Michael P. Gibson

Monday

Michael P. Gibson

Is there a free-speech defense of Grok’s deepfakes?

There are scenes in blockbuster teen movies from the 1980s and 1990s that wouldn’t fly today. I think of Revenge of the Nerds, that classic raunchy coming-of-age tale about pocket protector-wearing geeks no woman would ever touch with a three-foot slide rule. You might recall the heroes of the story install hidden cameras in a sorority house in order to spy on naked, skinny, blonde cheerleaders. In triumph, the Byronic dirtbag yells, “We’ve got bush!” In our purportedly more enlightened age, Hollywood has forsaken making risqué teen comedies for vulgar imps; instead the vulgar imps have taken their raunch to the lawless internet. The powers of AI have multiplied their mischief. Their latest prank is to tell Grok, an AI chatbot on X.

grok

Saturday

Michael P. Gibson

Billionaires or bust: the world needs the super-rich more than ever

The socialist left was on parade in the final innings of 2025. The long cold shadow cast by “The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act,” a ballot initiative in California to be voted on in November, has led tech billionaires to take flight out of the state and land in the zero-income-tax paradises of Texas and Florida. The initiative seeks a one-time 5 percent tax on the worldwide net worth of anyone stupid enough to be a Californian with assets worth more than $1 billion as of January 1, 2026. That meant anyone in the three comma club had to hightail it out before Governor Gavin Newsom could bellow “Happy New Year.

old buff dudes bodies billionaires

Wednesday

Michael P. Gibson

3I, the interstellar object that’s baffling astronomers

Science began in the skies. Just after sunset, to be exact, on the evening of November 11, 1572 when a young Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, raised his eyes to the night sky. There, above his head, a star was shining brighter than all the rest – a new star that should not have been. Brahe thought he was mistaken, that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but others confirmed what he saw. And yet, according to the reigning theory, derived from Aristotle, there could be no change in the eternal heavens. Surely then this object could not be a star. It must be an anomaly in the upper atmosphere, closer to the Earth, within terrestrial realms. But Brahe got to work. Using trigonometry and observations, he found that the impossible had indeed occurred.

3I

Tuesday

Michael P. Gibson

A lack of national identity has killed off the Great American Novel

Is there hope for literature in America this century? The forecast looks grim. One walk through the literary fiction section at a bookstore is a testament to the art form’s cultural bankruptcy. Just about every other book on the new release table is a treatise on your racism masquerading as a tale of collective uplift. Fine, if you want to expiate your sins of privilege – but all in all, a snoozefest. Novels held a central place in America as a vital cultural force; novelists were worshipped as electrifying sages Same goes for most of the books on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The subjects of race, gender and oppression generally dominate.

Tuesday

Michael P. Gibson

How China is out-innovating the West

The world received a jolt in 2018 – and it wasn’t from a Silicon Valley whiz or a lab at MIT. It came from Shenzhen, China, where a lanky, unassuming biochemist named He Jiankui did the unthinkable. Using the newly discovered CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit, and asking no one’s permission, He edited the genes of Lulu and Nana, twin baby girls, so that both were born immune to HIV. The scientific establishment gasped, jaws dropped and the moralists clutched their pearls. “Monstrous!” the bioethicists cried. “I was just horrified,” said Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the CRISPR gene-editing technique.

Tuesday

Michael P. Gibson

What happened to the great American IPO dream?

There is a dark but funny one-act play called No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, that gloomy, chainsmoking, wall-eyed French existentialist. The play is about three characters trapped in a room from which they cannot escape. No flames, no pitchforks, no brimstone – it turns out the afterlife isn’t the fourth circle of Hell, but a dinner party you can’t leave. Round and round these characters go, each demanding what the others won’t give. In the end, the worst punishment isn’t torture. It’s just being stuck. “Hell,” goes the famous line, “is other people.” Well, mon Dieu, we now have a sequel.

IPO