Can there ever be real ‘closure’ after a tragedy?

It is interesting how words and concepts that originate in fields like psychology and psychotherapy seep into general public discourse and are used by regular people. One such word and concept is ‘closure’, something that is often invoked after some awful tragedy.

Take this report following the deaths of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa.

It’s the light that draws people here, Gürler, a photographer, mused, and then they find a deeply inclusive and welcoming community. Hackman and Arakawa fitted right in, she said.

“He was the kindest man. He would smile at everyone,” she said. “Everyone I’ve talked to since yesterday is genuinely sad.”

For many years, people would see the couple walking around downtown, visiting the library or eating at local restaurants. Some residents have begun sharing stories online about their interactions over the years. One man described how he helped Hackman as a library worker, and how the actor later invited him to join him and Arakawa for dinner. Now the community waits to learn what happened.

“Something is missing. I hope we get closure, but I’m hoping [their] family get closure even if we don’t,” Gürler said.

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Book and TV review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I am fond of the books of Charles Dickens but for some reason never got around to reading this particular one that was published in 1853. It is argued by some critics to be one of his best works. I was stimulated to read it because I came across a 2005 BBC adaptation into a seres that looked like it might be good but I thought I should read the book first.

I am not an authority on Dickens so will leave it to others to judge whether this may or may not be one his finest works but it is undoubtedly very good and one of the most Dickensian in its flourishes and plotting. Coincidences, a Dickens staple, abound and people who seemed to be unconnected suddenly discover that they are in fact related, even very closely.

Dickens also has a penchant for creating eccentric characters with strange names and here we find them in abundance. In this book alone are Jarndyce, Guppy, Turveydrop, Jellyby, Snagsby, Smallweed, Chadband, Pardiggle, Squod, Tulkinghorn, Clamb, and Grubble. You rarely find a Smith or a Jones or a Brown in a Dickens novel. Interestingly, Dickens’s own name was considered strange at that time, as one critic wrote, “Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.” This shows that names that we now consider as ordinary became so by virtue of familiarity. If Dickens had not become so famous, his name might still have been considered ‘queer’.
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Republicans cannot help being bigoted jerks

Texas Republican congressman Keith Self is chair of a a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and during a hearing, he turned to Sarah McBride, a member of the panel and is transgender and referred to her as “Mr. McBride”, deliberately misgendering her because he is, of course, a transphobic bigoted jerk and this is what the Republican party now consists of.

I have got to hand it to McBride. Without missing a beat or showing any outward sign of anger, she replied “Thank you, madam chair’.

A fellow Democrat on the panel Bill Keating of Massachusetts then interjected and demanded that Self refer to McBride properly. Self tried to bat away the implication that he was a bigot by the usual evasion ‘that he was only following orders’ to argue that he was merely doing what the House of Representatives had decided but Keating was having none of it and kept insisting that Self refer to McBride properly. Self then adjourned the meeting.

Watch.
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Creating chatbots of the dead

The short film I’m Not a Robot that I posted about recently, told the story of a woman who suddenly learns that she might be a bot. While that was fictional, the ability for AI to create bots that simulate real people is already here.

In 1970, a 57-year-old man died of heart disease at his home in Queens, New York. Fredric Kurzweil, a gifted pianist and conductor, was born Jewish in Vienna in 1912. When the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, an American benefactor sponsored Fred’s immigration to the United States and saved his life. He eventually became a music professor and conductor for choirs and orchestras around the US. Fred took almost nothing with him when he fled Europe – but, in the US, he saved everything. He saved official documents about his life, lectures, notes, programmes, newspaper clippings related to his work, letters he wrote and letters he received, and personal journals.

For 50 years after Fred died, his son, Ray, kept these records in a storage unit. In 2018, Ray worked with his daughter, Amy, to digitise all the original writing from his father. He fed that digitised writing to an algorithm and built a chatbot that simulated what it was like to have a conversation with the father he missed and lost too soon. This chatbot was selective, meaning that it responded to questions with sentences that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life. Through this chatbot, Ray was able to converse with a representation of his father, in a way that felt, Ray said: ‘like talking to him.’ And Amy, who co-wrote this essay and was born after Fred died, was able to stage a conversation with an ancestor she had never met.
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The sad end of Hackman’s and Arakawa’s lives

It looks like investigators have figured out most of the details of the last days of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa.

The actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, who were found dead last month in Santa Fe, New Mexico, were rarely apart from each other, and it’s that closeness that may have led to the circumstances of their deaths.

Arakawa had become Hackman’s caregiver in his later years when he developed Alzheimer’s disease and became incapable of carrying out even the simplest of tasks. She ran the household errands, made sure he remained active and protected him from illnesses.

Authorities in Santa Fe revealed on Friday that the couple had died of natural causes, Hackman from heart disease and Arakawa from a rare viral infection. Arakawa died first, perhaps on 11 February, when she was last seen or heard from. Investigators said in a press conference that Hackman, 95, was likely unaware that his wife had died.

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Film: “I’m not a robot” (2024)

The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short was the 22-minute Dutch film I’m Not a Robot. It starts with a woman in an office working on her computer when she is faced with one of those CAPTCHA tests (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) where you are given a grid of boxes and asked to click on just those boxes that have show some particular item, such as a traffic light or a car or something similar to prove that you are not a robot. We have all encountered these things many times. So she does it but fails the first test. Again nothing unusual. It shows a different grid and she tries again. And fails again. And again. And again.

Frustrated, she calls tech support and after the person asks her some questions, raises the possibility that the reason she is failing may be because she actually is a robot. The film deals with how she reacts to that.

You can see the full film.

Readers will be familiar with the idea that we may actually be avatars in an advanced computer simulation. The reasoning behind it is that as computer simulations become ever more sophisticated in creating virtual worlds with avatars who look and behave realistically and as if they have wills of their own, at some point they will create one in which the avatars think that they are autonomous humans. How would we know if we have not already reached that state and we ourselves are indeed those avatars, thinking that we have wills of our own when we are merely doing what our controllers tell us to do?

The film reminded me of Black Mirror episodes that speculate on where technology might be taking us. Almost all of them show a dystopian future that rarely ends well for the protagonists. Apparently a new season of Black Mirror is expected to be released this year.

Kevin Drum (1958-2025)

I am sad to report that Kevin Drum’s wife Marian posted on his blog that he had died on Friday, March 7th. In 2014, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, the severity of which fluctuated with the various treatments that he underwent. He wrote openly about his travails with the disease but was never self-pitying or maudlin.

I was a regular reader of his blog starting from the days when he started out as a private blogger Calpundit in 2003 and then moving on to start the blog Political Animal at the Washington Monthly magazine, then to blogging at Mother Jones, before going back to a personal blog again, now called Jabberwocking, in 2021.

While I did not always agree with his politics (he was a little too mainstream liberal, centrist Democrat for my taste), I respected him for his data-driven approach to the news. He wrote well and would take news items and subject them to rigorous fact-checking and often present the results in the form of easy-to-understand charts. He was a big advocate of the idea that lead was a major cause of aggressive behavior in people and I found his arguments and the data he presented in support of it persuasive.

He was a sane, positive, stabilizing presence in the chaotic world of internet punditry and he will be missed.

Insulting federal workers

My earlier post about how some of the people getting fired by Musk-Trump are also getting abuse from their friends and relatives showed how those people seemed to view the fired federal workers as somehow parasites, enjoying a life of luxury off the backs of hardworking taxpayers and doing little to earn their keep, just goofing off while drawing a paycheck.

This misunderstands the nature of work. I suspect that most people, whether in the public or private sector, take pride in doing a good job. It is part of one’s sense of self-worth to know that one is pulling one’s weight and not dragging other people down. It is usually just those who have been treated badly by their employers who try to get away with doing nothing, perhaps out of a sense of grievance or getting revenge. Some of course are incorrigibly lazy but I doubt that they constitute more than a tiny fraction.
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