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2025-12-29 21:23:49

This is supposedly the best book about getting a divorce.

I am extremely not-getting a divorce, but

1) I saw two uncorrelated references to it as a Best In Category book, which usually gets things onto my book-list regardless of what they are (e.g. this is also why I'm reading a book about Call Center Management).

2) I think we should all probably spend more time doing "disaster preparedness" like this? If you ever do get a divorce / go to hospital / get sued, you will suddenly be trying to learn about a complex Systems Problem at the exact same time that you're extremely stressed and emotionally fraught. And frankly, for most white collar professionals, these are higher-probability prepping situations than stockpiling food and water, but I know far more people who do the latter. (I think the food-and-water prepping is also worth it, though! Life hack if you're in America: find your nearest LDS home storage center).

3) I am (to reiterate) extremely not-getting divorced but I do get into various situations where someone is mad at me and I am mad or sad at them, and I want to do a better job of navigating those situations, and I suspect that a good divorce book would have useful lessons about this. I think one useful life-strategy in general is to get the "professional grade" version of things even though you're only using them at an amateur level, e.g. mountaineering jackets are going to be really water-and-windproof, and this is helpful to me even though the only mountains I go near are metaphorical. So I figured a divorce book might be helpful in dealing with other kinds of contentions.

Anyway, thoughts from this book:

• Divorce is a difficult problem because you have exactly 1 counterparty; if your counterparty is being uncooperative, you can't pick someone else to divorce instead, you just have to deal with it. Your entire option set is "stay together", "come to an agreement outside court," or "go to court and do whatever the judge mandates."
  
  I feel like a lot of the biggest problems I have in life are like this (to different degrees or over different timescales), they basically boil down to "there is only one counterparty and you can't work around them and if they want to make your life miserable then your life will be miserable": your ability to negotiate a good outcome is really harmed when there's one other party you must deal with, no matter how they behave. This can happen with next-door neighbors, family members, bosses/employees (on some time scale). But marriage has the extra element of a very restrictive legal contract that's ultimately backstopped by some un-appealable judgements from a judge.
  
• More generally: I feel like one of the most important truths to make peace with as an adult is that a sufficiently motivated person can (for some amount of time) ruin your life. I originally wanted to write they "can ruin your life, if they're willing to ruin their own", but I'm not even sure that's true: I think sometimes someone can ruin your life in their spare time and at no cost to themselves. And this genuinely fills me with horror, but maybe also I should be grateful that in practice most people don't do this, even thought they could?
  
  (Edit: I guess they can't exactly ruin your life, but they can create conditions that for many people will be all-consuming and miserable. Potentially if you're zen enough, you will be able to sing through it anyway; happiness independent of conditions, baby.)
  
• One of the big game-theory problems for this book is that lawyers are very expensive, so you should be willing to give your counterparty a generous share of your combined assets in order to avoid going to trial. I.e. it's better to concede 55% of your combined $X assets up front than to go to court and each get 50% of the $0.8X you have left after paying lawyers.
  
  However, if your counterparty knows you believe this they can squeeze you pretty hard – it's not exactly a slippery slope, it's not like they can escalate from 55% to 60% to 65% to 70%, you do always have the option of going to court once the expected value of the unfair split vs the trial outcome gets bad enough. But if your ex knows you've read this book, they could rationally demand a fairly unfair split in their favor, and know that you're likely to take it.
  
  I do think the ideal would be for your ex to think you're willing to go to court when actually you're willing to give them 60%, and I don't think this book really wrestles with the strategic implication of its advice. The author is right, you're STILL better off getting rinsed but saving your sanity!, but you're even better off saving your sanity without getting rinsed, if you can manage it. It's a classic surplus-division problem, and there's no good answer to figure out who gets how much of the surplus.
  
• One of the author's big contentions is.... don't try to teach your ex a lesson, no matter what they did to you, it's not going to happen and you need to accept that. Just Get This Done, as the title tells you, and move on.
  
  This feels so hard, in so many fallings-out I've had the thing I most desperately wanted was for the other party to just understand or even acknowledge my perspective, and it's genuinely painful to just have to walk away while the other person seemingly refuses to even see what I'm aggravated about.
  
  It's probably the right advice, I get that, but man is it hard in practice.
  
• In divorce, teaching your ex a lesson is double-stupid because divorce costs are paid out of shared marital assets, so you're actually paying for both of your lawyers, whether you like it or not.
  
• You should really, really be organized with all your documents (bank statements, wages, assets etc), it will make your life easier. Of course the implication here is that you should be organized with your documents all the time, so you don't have to do it retroactively. Man I hate this point but that's probably why I need to do it.
  
• Keep a diary: I am surprised how often this comes up in legal and quasi-legal situations, having a contemporaneous written journal seems to count for a lot. If you're ever in a situation of interpersonal dispute, start keeping an (unemotional) diary of what they said to you and when.
  
• The author talks a lot about the "meta case": not the legal case itself, but e.g. how the judge feels about you for extra-judicial reasons based on vibes and how you behave. He says his first boss would always ask (before all other questions about a case) "who's the opposing lawyer?" and then "who's the judge?"
  
  This is so uncomfortable to me. We want to believe in an impartial judicial system, right? This is one of the core principles of liberal democracy, right? And yet nobody behaves like this is actually true: people hire expensive lawyers and go judge-shopping (where possible) and behave in certain ways that (they think) will make the judge more sympathetic to them, none of which is consistent with The Majestic Equality of the Law.
  
  The author of this book presents this tension as "if the case is on the bubble, and you've been a jerk, that could nudge the judge to rule against you," but... I don't know, I think in practice it's much stronger than that. It's not "the meta case will make the difference if literally everything else is tied," it's more "the meta case makes a significant difference even in cases that aren't anywhere close to ties, it just violates our shared pretense to admit that."
  
  I feel like I'm breaking some kind of rule even by talking about this?
  
• Relatedly: a wise man once told me: "social factors dominate human interaction and what actually happened only matters in extreme cases." That is, if you get mad you will be seen as losing almost-every argument, regardless of what the other person did that led to you getting mad, again excepting really extreme and explicit evidence.
  
  I really need to practice this. "If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and/or provoking you" is one of the most important life skills, and I'm not even really sure how to get more practice for it outside the bad moments when you need it most and also it's hardest to summon. Meditate more, I guess?
  
• When people ask my advice about writing books, I often tell them to spend inordinate time on designing the cover + picking the title: I suspect that 50%+ of your book's outcome will stem from the title and cover rather than the contents.
  
  In this case, I Just Want This Done is a banger title: it's emotionally resonant, clear and concise, it's not a phrase I'd actually heard before but it's immediately clear what it means, well done.
  
• You can't win a divorce, only lose less.
  
• It's clear that having you and your ex's lawyers being on good terms and communicating well is ideal. So maybe the ideal setup would be to collaborate on hiring sets of lawyers who have a history of working together: the author says he does this sometimes in Alternative Dispute Resolution setups, he recommends a copacetic lawyer to his client's ex and that makes the case go smoothly.
  
  But you could imagine how, for the client, this could get you in a situation where both lawyers are biased against you, if your ex or their lawyer are manipulating you.
  
  I don't know what to say exactly, principal-agent problems are ridiculously hard, you want your lawyers to fight the other set of lawyers iff it's worth fighting, and otherwise to get things done as collaboratively as possible. And it sounds like most often you want your lawyers to be conciliatory and not spend $10k of billable hours to solve a $5k problem, but you're not in a position to tell the difference and they are. Tricky!
  
• Re: kids, in many jurisdictions the term "custody" has been replaced with "parental responsibility", because "custody" sounded like jail. "Visitation" was replaced with "parenting time" for same reason. It's pretty funny to me that I've heard these terms for years and never made the connection, but now I see it....
  
• If you own a small business, the component of your business value that is "personal goodwill" belongs just to you, not to the company, and therefore isn't counted as a marital asset.
  
  This kind of makes sense to me – in lots of small businesses, the owner is the company, if she quits then the company's value would quickly round to nothing – but it feels like an interesting valuation problem.
  
• I feel like one problem with divorce law is that kids are treated as both obligations and assets? Like, often the outcome of a divorce is that the high-earning parent has to provide funds for the child-rearing parent to continue raising the child, which I think implicitly assumes that child-rearing is a burden that neither parent wants to do, but simultaneously in many cases I think both parents would prefer to have custody (sorry, I mean Parental Responsibility) whether or not they got paid for it? I don't know, this thought isn't fully baked, but I think there's something about how we do this currently that's kind of weird and maybe based on outdated assumptions.
  
• The author says that you shouldn't shout at your kids or use any kind of corporal punishment while the divorce proceedings are happening, even if that was normal during the marriage.
  
  I feel like this is pretty weird, when you think about it? Either it's ok to shout and smack children or it's not, why does the parents divorcing affect that?
  
  I think this actually gets at a fundamental tension in modern society, where we're societally ambivalent about whether kids are ultimately under the control of 1) their parents, 2) the government.
  
  For most of human history, I think, this just wouldn't have been a question, obviously kids were controlled by their parents, but recently the government is asserting itself more heavily, with more willingness to assert what parents can and cannot do with their own kids.
  
  So the resolution of this one is just "the government would like to ban all parents from shouting at or spanking their kids, but mostly it can't (so far), but during divorce cases they can, so they do."
  
• You legally can't retire / reduce your income in order to reduce your alimony. That is, if you have a high-paying job and you think to yourself "well, if my effective income from this job is now 1/3 lower, it's not really worth it to me, I'm going to quit and become a gardener / cook / acrobat like I always wanted to be," then the court will say.... no, you can't do that. Or rather, you still owe alimony as if you were working the high-paying job, so in the long run you can't afford to earn less.
  
  (The author says that reducing your income after a divorce is cutting off your nose to spite your face, because you're still keeping 2/3rds of your income. But idk, I think lots of people would change their jobs if it suddenly paid 1/3 less overnight, no spite required! Maybe that seems crazy when your income is millions of dollars a year, but also... maybe the crazy part is that people keep working for so long when they have so much money in the first place? Maybe the divorce is just a wake up call that they have enough money already, and also a wake up call about how they should have put more time into their relationships?)
  
  I don't know, I think I understand the motivation for this rule, but also... this is an incredible level of state intervention in people's life-choices that I don't think we would accept in other circumstances? Like, one of the things that liberal democracies say is bad about authoritarianisms is that in Those Places the government can command you to do a particular job whether you like it or not, and then... it turns out that, in our current liberal democracy, in at least one context the government can (approximately) command you to do a particular job whether you like it or not?
  
  An example I heard from outside this book is that air traffic controllers 1) make a lot of money, 2) don't really have skills transferable to any other high-paying job, 3) aren't allowed to do drugs, including some very normal medications, including some antidepressants. One guy got depressed about his divorce, started taking antidepressants, got fired from his air traffic control job, and then had to keep paying alimony as if he had the high-paying job which he was no longer eligible for, and the judge didn't believe him that he really had no way to earn as much money any more.
  
  My takeaway here is roughly "getting married is signing yourself up to lose some basic rights that you might not have thought about" – e.g. if you have kids, you can be compelled not to move outside a certain radius, so you're potentially giving up both freedom of work and freedom of location, in a legally-enforceable way.

So, there you go. Everything you hopefully won't need to know about getting a divorce. If you have other books I should add to my pile, let me know.

2025-12-27 00:45:03

Happy last days of 2025! Here's a review of the year in Blog, for those meta-interested in blogging.

By far our most popular post this year was 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties. A lot of you probably know that writing online is very power-lawed, but maybe not quite how extreme it is: I think Party Facts already has 1000x more views than our average post, and the gap will probably keep growing over time. Enormous thanks to our editor friend A., who "commissioned" it, and needs to give us more blogpost ideas since she's clearly better at it than we are.

Another highly-reacted post from this year was How Weird Do You All Want This Blog To Be?, which generated more direct comments and emails than anything else we've written, and generally made the blog feel worth doing again. Overall it's kind of shocking how much blogging feels like shouting into a void, so thank you to everyone who turned that void into more of a soiree.

We started this blog almost-exactly four years ago in order to share the good news about Monosodium Glutamate. I had read a bunch of people online claiming that if you blog consistently for a year or two you will naturally start to develop an audience and... I don't think that's actually true? We had a bunch of unfair advantages when starting this blog, a higher-than-average connectedness in the graph of existing successful bloggers, and I would still say that mostly our audience is staggeringly small because the audience for almost-any writing like this is staggeringly small: if people could see the actual reader numbers for various prestige magazines they would cry.

Towards the end of this year I got a few big benefits from the blog that might singlehandedly justify all the time that's gone into it: I met two exceptional teachers/guides who are helping me with two major areas of existence, and made one outstanding real-life friend, for which I'm exceedingly grateful. Someone once said that posting online is a complicated, indirect search function for finding people you resonate with, and I think I'm finally feeling that. But it's probably not restricted to posting, it's more like... making stuff and sharing it with the world is a search function for finding people you'll like.

I blog largely because I have too many thoughts in my head, and left to themselves they keep repeating themselves at me, and blogging lets me clear them out and make space for new thoughts to happen. I do feel like there's a certain magic to writing, and ways that it's uniquely good at letting you think through an argument, and review and re-edit and sharpen what you actually believe. (I think that seeing something in text that you don't really believe is viscerally uncomfortable, and you therefore have to delete it, and therefore help yourself understand what isn't true).

I also think there's a physical dimension to the glory of writing, that trying to structure your thoughts on a 2-D page is inherently Good, and that physically moving segments around helps you figure out which parts are most important, and which bits are pre-requisites for which other bits, and where there's actually massive gaps that you didn't notice while thinking because of the non-linearity of internal experience.

That said... blogging has taken up a vast amount of my time, and I can't honestly say if the opportunity cost was worth it. (Well: to the extent it keeps me out of trouble, maybe that goes the other way). I often suspect that there are some people who just love writing, but other people who love idea-wrangling and then just happen to end up path-dependently doing their idea-wrangling in writing. I think if I could make myself switch from blogging to video or audio I would be better off, and if you're thinking of blogging but feel like you could channel your thoughts through games or short-form videos instead, you might realistically be better off cultivating that.

Happy end of Q1 21C to all! And wishing you an excellent Q2.

2025-12-24 21:27:28

The "endowment effect" is the claim that people overvalue things they own relative to things they don't, even if they only just got the item and don't have any reason to be attached to it (or have inside information about it).

So: participants in an experiment are rewarded with a tchotchke, and then they're asked if they'd like to trade it for a different tchotchke, and they disproportionately choose to keep their first tchotchke, even though it was randomly assigned and the people assigned tchotchke-2 generally keep that one too.

I'm sure this finding isn't entirely true, but unlike many other social psych findings it feels genuinely plausible to me.

I think there's a kind of endowment effect for our own lives, and I think I have unusually little of it: I don't generally feel that my job/beliefs/experiences etc are better just because they're mine. (My blog readership, of course, is precious and unique and I would not trade it for anything).

I'm sure you could prove in 10 seconds that I do still have a large and irrational endowment on these things, but my sense is it's far less than other people's. If you also experience this, or experience the opposite, I'd be keen to hear more.

Here's a thing that bothers me greatly. If one person insists on spending 100 hours researching a topic before having an opinion about it, while another spends 1 hour, the low-research person will publish 100x more opinions.

And just on principle I think for any given topic there'd be far more people who have researched it for an hour (or less) than people who have researched it for 100.

So unless there's some gating on whose opinions get published, or some reason to assume that informed opinions would get more traction than uninformed ones, most of the opinions you read will be from people who know very little about the topic.

And note that this is fractal: even if you decide to only listen to (say) Harvard Trained Historians, there will still be far more published content by the Harvard Trained Historians With A Low Bar For Having An Opinion than from the ones who insist on researching a lot before opining.

This seems very bad.

Of all the convoluted pointless bureaucratic loopholes I jump through, one of the least important but most poignant is borrowing ebooks from the library. There's a digital file somewhere that has 0 marginal cost of reproduction, and me and a bunch of other people queue up to have access to it, and when it's my turn to borrow I have three weeks to read it (which usually expire before I get to it), while other people are needlessly excluded from reading at the same time, and all for... what? As I said, there are other more-important pretzels we tie ourselves in for legal fiction reasons, but this one is just so vivid as a pointless game we play to pretend that something is what it isn't.

2025-12-22 21:30:58

I have been asked before if ATVBT has any official editorial positions, and I believe the only one is "aliens are real and extremely nearby".

This position was widely mocked until extremely recently, is currently on the cusp of social acceptability, and (I think) will soon be extremely mainstream, with everyone pretending that they were always open to it and never mocked it (while of course shunning the weirdos who were saying it twenty years ago).

Luckily, if you start investigating aliens today, you can be at just the right time to be part of the "early majority" – your friends will remember that you were talking about it just before it became popular, but after the New York Times published testimony from US Navy pilots that they'd seen objects doing things that no known human technology can do.

A good place to start for alien exposure is the recently-released movie Age of Disclosure. It tries to convey that there's a bipartisan understanding at the top of the US government that
1) aliens exist, in a non-trivial near-earth sense,
2) there's been some shady maneuvering for a while now to prevent democratic oversight of the government's alien knowledge, and
3) the dam is breaking and it’s all coming out soon, one way or another.

I have some quibbles with the movie. There is some really unnecessary equivocation between the extremely uncontroversial position "humans are not the only intelligent life in the universe," which ~most people I know believe in the abstract, and the not-yet-popular position "aliens exist and are in contact with the earth."

In an effort to assert bipartisanity, the trailer for the film gives equal billing to headline interviewees Marco Rubio (Republican) and Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat), but in the movie itself Gillibrand basically just says that alien life probably exists somewhere and that the intelligence services and defense contractors should be accountable to democratically elected representatives, both of which I think are uncontroversial but not groundbreaking.

I think this is a useful pattern to remember when looking at alien stuff: it will simultaneously be true that most of the claimed evidence for aliens is shoddy and/or fake, and also that the best evidence is sufficient to be convincing. (This is actually a helpful thing to remember for many other arguments, but that’s another story).

The good news is, I think the movie is convincing after you chop out the fluff. Basically:

• Marco Rubio – the current Secretary of State – seems to legitimately believe that aliens are near earth, gives cogent explanations of why this information has not been made public sooner, does not seem like a crazy person (no matter your preexisting beliefs), seems to have a strong understanding that saying this stuff makes him sound crazy, and is willing to spend political capital on saying it anyway.
  
• Archive footage of Harry Reid, long time Democratic Majority Leader, really does seem to indicate he believed in near-earth aliens, and believed that intelligence agencies were giving the democratically elected government the run-around on near-earth aliens.
  
• Clips from the movie make it seem plausible (but not certain) that Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama have some kind of knowledge about aliens. I think the evidence here is at least arguable, just watch the clips and see how you feel, but they don’t-deny it when asked rather than actively confirming it, where it feels like something that’s incredibly easy to deny if you want to. There’s also a bananas story about George HW Bush being told, while head of the CIA (!), that he didn’t have a “need to know” about aliens, but it’s told second hand.

Overall, for me, the movie backs up the claim that either near-earth aliens are real, or the US government wants you to think that near-earth aliens are real, and either way it should be a massive story. That's really the number one question for me to people who think it's all a hoax or misdirection: ok sure, but isn't that kind of huge deal too? I have to stress this is from very senior people in both political parties.

One interesting thing to do if you’re alien-curious is just to go around asking your friends if they’ve seen UFOs. One of the first things that pushed me towards belief in aliens was sitting at a random hangout with 6 people and one of them brought up aliens, turned out 4 out of 6 had seen a UFO (alas I was one of the remaining two). Everyone seemed surprised to learn about each other’s UFO stories, and all the stories were more detailed and meaningful than I would have expected.

2025-12-19 21:21:40

I’m James, a friend and regular contributor to ATVBT. This is my weeklyish list of links, curiosities, and musings.

In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026!

A message from my sponsor

Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing, but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend time with your friends and family without a screen. Highly recommended!

Worth your time

Human Invariant: “In simple terms, good work gets noticed by everybody who matters.”. On some level, I think this is a useful reduction. At the same time, I also think that HI underates the dance between creators and audiences. Most great things are to some degree co-created.

Also, Human Invariant interviews a YouTube screenwriter.

On Bill Snyder’s career at Kansas State.. This level of obsession makes me wonder if I have What It Takes.

I feel I don’t spend enough time thinking about Esmerelda and how ambitious of a project it is.

The story of kelp pots (seed starter pots made from seaweed), a fun story in which I played a small part.

New to me: The Gettier Problem

The Lost Generation. This one is controversial because it deals with race and DEI, but if you can distance yourself from that a little bit, it’s really informative. It made me believe more in the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.

The story of the fight over Romansch. Particularly enjoyable for me because the Engadin is among my favorite places in the world.

Things I learned

The average boomer will get paid out significantly more in medicare and social security than they paid in taxes — Russ Greene. Soon we’ll need a Boomer Corner.

This was the first year where no Pearl Harbor survivors were able to attend the commemoration ceremony.

Americans drive 3.3 trillion miles each year — Rohit

The EU makes more from fines on US tech companies than it does from taxes on all EU tech companies — David Fant

Lebron James has played against 35% of players in NBA history — CBS Sports. To be fair, he has played in ~28% of the league’s seasons. I think this makes him the Queen Elizabeth of athletes.

Musings

I feel like the Grinch saying this, but we’ve got to cut down on the number of special clothing days (e.g., pajama day) that are happening in schools or daycares. All it does is create stress for me as a parent and I don’t get the sense that my kids actually enjoy these. Who is this for?

LLM corner

Some shameless self promotion: The latest episode of —dangerously-skip-permissions: How Penny Schiffer works. Penny is another technical product manager turned AI software developer who I think has really mastered creating with AI.

Dexter, Claude Code for researching stocks.

GenAI created ads outperform human created ads by 19%… unless they are disclosed as created by AI, in which case the performance goes down by 32% — Eric Seufert

The coming AI wildfire.

Dev Browser, a better tool for agents to view local webpages. I can’t wait to play with this one.

2025-12-17 19:55:16

By far the best poem to share with people who don't like poetry is Failing and Flying, by Jack Gilbert. I have never seen any other poem connect so much with so many people on first reading. Honestly the highest-value move right now is to stop reading this post and go read that poem.

I once heard Seamus Heaney at a recital and he read each poem twice – as in, he'd finish a poem and then immediately read it again. He said he was copying this off some other famous poet, presumably William Butler Yeats. It was weird but also truly a good experience – the first read situates you, big picture, and in the second read you hear the details.

When I was in high school I would memorize poems to the point where I now have probably 20 poems lodged in my brain for life. I no longer know how I did it, I have tried again since and largely failed to remember anything. Maybe the brain-plasticity stuff is real, or maybe I've just gotten lazy, my guess is the second.

I do think poem-memorization is an immensely valuable practice, it embeds a particular music into the language of your thoughts.

Probably unsurprisingly, highly rhyme-y poems are easier to memorize; perhaps less-obviously, having a clear progression and narrative in the poem also helps a lot. So e.g. Robert Frost's sonnets go down easy, and Milton's On His Blindness (extra fun if you do the voices), and some Carol Ann Duffy: all have strong rhymes and clear storylines.

But some of the most beloved poems, like Wild Geese, are hard to memorize because many of the lines could plausibly be flipped, which adds to the cognitive burden, and this is also a problem for some lovely structured rhyming poems, like Missing Dates.

I guess my point is that not every poem needs to be memorized, and if you're struggling with one poem maybe try another.

I am broadly of the opinion that most aesthetic experiences should be judged by their peaks not their averages, and that very few artists can consistently produce outstanding work.

E.g. I used to be disappointed when I saw a new book by a "favourite author", and inevitably discovered that I didn't like it half as much as the book I fell in love with them for; now I accept that the meaning of "favorite author" is just "person who has ever written one great book," not "person who consistently writes great books."

The same goes for restaurants: a great restaurant is a restaurant that has at least one exceptional dish, and I should not expect their other dishes to be exceptional, and some of their other dishes will be actively bad.

My point is, this all goes even more so for poetry. I do not enjoy most poems in most poetry books; even an exceptional poetry collection might only have a small handful of poems I love. But it's those poems that the book exists for, and possibly that we exist for.

(Unsurprisingly, my favorite single poetry collection is Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires. But I still don't like most of the poems in it, and some of the poems I love only in parts).

I hate the standard Poetry Reading Voice, it feels so fake to me. I wonder if there was one poet once who everyone else is imitating, someone whose natural reading voice had that slow insistent lilt to it, and they were super charismatic and incredible to listen to. And then everyone else tried to copy that voice but now they're facsimiling facsimiles, and it's like kids dressing up in their parent's clothes, it's bathetic.

Someone pointed out once that we think of poetry as niche and unpopular, but the most popular commercial music of the 1990s to 2010s was spoken word poetry (i.e. rap). I don't know, I think that's pretty great.