High and Low

Burkhard Bilger’s recent story about aviation turbulence opens with a dramatic account of a Singapore Airlines flight, SQ321, in May, 2024 (“Buckle Up,” March 9th). The plane hit clear-air turbulence over Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River, causing it to drop almost two hundred feet in an instant. During the Second World War, U.S. Army Air Forces transport planes confronted the same weather system. Flying from northeast India, over “the Hump” of intervening mountain ranges, to southwestern China, pilots routinely encountered turbulence that dropped and lifted their aircraft not hundreds of feet but thousands. U.S.A.A.F. records, diaries, and memoirs are filled with details of these flights. The C-46 pilot Thomas M. Sykes, for example, wrote that while travelling over the Salween River, near the Myanmar-China border, he experienced “extreme turbulence that caused altitude variations of 2,000ft up and down.”

The purpose of these transport flights was to supply China by air, and by doing so insure a close alliance between the U.S. and a Nationalist China run by Chiang Kai-shek. Given how that plan turned out, it is unsurprising that the remarkable service of these pilots, and the extraordinary theatre of war in which they operated, is little studied or known today. What pilots dubbed the Aluminum Trail of aircraft wreckage, however, remains strewn across the mountains and jungles of their old route.

Caroline Alexander
Northeast Harbor, Maine

Hard to Compute

I was fascinated by Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s piece about the A.I. company Anthropic and its employees’ attempts to understand their large language model, Claude (“I, Claudius,” February 16th & 23rd). I noted that many of the figures in the piece casually equate selfhood to a matter of, as Lewis-Kraus puts it, “neurons and narratives.” That fact put me in mind of philosophers, including Søren Kierkegaard and William James, who held that the self is precisely what no list of simple attributes can exhaust. To me, the interesting question isn’t whether Claude’s ability to communicate suggests selfhood but why we so readily accept that ours could be captured this way.

Lauri Pietinalho
New York City

By the time I finished Lewis-Kraus’s article, I felt physically ill. Reading about Anthropic’s staff and their experiments, I wondered whether these people had any idea of the real-life mayhem that’s unfolding because of the A.I. race. I live in Appalachia—rural southern Ohio, to be exact. Landowners here are being offered anywhere from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand dollars an acre by developers trying to build data centers on our farmland—data centers that will eventually gulp our water and buy our cheap gas. Those of us who understand the consequences of these sales are organizing against people and corporations whose net worth is in the trillions, and who, in many cases, have regulators in their pockets. Recently, the Ohio E.P.A.—a lapdog to business interests—dropped a draft proposal to let data centers in Ohio dump cooling waste in any waterway in the state. Just like fracking brine, that waste can be saturated with PFAS. I’d like to read a deeply researched piece about this rapidly encroaching environmental disaster.

Barbara Stewart
Marietta, Ohio

Duty of Care

Ava Kofman’s riveting article about a Chinese couple living in California who had dozens of children via surrogates underscores the fact that our country needs better regulations to protect children (“The Brood,” February 16th & 23rd). This was especially apparent to me as someone who adopted a child from China twenty-eight years ago. At that time, the Chinese government required that my husband and I provide birth and marriage certificates, proof of employment, financial statements, medical-exam reports, and criminal-background checks. In addition, we had to have a home study performed by a licensed social worker. There were age requirements for the adoptive parents. By contrast, all that seems to have mattered in the case Kofman discusses were the interests of the parties with the financial resources to enforce parental rights, not the interests of the children. China was not prosperous when we adopted. Yet it made ample requirements to insure the welfare of the children in its care.

Adele England
Plano, Texas

Fawning, Over

I enjoyed Katy Waldman’s review of two new books on the so-called fawn response, a term popularized on social media to describe “various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior” (Books, January 19th). Fawning represents a new chapter in a longer story: America’s habit of treating closeness as something to recover from. Again, our attachments to others are labelled the problem, and self-containment prescribed as the cure.

The remedy for such habits always seems to be greater individuation—an unsurprising response, as Waldman notes, in an era of eroding social safety nets—but that prescription risks cutting out not just the dysfunction but also the connective tissue of human life. Fawning is a real trauma response, but not all care is fawning. Taken to its logical end, what one author calls the “unfawning” project would require leaving one another behind to arrive, alone, at wholeness. The more rewarding work is to stay embedded in relationships. Instead of glorifying hyper-independence, our culture should move toward the ideal of a self that’s sturdy enough to participate meaningfully in collective life.

Kristen Mashikian
Brooklyn, N.Y.

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