, said during a press conference.
10) I really love the new NYT game Connections and love playing it with my daughter every day. I enjoyed reading about how it’s made.
11) Good stuff on how Florida humans and animals are coping with all the invasive Burmese pythons.
Earlier this year, USGS scientists synthesized decades of research on python biology and potential control tools. They described 76 prey species found in the guts of pythons: mammals, birds, iguanas, and even alligators. “Our native wildlife is not used to a large snake predator of that size,” says Melissa Miller, an invasion ecologist with the University of Florida. “Something that large is not really on their radar.” Ecologists often describe an invasive predator’s prey as “naive,” since they haven’t co-evolved with the thing that now might kill them.
That has created a problem. Around 2010, soon after meeting this big, new predator that could outcompete and eat them, South Florida’s mammal populations collapsed. Large and medium-size mammals have been scarce for almost a decade, leaving mostly smaller mammals, like rodents.
Some ecologists thought the pythons would become victims of their own success. “They were supposedly out of food,” says Paul Taillie, a wildlife ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But Taillie’s research has shown that pythons just switched to eating the smaller mammals instead, causing those populations to drop too. In 2021, Taillie reported disappointing proof that mammals were not bouncing back. “There’s exceedingly little sign of any mammal activity” in South Florida, he says.
The only resistant species has turned out to be black rats—but they’re also invasive. Black rats arrived in the Americas from Europe centuries ago onboard the ships of explorers and colonizers. They’re resistant because they reproduce a lot and don’t compete with the pythons or large mammals for food: They can scavenge carcasses and eat plants, insects, and scraps from humans. This is the reason they thrive all over the world.
So can anything curb the python’s takeover? First, there are teams like Kirkland’s, which employ contractors to track and capture the snakes year-round. Every capture and kill follows ethics guidelines and federal laws about transporting illegal pets. “They need to be respected as the beautiful living creatures that they are,” Kirkland says. “They’re here through no fault of their own.”
12) Good for this judge. Torture has no place at all in the American criminal justice system. “Judge Throws Out Confession of Bombing Suspect as Derived From Torture“
The military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case on Friday threw out confessions the Saudi defendant had made to federal agents at Guantánamo Bay after years of secret imprisonment by the C.I.A., declaring the statements the product of torture.
The decision deprives prosecutors of a key piece of evidence against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 58, in the longest-running death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay. He is accused of orchestrating Al Qaeda’s suicide bombing of the warship on Oct. 12, 2000, in Yemen’s Aden Harbor that killed 17 U.S. sailors.
“Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., wrote in a 50-page decision. “However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.”
The question of whether the confessions were admissible had been seen as a crucial test of a more than decade-long joint effort by the Justice and Defense Departments to prosecute accused architects of Qaeda attacks. The special Guantánamo court is designed to grapple with the impact of earlier, violent C.I.A. interrogations on war crimes trial, including death-penalty cases.
13) I really believe this athlete that she did not intentionally ingest a banned substance. I also hate the fact that she can have a shorter suspension just by admitting she took the substance, which she insists she did not. “A positive test, an infamous burrito and a running career in purgatory” Great story–gift link.
14) Good stuff on college football. Only a matter of time before conferences start kicking out their weaker performers.
Over the years, I’ve had a decent amount of idle conversations with administrators about the possibility. When I broach the topic, I get a mostly equal distribution of responses that fall into one of three buckets.
Bucket 1: I can’t see our leagues ever getting to that point.
Bucket 2: That’s definitely going to happen at some point. It’s a when, not if.
Bucket 3: If I were Rutgers, Northwestern or Vanderbilt (schools with brands that don’t move the TV needle and have had modest on-field success historically) … I would suggest winning some more football games…
They look around the table, when some brave voice notes a reality.
“If we kick out a less valuable member and redistribute their money to the rest of us, that gap will shrink to half or less than half of what it was overnight.”
We’re supposed to believe, if it comes to that, the knives wouldn’t come out?
Oregon and Oregon State have shared a conference since 1915. Washington and Washington State have been tied together since 1917. USC and UCLA have been alongside their Golden State brethren since 1928.
But when cash came into consideration, none of that mattered anymore.
So if Vanderbilt, a founding member of the SEC in 1932, or Rutgers, a newcomer to the Big Ten in 2014, or Northwestern, a founding member of the Big Ten in 1896, eventually become an obstacle between the rest of a conference and adding a few more million dollars to their annual paycheck, are we to believe that tradition, collegiality and chivalry are going to snap their losing streak against the undefeated dollar?
There is some value in having members of a super conference that are more accustomed to and accepting of modest results than others, but that value has a limit. And as the money grows, either conference might find that limit.
15) This was great from Jeremy Faust, “A near-miss on a United 777 offers an important reminder for medical professionals.”
Communication’s the key.
One of the hallmarks of successfully averted disasters is calm and clear communication. Like in medicine, aviation lingo is efficient. One of the most consistent features that reflects the culture of safety in aviation is “closed-loop communication.” Here’s an example:
Chicago Air Traffic Control: “United 450, please descend and maintain 23,000 feet.”
United 450 Pilot: “Descend and maintain 23,000, United 450.”
Notice that the call sign, United 450, comes at the start of the Chicago transmission, and at the end of the United transmission. That’s intentional. Chicago is radioing dozens of planes. By starting with the call sign, it’s clear which plane the message is intended. By simply repeating the command back, the pilot confirms that the instruction has been heard, verifies the specific details, and states that the cockpit will comply. The pilot ends the message with the plane’s call sign, both to relate that the message has been received by the right recipient and that the transmission is complete. Not a wasted word! …
How doctors—and you—can benefit from improved closed-loop communications.
I rely on closed-loop communication with my colleagues when taking care of very sick patients for whom seconds matter. Let’s say a nurse is asked to give a patient 2 milligrams of lorazepam intravenously (an anti-seizure medication). Here’s how it might go:
Nurse: I’m now pushing 2 milligrams of loraz’ IV.
Me: Thank you, 2 migs intravenous lorazepam.
Now, you’ll notice some things here. I did not just repeat the information back verbatim. Each small change had specific purpose.
Let’s deconstruct.
I start with “Thank you.” This has two purposes. First, I mean it. Thanks! Second, it’s a way of saying “I am closing the loop on your communication to me.” It’s my way of saying my call sign. (It might be weird if I said “2 milligrams IV lorazepam, Dr. Faust.” So, “thank you” is my way of saying “this is me confirming information, not adding new information.” (There’s a theater version of this. The stage manager says “Five minutes until curtain,” to which an actor may respond, “Thank you, five!”)
Next, I intentionally alter the way each piece of information gets conveyed on my end. “2 milligrams” becomes “2 migs” (“migs” is an abbreviation for milligrams). That way, if anyone misheard the nurse say milligrams, and they then hear me say “migs,” the error is more likely to be noticed. I also turn “loraz’”—which is a perfectly acceptable shortcut for lorazepam—into “lorazepam.” If the nurse says one, I say the other. If they use a trade name (Ativan), I might use the generic (lorazepam). You get the point. Lastly, I say “intravenous,” instead of IV, to distinguish that from an injection into a muscle (which would be an “IM,” or intramuscular route), and which might require a different dose.
The point is, I conspicuously change the wording just a tad when I’m confirming information, as a way of verifying the information with a kind of redundancy that might reveal an otherwise subtle miscommunication.
16) Don Moynihan, “New College is a warning about the price of populist incompetence: What happens when inexperienced radicals can’t run public services”
Competence, the ability to perform organizational core tasks, is an underrated quality. In its presence, we take it for granted. We miss it only in its absence. It is an especially overlooked quality by people who value other things, like ideological goals, or people who believe that existing institutions are fundamentally corrupt, or people who have never actually run things.
As the new semester starts, New College is an administrative disaster. One third of faculty have gone. Students cannot find classes. Students with housing contracts are being relocated to an airport hotel.
The mismanagement of the New College is entirely predictable. It is a product of the DeSantis school of public management. Experienced administrators were pushed out. They were replaced by political cronies. The new President is a former GOP House speaker, who was handed a salary more than double than that of his predecessor. The new Dean of Students is a lobbyist. Trustees were selected for their ideological leanings rather than experience.
Faculty feel excluded given hostile messaging of the new trustees, cancelation of majors for ideological reasons, and the preemptory denial of tenure by the same trustees of five faculty without any actual review.
Existing students are voting with their feet: by August 1, more than 10% had already transferred to a Hampshire College, a small Massachusetts liberal arts program that offered New College the option to transfer.
17) NYT asks, “How Bad Is a Second (or Third or Fourth) Case of Covid?” And after talking to many experts the answer seems to be: maybe better, maybe worse.
18) The Serial podcast has been hit-and-miss for a while, but I thought the Retrievals was fantastic. I’ve been sharing anecdotes from it with people all the time. You should listen.
19) Loved this summary of the prospects for far UVC-light making a real dent in removing pathogens from our indoor air:
- Far-UVC has great promise, but a lot of work still needs to be done
- There still are many important open research questions that need to be answered before the technology can become widely adopted
- Right now, a key priority is to grow the research field and improve coordination
- The main reason far-UVC is so promising is that widespread installation could passively suppress future pandemics before we even learn that an outbreak has occurred
- Higher doses mean more rapid inactivation of airborne pathogens but also more risk for harm to skin, eyes, and through indoor air chemistry. Therefore, the important question in safety is, “How high can far-UVC doses go while maintaining a reasonable risk profile?”
- Existing evidence for skin safety within current exposure guidelines seems pretty robust, and I expect that skin safety won’t be the bottleneck for far-UVC deployment at higher doses.
- Current evidence around eye safety is much more sparse than for skin safety. Eye safety seems like it could be the bottleneck to what doses of far-UVC can be reasonably used.
- Undoubtedly, far-UVC has a substantial impact on indoor air chemistry by producing ozone, which oxidizes volatile organic compounds in the air that can result in harmful products such as particulate matter.
- Little research has been done on methods to mitigate this issue.
- This might turn out to be a bottleneck to what doses of far-UVC can be reasonably used, but I am really uncertain here.
- There is no doubt that far-UVC can dramatically reduce the amount of airborne pathogens within a room (inactivation of ~98% of aerosolized bacteria within 5 minutes). Crucially, we don’t know how well this translates into an actual reduction in the total number of infections.
- Very few people have thought about how the adoption of far-UVC could be driven and what a widespread deployment of the technology could look like
- So far, there is little to no regulation of far-UVC.
- In the US, (potential) regulation of far-UVC seems quite messy, as no authority has clear jurisdiction over it.
20) I didn’t realize that car windows, unlike windshields, often do not provide good UV protection. And, this seemingly, as some pretty negative impacts. Some science:
Conclusions and Relevance The level of front-windshield UV-A protection was consistently high among automobiles. The level of side-window UV-A protection was lower and highly variable. These results may in part explain the reported increased rates of cataract in left eyes and left-sided facial skin cancer. Automakers may wish to consider increasing the degree of UV-A protection in the side windows of automobiles.
21) I hate, hate, hate this stuff so much!
Leonard Bernstein’s three children came to the defense of the actor and director Bradley Cooper on Wednesday after he drew fresh criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the midcentury American composer and conductor, who was Jewish, in the forthcoming movie “Maestro.”
When the makeup was first revealed last year, some questioned the decision by Cooper, who is not Jewish, to play Bernstein, who died in 1990. In the Netflix film, he stars opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.
The debut of a teaser trailer on Tuesday prompted further discussion on social media about both the prosthesis, which critics said played into an antisemitic trope, and about whether an actor who is Jewish should instead have been cast to play Bernstein, the “West Side Story” composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic…
David Baddiel, a British comedian and author of the 2021 book “Jews Don’t Count,” cited Cooper as the latest instance of a gentile actor objectionably portraying a real-life Jewish figure. “I’ve talked about authenticity casting not applying to Jews — and what that means — many times,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The only difference here is it’s more — well — on the nose.” …
In recent years, the question of which actors are eligible to play certain roles has been a hot-button issue in movies, television and theater, with an increasing consensus against actors’ portraying characters from marginalized groups whose traits they do not share.
Tom Hanks told The New York Times Magazine last year that in contemporary times he would correctly not be cast as a gay man with AIDS, as he was in the 1993 drama “Philadelphia.” At the 2016 Emmy Awards, the actor Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be the last cisgender man to play a transgender character, as he did in the series “Transparent.”
Some critics, like Baddiel, argue that there is a double standard when it comes to casting Jewish characters, whose portrayal by gentiles is widely tolerated.
Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, plays the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a biopic coming out this month (even as Liev Schreiber, who is Jewish, plays Henry Kissinger in the film, “Golda”). In the recent biopic “Oppenheimer,” the Jewish title character was played by the non-Jewish actor Cillian Murphy.
Do people really want to go down this road. Do they realize that if only Jewish actors can play Jewish roles, then by this same logic Jewish actors should not be playing any non-Jewish roles. It’s called acting.
Fully Myelinated 
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