At time of writing, the Roberts Court is hearing Donald Trump’s preposterous challenge to birthright citizenship—a constitutional knot so neatly tied that not even the court that gave us Plessy could feign to find fault with it in 1896. Furthermore, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak dropped a major report with the New York Times, exposing the internal reasoning, or lack thereof, that ultimately led to the modern “shadow docket.” This strategy has been used to grant President Trump numerous victories in his second term while sidestepping the transparency, deliberation, and jurisdictional sequence the court has historically preferred. And make no mistake: it is a strategy. Along with originalism and the major questions doctrine, the Roberts Court has given itself a raft of new or enhanced tools with which to empower conservatives and thwart liberals. Such developments reveal a remarkably rapid decay undermining the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Given the dangerous disregard for the Constitution this court has demonstrated, it’s worth taking a deeper look at the highest court in the land: what it is, and what it could be. 

The Supreme Court has always been tricky. Its principal role in our republic—judicial review, which gives it the power to overturn acts of Congress—is not enumerated in the Constitution. Neither is its size nor the responsibilities of its justices, both of which have changed much over the centuries—from one chief justice and five associates, splitting their time riding circuit across their new country then returning to drafty, borrowed chambers in Philadelphia as the Supreme Court, to nine full-time justices serving exclusively in their handsomely appointed neoclassical temple in Washington. Most of its features have evolved or accreted over time, and unlike the expansive language of Article II that establishes an independent executive, the Constitution explicitly places the courts almost entirely under the statutory authority of Congress.

Authority which Congress has used. Many times. Throughout our history, Congress has wielded its power to discipline, manipulate, and sculpt the Court, sometimes creatively. In the very case that established the power of judicial review, the outgoing Federalist Congress decided to pack dozens of newly formed lower courts with judges hostile to the incoming Democratic-Republican majority and the new president, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, through his Secretary of State James Madison, tried to block the appointments with a procedural trick, which eventually produced Marbury v. Madison. 

Then consider when, furious with Andrew Johnson’s opposition to Reconstruction in 1866, the Radical Republican Congress passed a law abolishing each Supreme Court seat after it fell vacant. The effect was that Johnson, for all the damage he did do, never appointed a Supreme Court justice, and the bench fell to seven. When Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency in 1868, Congress expanded the court back to nine, where it has remained since.

And in the wake of multiple, generationally mendacious rulings, the time has come for Congress to take up its chisel and sculpt the court again. It cannot continue in its current form. From Citizens United to the Dobbs decision, from the anti-democratic confession that is Trump v. United States to the act of merely hearing a challenge to birthright citizenship, the Roberts Court has demonstrated an unmistakable and unprecedented preference for oligarchy and concentrating power in the person of the president. They have invented new standards, twisted old ones beyond recognition, played Judas with our Constitution, and Thrasymachus with our republic. These rulings are not criminal. But they are politically delegitimizing. Approval ratings (not something the court has often found itself worried about) are at historic lows in recent years, deeply polarized, and thermostatic.

This is a solvable problem, but a problem perpetuated by one party will not find a solution bursting with bipartisan collegiality. The Roberts Court is the final product of a partisan industry dedicated to the anti-democratic transformation of American society, and all its conservative justices are products of that pipeline. It’s a problem caused by conservatives and conservatives are, for now, quite happy with it. So, it will fall to Democrats to fix it. 

The most common proposal is to tie the number of justices to the number of circuit courts, which was the norm until 1869, and would give the next Democratic trifecta a Supreme Court of thirteen justices to rebalance. This is a measured response. Judicious, even. But not sufficient. Court capture has proven a reliable strategy for permanently locking the partisan preferences of a minority into our constitutional order. While it would take generations to achieve again, simple court expansion doesn’t alter these incentives. It simply moves the line of scrimmage further from the goalposts.

No. I would like to propose something entirely different. 

Let’s break up the Supreme Court. 

This is a two-part proposal, and the justifications for each part are obvious in isolation, but their real potential is only unlocked when used in tandem. And while the flashier part is breaking the power of the Supreme Court, that’s actually second in the order of operations. Before we can break up the Supreme Court, we need to fix the lower courts.

Because even if it’s less sexy, and even though the highest court in the land enjoys more power than ever in its history, the state of federal justice in general has seldom been sadder. Lower courts are chronically overburdened and underfunded. Taking a case to trial often takes years, turning defendants' lives into a precarious waiting game—one they may well spend in pretrial detention, unable to work, unable to meaningfully live. This surely contributes to the appalling fact that over 90% of guilty verdicts result from plea deals, which are rife with prosecutorial gamesmanship, perpetrator-seeking, and horse trading. It never fails to amaze that these conditions don’t in themselves constitute an unconscionable violation of the Sixth Amendment. 

This issue is old. But unlike the political difficulties of the Supreme Court, it’s not especially partisan. The fundamental problems our federal judiciary faces are capacity and resources. At almost every stage, Congress has been slow to expand the courts of appeals and glacial at increasing their budget. Even as the Warren Court expanded defendants’ rights and Nixon launched the Drug War, as the need for trials, attorneys, judges, and resources swelled, Congress was slow to act. The last time a new court of appeals was added was 1981, when the population was roughly 30% smaller than today. There isn’t enough money and there aren’t enough courts and at no time on record has there ever been enough of either.

As for the Supreme Court, setting aside the extent to which it is thoroughly captured, it has also accumulated too much power. Judicial review has grown into something more akin to an exclusive, proprietary claim over constitutional interpretation such that legislative agendas with clear democratic mandates can be enacted, only to be put down by our self-appointed national council of wizards. As recent developments with the shadow docket prove, they no longer even feel the need to justify themselves to posterity. Laws, regulations, and government programs with majority support enacted decades ago can be undone in near total silence, with no more than a sparse paragraph announcing the decision. Our sclerotic Congress has ceded to this court a crippled but dangerously anti-democratic legislative power. This too is not new. But with thorough Republican capture locked in for a generation and with the shameless partisanship (and in a couple of cases, open corruption) of their justices, it’s simply more obvious.

A sweeping overhaul of the federal courts is necessary, one that addresses both of these travesties simultaneously. And because the framers subordinated the courts so completely to Congress, this can be done without the need for any amendment, with nothing but a simple majority in both chambers and the president’s pen.

It’s worth reiterating that everything here is well within the statutory power the Constitution grants to Congress and, in fact, the text of Article III establishing the courts is so light, it’s worth quoting sections 1 and 2 in full:

Article III, Section 1

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

Article III, Section 2

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;--between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States;--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment; shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.

Essentially, anything except the existence of a Supreme Court, its unique original jurisdictions, its final appellate jurisdiction, and the general principle that federal judges serve lifetime appointments, is entirely at the discretion of Congress. With this power and the state of the justice system at large in mind, let’s reshape the Supreme Court for the 21st century:

It begins with the courts of appeal. Given that we have never achieved adequate court capacity, we should stop adding one or two a generation, and double them immediately—from thirteen to twenty-six. The number of district courts beneath them should be increased proportionally. Also, the budgetary requirements to reasonably meet the constitutional guarantees of the Sixth Amendment should be assessed and rolled up into the annual budget. This would likely be necessary to avoid the judicial equivalent of the problem of adding just one more lane to a highway, but that’s a different essay entirely. For now, we’ll focus on the structure of the courts themselves.

Let’s say the district courts are doubled, like the courts of appeal. And for the sake of argument, let’s say the number of district and appellate judgeships also doubles with the total number of courts. We’ll also ignore the Federal Claims and International Trade courts for this exercise, to keep it neat. 

That gives us twenty-six circuits, 188 districts, and 1,730 Article III judgeships, greatly expanding the capacity of our federal justice system for case throughput, faster verdicts, and the resolution of appeals. Plea bargains instantly become less tempting, and prosecutorial and law enforcement conduct are introduced to greater judicial scrutiny. If paired with budget reforms, it can also rebalance the power between prosecutors and defense attorneys.

If that were all these reforms could accomplish, they would be well worth pursuing in a justice system as strained as ours. But if we take the second step and break up the Supreme Court, they also unlock the potential for a powerful reform to judicial review.

Since January 2025, the two greatest bulwarks against the second Trump presidency have been lower court judges and the American tradition of jury trials. Breaking up the Supreme Court combines both to create an entirely new vision for Article III—one that embodies our traditions of justice and democracy far better than the First Street mystery cult and, combined with dramatic court expansion, will give American justice a level of accountability, legitimacy, and scale it has never known.

When I say “break up the Supreme Court,” I mean that we should establish judicial review by sortition. A Supreme Court empaneled with a random draw from the entire federal judiciary. A jury of judges.

There are currently nine justices on the bench. Going forward, each will be assigned to one of the twenty-six courts of appeal. This will be their primary role going forward. For each case referred to the Supreme Court, a bench of nine judges drawn at random from the full federal judiciary will be empaneled to hear and decide the case. After deciding the case, they will return to their respective benches until called upon again. Supreme Court Justice is now a temporary role.

The appeal here is ancient. Sortition, or lottery, as a means of making decisions (including conducting democracy) is the tradition from which our jury trials emerge, and stretches back at least as far as Athens. Its chief virtues are that it maximizes the wisdom of the crowd–which is one of the chief instrumental arguments for democracy itself–and it leverages the incorruptibility of chance, which is the observation that you cannot bribe an official who does not know they will be in position to be bribed. In short, a decision made by a random selection from the larger body of decision makers has a higher chance of better outcomes than one than one made by a fixed group of specialists, and it’s difficult for billionaires to know which judges need a lavish yacht cruise to convince them of the merits of ruling a certain way on certain cases if the judges themselves don’t know which cases they’ll be ruling on.

This method of “judgeship by jury” gives the Supreme Court a more composite character, ensuring that the broadest possible cross section of jurisprudence is represented. It removes the prestige and power that have accrued to our permanent justices. It recenters judicial review as a historical process shaped by the full sweep of the judiciary, rather than the fixed preferences of a permanent bench. It is nonpartisan, at least insofar as it grants no party any more power to reshape the composition of the judiciary than the electorate does. And when drawing from the expanded judiciary we’ve already established, it pulls from a very deep roster of expertise and experience, and as wide a range of diversity of thought as our duly elected representatives are willing to confirm.

In my view, this plan in its entirety should be the first order of business for any future Democratic trifecta. The Roberts Court, supine and submissive as it is to its Caesar of choice, will suddenly rediscover its constitutional role again the moment the White House changes the color of the drapes. Especially if the new Congress arrives with a demonstrable interest in court reform. As they did with the major questions doctrine and the shadow docket under Obama, they’ll invent new ways to fight their partisan battles if necessary, because partisan warriors are what they are. And after keeping the patient embers of corruption smoldering through another Democratic administration, they’ll simply resume their march toward tyranny and oligarchy. They will never stop. Enough. Break their power and begin an immediate transition to a better system of both justice and judicial review. It will take time to confirm so many new judges, so we should start right away. The new system will begin better than we’ve ever known and only improve with time, while the old, broken one will trouble us no more.

Featured image is Circuit judge Hal W. Adams riding mule to avoid high water

Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, ​“The Hidden Cost of AI Art.”​

As Sanderson explains, early in his address: “The surge of large language models and generative AI raises questions that are fascinating, and even if I dislike how the movement is going in relation to writing and art, I want to learn from the experience of what’s happening.”

Sanderson makes it clear that he disapproves of AI-generated art (“my stomach turns”), but he wants to understand better why this is the case. To do so, he begins considering and then ultimately dismissing a series of common objections:

• Does he dislike AI art because of the economic and environmental impacts? “Well, those do concern me, but if I’m answering honestly, I would still have a problem with it even if AI were not so resource hungry.”
• Does he dislike AI art because it’s trained on the work of existing artists? “ Well, I don’t like that. But even if it were trained using no copyrighted work, I’d still be concerned.”
• Does he just hate the idea of a machine replacing a person? Sanderson references the folk tale of John Henry attempting to beat a steam drill in a tunnel-digging competition that culminates in Henry’s death. “We respect him, but as a society we chose the steam drill. And I would too…The truth is, I’m more than happy to have steam engines drilling tunnels for me to drive through.”

So what is it?

Sanderson ultimately lands on a more personal reason. Talking about his struggles with his first (failed) book manuscripts, he identifies the key value of art: it changes the artist who attempts it. As he elaborates:

“Maybe someday the language models will be able to write books better than I can. But here’s the thing: Using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point, because it looks at art only as a product. Why did I write [my first manuscript]?… It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, ‘I did it. I did it.’”

As a writer myself, I’ve also been thinking about this question recently. I like Sanderson’s take, but I’ve been developing one of my own. I understand art to be an act of deep human communication, in which the artist uses a tangible medium, such as a page of prose or a painted canvas, to transmit a complex internal cognitive state from their brain to that of their audience.

It’s telepathy. And it’s one of the most beautiful and human things we do.

This makes the idea of reading a book written by a language model, or watching a film generated by a prompt, intrinsically absurd, if not anti-human. It’s the heroin needle providing a quixotic simulation of love.

What really struck me about Sanderson’s talk, however, was his conclusion. If art is deeply human, he argues, then it’s up to us to define it. “That’s the great thing about art – we define it, and we give it meaning,” he says. “The machines can spit out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. They can pile them to the pillars of heaven itself. But all we have to do is say ‘no.’”

I’ve noticed a trend in recent AI commentary toward a certain nihilistic passivity. You probably know what I’m talking about – the now popular style of essay in which the author, with a sort of worldly weariness, lays out some grim scenario in which AI destroys something sacred, and then sort of just leaves it there, like a cat dropping a dead bird on the doorstep.

I’m getting tired of this meekness.

Sanderson reminds us that we have agency. In the areas that matter most, it’s us, not the whims of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei, that determine how we shape our existence. All we have to do is say “no.”

Correction:

In last week’s AI Reality Check episode of my podcast, I said the following:

“If you go back and look at the release notes for Anthropic’s earlier, less powerful opus 4.6 LLM, they say the following: their researchers used Opus to find, quote, ‘over 500 exploitable zero-day vulnerabilities, some of which are decades old.’ And let’s stop for a moment because that note, which was hidden in the system card for opus 4.6, is almost word for word what anthropic said about Mythos.”

Some of this wording was sloppy, so I want to clarify it here. I was referring to this report on Opus 4.6, which Anthropic published the same day it was released. This is not technically the system card for Opus 4.6, but it is accurately described as release notes (or perhaps supplementary release notes).

This report said: “Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.” In another place, it said: “So far, we’ve found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities.” Both the title of the report and the conclusion refer to these vulnerabilities as “0-day.”

The specific quote I provided, however, does not appear in the report. It’s actually a summary of the report from this tweet. In my opinion, the summary is accurate, but the way I worded the above implies that it was actually found in the report, which it was not.

Thank you to the AI researcher who pointed out these issues. I appreciate corrections! You can always send concerns or notes to podcast@calnewport.com.

The post Brandon Sanderson vs. AI Art appeared first on Cal Newport.

We’ve spent the last six years in Framework proving that it’s possible to build high-performance, thin, light computers that last longer and respect your rights through repairability, upgradeability, and customization. We’re happy to see repair rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception, with even Apple of all companies embracing it on their latest notebook. I built this company specifically to reset and fix a broken industry. So, mission accomplished? Not quite. There is a very real scenario in which personal computing as we know it is dead.

Memory, storage, silicon, and everything related to it is being consumed at unprecedented levels in a “winner takes all” race to an AI-first world in which access to compute is metered by the token. It’s clear that the fundamentals of computing and electronics have changed. The computer in the cloud has increasingly greater economic output than the computer in the hand. This means that to the extent that there are constraints on the supply that feeds both, the cloud will win every time. We see this in the rapidly rising costs of silicon and all of the devices that depend on it, the shift from ownership to subscription, and the rise of closed black boxes over an open ecosystem. What does this all mean? The industry is asking you to own nothing and be happy. Computers are no longer a bicycle for the mind. They are becoming the self-driving car that takes you directly to the destination.

You might be reading all of this and thinking, is this a farewell letter to personal computing? Is this the end of Framework? No, this is a manifesto. No matter how inevitable the AI-takes-all scenario may sound, as long as there is a person in the world who still wants to own their means of computation, we will be here to build the hardware that enables it. That means computers that you can own at the deepest level and do what you want with, whether that is choosing your OS, modifying your hardware, or even just keeping your data and computation local rather than leased from the cloud. We won’t get there all at once, but we will always be fighting for a future where you can own everything and be free.

Every step we take and every product we ship serves that goal. With that, we’re happy to announce that we have our next live launch event coming on April 21st at 10:30am PT in San Francisco. During the event, we’ll be streaming our announcements live to the Framework YouTube channel. You can subscribe and get notified when the stream goes live. We can’t wait for you to see what we’ve been working on.

These products are for you, so we’re opening a batch of invitations to the Framework Community so you can meet the team and get hands on with our newest products. Having community members at our event last year was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait for you to join us alongside press and partners. If you’re a Framework fan and are in the San Francisco area (or are able to handle your own travel to us), you can apply to attend in this sign-up form. We expect we’ll see a lot more interest than we have available seats in our venue, so don’t wait to get your application in.

We have one other update for you ahead of our launch event, which is that our products are now available to ship to four additional countries: New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and Singapore. You can start ordering everything we have in-stock now, though you may want to wait until the 21st to see what we’re announcing!
For a hint at what we’ll be announcing, head to the event page.

Perhaps you’ve heard of looksmaxxing, the online trend in which young men strive to become supposedly attractive, often through self-harm. Thanks to Clavicular, a young, fringe manosphere influencer, this term—and others modeled after it—has proliferated. You can be a looksmaxxer by soft maxxing (skin care or exercise) or by hard maxxing (plastic surgery or self-mutilation). Looksmaxxers often find themselves jester-maxxing, that is, using humor to gain the attention of women.

Maxxing can be specialized, too, and even modest, maximally speaking. A dude might be personality-maxxing instead of jester-maxxing. Less incel-maxxing versions might entail health-maxxing—what people called wellness approximately 10 minutes ago. Want your gut to be more regular? That’s fiber-maxxing. Want to build bulk? You’re protein-maxxing. Some so-called tradfem women want to bear more children through fertility-maxxing—a process our culture once understood as getting pregnant again. Maxxing goes the other way too, maximizing harm instead of benefit: Maybe you’ve got a drug habit, in which case you might be pill-maxxing. Anorexia, for some, is now starve-maxxing.

Everything worth doing seems to be worth maxxing. Want to use technology less and pursue human connections more? That’s friction-maxxing. What about relaxing or zoning out? You’re nothing-maxxing. Reading is book-maxxing. Going to bed is sleep-maxxing. Buying a pair of denim shorts for the welcome spring is probably jorts-maxxing. Think you’re reading an article right now? Nah, bruh, you’re Atlantic-maxxing.

The trend is irritating and stupid, but it also betrays a truth: The online life is an extremist one, and the result is fatigue-maxxing.

As with any trend, but especially in the depths of YouTube, Reddit, 4chan, Discord, Kik, or any of the other very online places, maxxing is overblown. Not many people are saying any of these things—at least not in large numbers. Instead, they are consuming protein, getting pregnant, and even reading books.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Looksmaxxing’ reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men]

But an idea can become potent through its rapid depiction in culture—including in articles such as this one, which maxes maxxing even as it attempts to minimize it, somewhat. Online, our odd verbal tics—“Do better,” the figurative literally, “I can’t”/“I’m dead,” “THIS”—can seem like a mania. News about a mania can help make it a reality.

Writing at The New York Times, Nitsuh Abebe argues that -maxxing as a suffix is the love child of two cursed parents: the idea of optimizing a resource, which he attributes to video gaming, and incel culture, where he locates the origin of looksmaxxing specifically.

These two origins—gaming and incel culture—make maxxing seem perverse and fringe. Critic-maxxers hope Clavicular is, as my colleague Will Gottsegen put it, a curiosity—in other words, a freak. But a freak who might be dangerous, because his words and actions could spread. Perhaps they already have: Gottsegen’s concerns, for example, were affirmed by the hateful, violent, and anti-Semitic abuse he received from Clavicular acolytes after requesting an interview with the looksmaxxer in chief.

This version of online extremism’s story is a comforting one. A bad actor becomes radicalized online by other, prior bad actors, who then spread their particular gospel of badness further, online.

Radicalization really does work this way, sometimes. Colleen LaRose, a.k.a. Jihad Jane, became immersed in jihadist recruitment forums online, joined an al-Qaeda cell in Ireland, and became entrenched in a homicidal conspiracy. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American al-Qaeda propagandist, spread Muslim extremism among the English-speaking online world. Dylann Roof internalized white-supremacist messages from websites surfaced by search algorithms, and later carried out the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, was inspired by YouTube. So were Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques in 2019 after absorbing far-right ideologies from online forums such as 4chan, and Jake Angeli, the “QAnon Shaman” known for his shirtless, head-dressed appearance during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Though distressing, these well-known individual extremists offer consolation for aspiring normals, because they represent a perversion of norms, even while also threatening to erode those norms. So do categories of softer radicalism unattached to specific figureheads: “grindset” work extremists, manosphere red-pillers, disinformation-addled elder Facebookers, or “HODL” investment perverts. Life online appears to be neatly divisible, and indeed divided, into freaks on the one hand and, on the other, reasonable people such as yourself.

It is not. Online life is extremist in deep and broad ways. The intensity of internet life, even under ordinary circumstances, pushes us toward extremes on any topic—and every topic. No idea, belief, purchase, product, or event can be ordinary or innocuous. Everything must be done with absolutism, and those extremes must be performed in public, online.

When an influencer announces that she is “obsessed” with a makeup palette, slop bowl, or imported low-cost garment, her verbal tic spreads. Suddenly ordinary people also become “obsessed” with cleansers. They discover peptides they “can’t live without.” Mild enthusiasm doesn’t travel online. Intensity does. The algorithm, and the economy that supports it, first escalates speech that overstates the emotions that underlie it. As the speech spreads, the feeling follows. People truly come to believe that they cannot live without a particular peptide or a palette.

Over time, everything becomes either life-changing or irrelevant. Moderate positions can certainly be held, but only in the ordinary life one leads quietly and calmly offline—insofar as living offline is even possible anymore.

Fans no longer simply like a television show, film, comic book, author, quick-service restaurant, or any other cultural product. Instead, their enjoyment has become ramped up to a level formerly reserved for unhinged, extremist fandoms, such as Trekkies and Beanie Baby collectors. Fans feel the need to defend a work’s true meaning. They attack deviations from agreed-upon “canon.” They cease to interpret but instead draw lines in the sand. For every cultural good, identity has become fused with the object of interest, turning previously normal people leading unremarkable lives into Steak ’n Shake beef-tallow purists, Harry Potter moralists, or cast-iron-pan-cleaning radicals.

[Charlie Warzel: This is what it looks like when nothing matters]

On Facebook or Nextdoor, a missing package can never represent a simple misfortune or misunderstanding; it must instead become urban decay or a racist incursion. A loud car heard blocks or miles away represents social breakdown. A dog let off the leash becomes indicative of moral rot. An opinion offered offhand suggests a secret wickedness that must be exorcised. Platforms reward escalation with attention, and the audience also often responds. And so everyday life becomes overinterpreted, as local forums become symbolic battlegrounds.

You no longer buy or use or encounter goods, services, or events, but endure them with your whole person: I am a Moleskine journaler; I am a Stanley-cup commuter; I am a barefoot-shoe jogger. Advice or even just notions—only check email after noon; never do 10 reps of crunches—solidify into absolutism or vanish.

The speed, urgency, and constancy of online life amplifies extremism because posting, replying, and generally participating in the discourse is its own virtue enrobing all the rest, an internet-maxxing to rule all the others. Liking became fixation, watching became safeguarding, asking turned to prosecution, trying devolved to optimizing, noticing twisted into diagnosis.

Maxxing declares this state of affairs honestly. Finally, we can shed the pretense that internet life is reasonable, level-headed, or healthy. The whole internet is a machine for extremist thought, belief, and action. Maxxing could amount to its endgame—the final victory of full-throated extremism of any form and kind. But immoderacy online always ratchets up. Eventually, and probably soon, the max-maxxers will seem temperate in hindsight.

On Sunday, April 15, 1990, Americans got their first look at a daring new experiment in television—a sketch-comedy show intended to pose a direct challenge to NBC’s long-running Saturday Night Live. In Living Color was the brainchild of Keenen Ivory Wayans. He was the head writer and star, supported by four of his brothers and the rest of a cast—and dance troupe—made up almost entirely of people of color. Americans had never seen anything like it before. And they loved it. I sure did.

I was 10 years old, sitting wide-eyed beside my brother in our family’s South Jersey living room. It felt like someone had kicked open the door to a party I hadn’t even known I was waiting to be invited to. I’d seen Black faces on TV before, but rarely had I seen so many, all at once, being this funny, this free, this in control. In Living Color didn’t just make me laugh, it reflected the rhythm of the barbershops, family reunions, and cookouts I knew so well.

That wasn’t an accident. It was the product of a deliberate strategy set in motion when Barry Diller launched the Fox network in 1986 with a mission to disrupt the television status quo. Back then, the Big Three—ABC, CBS, and NBC—offered a steady stream of safe, interchangeable programming. As the scrappy new contender, Fox had to break the mold. Diller, along with the programming chief, Garth Ancier, set out to build a network that was alternative by design and saw being different as a virtue, not a risk.

The breakthrough, Diller told me, came with a script for a show pointedly titled Not the Cosbys—a reaction to the wholesome, top-rated sitcom The Cosby Show. That script became Married … With Children, that gleefully subversive sitcom that set the tone for everything that followed. “It was as alternative as you could get in terms of what the American networks were offering to viewers,” Diller explained. “Once we knew we were an alternative and that we had to be edgy, it dictated almost every decision we made.”

That ethos produced groundbreaking successes—The Simpsons, Cops, and a slate of other shows that challenged everything about what network television could be. But nowhere did it shine brighter than in the emergence of In Living Color and, soon after, Martin, two shows that would help transform Fox into an unlikely powerhouse of Black cultural creativity. It wasn’t a plan; it was a by-product of being open to voices, visions, and brilliance that the legacy networks too often ignored. “It made Fox the No. 1 network,” Diller noted.

What most of America didn’t realize at the time was that they were witnessing the dawn of a new era in entertainment, one where Black artists were flourishing because of, rather than in spite of, their Blackness.

In the months leading up to In Living Color’s debut, Keenen Ivory Wayans and the cast had been grinding, fine-tuning sketches without knowing which would make the cut. Fox, meanwhile, was on edge—eager for a hit but wary of just how much ground this groundbreaking show might actually break. Their fears proved unfounded. The premiere drew a staggering 23 million viewers—an astronomical number for a fledgling network that wasn’t even airing programming seven days a week.

Fox slotted In Living Color right after its two biggest comedies, The Simpsons and Married … With Children, but by then, the show was already a hot topic. The network had dragged its feet so long on airing the pilot that bootleg copies started circulating within the industry—and beyond. In New York City, street vendors were selling tapes of the unaired episode months before its official debut. One of those copies found its way to the Details magazine writer Martha Frankel, who wrote a rave review questioning why Fox was holding it back. The next day, Fox executives scrambled and finally green-lighted eight episodes.

A closer look at the sketches in the pilot demonstrates just how far Keenen was willing to go to upend norms and rattle people—and just how subversive his vision was. Keenen was eager to take down whoever he felt would get a laugh. “What was cool about those guys is that they’d mock the heroes of their community, which is a real threading of the needle,” Les Firestein, a co–head writer of the show, said of Keenen and his younger brother Damon. “Having the ability to make fun of yourselves as a culture is a show of great strength. One of the things that was seminal about In Living Color was that Black people enjoyed laughing at Black people. That was the seismic change. You had an entire culture getting to the point where they said we’re strong enough that we can laugh at the more ridiculous parts of our own culture.” That alone was new ground for Black comedy on television, which hadn’t been ready 13 years earlier for the strange, rebellious vision of Richard Pryor on The Richard Pryor Show.

One of the first things the audience sees in the In Living Color pilot is Keenen stepping onto the stage, introducing his cast—but, in true form, he doesn’t play it straight. “I’ll tell you what I’m most proud of,” he says, locking eyes with the camera. “Unlike other shows, I’ve got nothing but qualified Black people backstage making decisions.”

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With perfect timing, he swings open the door to the writers’ room—only for a swarm of panicked white writers to scurry out. Keenen, deadpan, assures the audience they’re just the cleaning staff. He then gestures toward a bewildered Black woman holding a mop. “And this,” he says with a grin, “is our head writer.” The bit lands perfectly—sharp, subversive, and hilarious. Then, without missing a beat, Keenen moves on and introduces the cast: “We went nationwide to find the most talented people in the country,” Keenen announces with a straight face—before rattling off a lineup that sounds more like a family roll call than a casting list. “Damon Wayans, Kim Wayans, Crystal Wayans, T. J. Wayans, Toney Wayans, Tommy Wayans …” The message is clear—and hilariously ironic. Many cast members would later (half) joke that the surest way to get on the show and thrive was to have “Wayans” on your birth certificate.

Keenen brags about how integrated the show is—and then opens a door that is labeled White Cast Members Only, behind which Jim Carrey and Kelly Coffield are shining shoes and ironing clothes while grinning and singing “Camptown Ladies.”

“Oh, those people,” Keenen says. “Always singing, always happy.”

From there, the pilot goes on to directly lampoon a Black hero: The first sketch, “Love Connection,” features Carrey as the ever-smarmy Chuck Woolery, while Keenen steps in as Mike Tyson, paired with Kim Coles as his new wife, Robin Givens. Keenen leans into the broad caricature—giving Tyson the signature lisp and playing him as a clueless, sexist ogre. From the jump, the show made its stance clear: No one was off-limits.

That particular Tyson impression became more common, but in 1990, Mike was still young, ferocious, and not yet a go-to punch line. (Remember, this was some 20 years before Tyson made fun of himself in The Hangover.) He had just been knocked out by Buster Douglas in Japan two months before the episode aired—though the sketch had been written before that stunning defeat. It didn’t take long for Keenen to learn that Tyson wasn’t amused. One night at a club, Mike spotted him and stormed over.  

“That was the scariest moment of my life,” Keenen recalled. “All I feel is this paw land on my shoulder. I turn around and it’s the heavyweight champion of the world. He stepped to me. He goes, ‘What? I kill your mother or something?’”

Tyson clearly didn’t like the impression. Months later, Keenen said he ran into Tyson again, and he was more relaxed. “He was actually really cool,” Keenen said. “He was like, ‘Yo, I was just going through some things. You do your thing.’”

The show never shied away from making fun of Black culture, as seen in the recurring sketch “Great Moments in Black History.” One of the most memorable bits claimed that a Black man had “invented” self-serve gas stations. The punch line? Cast member Tony Riley playing an apathetic gas-station attendant who yells at a customer, “Get it your damn self!”

Audiences loved it. The studio crowd for In Living Color’s pilot exceeded even Keenen’s wildest expectations. “Black audiences don’t just laugh at stuff, we stomp our feet, we high-five,” said Paul Miller, the show’s primary director. “People were literally running up and down the aisles during the taping, high-fiving each other. One of the executives turned to me and said, ‘Did you pay these guys to do that?’” Kevin Bright, a supervising producer in the first season who later co-created Friends, had never seen anything like it. “At Friends, I’d never seen a first taping of anything where the audience was that crazy,” Bright told me. “They were on fire.”

For Larry Wilmore, a writer on the show’s first three seasons who went on to co-create The Bernie Mac Show and produce The Office and Black-ish, working on In Living Color often felt “surreal.”

“In those days, if you worked on In Living Color, people went crazy,” Wilmore told me. “They would say, ‘So what do you do?’ I go, ‘Oh, I write for television.’ ‘Oh, really?’ They didn’t seem that impressed. ‘Well, what shows do you write for?’ ‘I write for In Living Color.’ And they go, ‘In Living Color! Oh my God!’ The energy they had for that show, it was so interesting. And I think because we were pushing boundaries at that time that hadn’t really been pushed before, especially in race and culture. And people were so excited to see that on their television.”

Those who had devoted their lives to making the show had other reasons to be excited. Keenen recalls having moved to L.A. with Hollywood dreams—only to discover that the industry expected young Black men to only play thugs or pimps. Even worse was when they wouldn’t get those parts because they were told they sounded too educated.

“I’m from a family of 10 in the projects, and I find out I’m not ‘Black enough,’” Keenen said.

In the summer of 1978, Keenen stood in line for his shot at a five-minute set at the Improv in Los Angeles. He met the only other Black guy there, Robert Townsend, and the two became inseparable. (Townsend would go on to become an accomplished comedian, actor, and the director of legendary comedy specials such as Eddie Murphy Raw.) Keenen bombed his first set, but it didn’t matter. “I bombed terribly. It was an out-of-body experience,” he said. “Still, I was looking at myself like, You’re doing it.”

Keenen studied other comics closely, analyzing how they wrote jokes. “Even as a young comedian, Keenen was kind of a master craftsman. He knew instinctively how to set up a punch, deliver the joke, rewrite the structure, make it funnier.” Those were skills that would serve him well with In Living Color 12 years later.

But when Keenen came home from Tuskegee in his second year to tell his parents he was dropping out to pursue comedy instead of engineering, they didn’t understand. Marlon, still in elementary school, was there to witness the moment. “My mother cursed Keenen out,” Marlon told me. “My mother said, ‘Boy, a stand-up comedian? I known you your whole life and you ain’t never said nothing funny. This shit is the funniest thing you ever said! You’re going to be a stand-up comedian? Let me tell you something, boy. You better go out there and get your engineer’s degree and a job with some benefits!” Keenen knew there was very little chance they would understand. “I might as well have said I was going to smoke crack,” he said. “But I knew deep in myself what I wanted to be. I knew I was going to do it.”

His biggest break came when he landed a spot on The Tonight Show in 1983. By then, he was five years into his stand-up career—seasoned, confident. He told a joke about his older brother, Dwayne, who, as Keenen put it, finds racism in everything. “He’s like, ‘The white man don’t want to see you make it! They don’t want to see you get ahead. They got a conspiracy out there!’ Does he think there’s some secret organization sitting around going, ‘Now, there are too many Black people making it in this country. They’re making too much progress. Now, let’s see … We got Malcolm X, we got Martin Luther King … Dwayne! He’s up for promotion at McDonald’s! Stop him!’” The crowd erupted. Then came the ultimate trophy—Carson called him over to the couch. They were headed to commercial, so there was no time for an interview, but as the show cut away, Carson’s voice could be heard: “That’s funny stuff.”

Keenen grew close with Eddie Murphy and even closer with Townsend. Along with Arsenio Hall and Paul Mooney, they formed what Mooney later called the Black Pack, a nod to Sinatra’s Rat Pack. When the time came, assembling the cast for In Living Color proved to be a challenge—even with Keenen’s siblings in the mix. Keenen saw SNL as a writer-driven show, but he wanted ILC to be performer-driven, where the writing would serve the cast. His plan was to build the show around his brother Damon and add the best talent he could find. “Damon was at a point comedically where he was the most brilliant guy on the planet,” Keenen said. “The way he thought, the way his point of view was completely different than mine or anybody else’s. He was really on the edge.”

“The Wayanses are kind of a comedy troupe in and of themselves,” Rob Edwards, a Black writer on the show who created “Great Moments in Black History,” told me. “They’d go out to dinner—they eat as a family all the time—and try to crack each other up.” The next day, they’d bring those stories to the writers’ room. “The writers would take as much of this down as humanly possible,” Edwards said. “They have incredible characters, timing, and a great sense of what’s funny.”

Keenen’s authority over the show was undisputed. He had strong ideas, and whether people saw him as confident and visionary or arrogant and dismissive, he commanded respect. He wasn’t a screamer or a tantrum thrower, but his presence was intimidating. He took input, but not dissent. “It was a dictatorship,” Keenen admitted.

And that dictatorship worked. Right before the premiere of Season 2, In Living Color won an Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series—beating The Arsenio Hall Show, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night With David Letterman. Keenen especially enjoyed besting SNL, which had unceremoniously dumped Damon. But Hollywood had no interest in rewarding the show beyond that—In Living Color never won another Emmy.

“Keenen is one of the true geniuses of sketch comedy,” says David Alan Grier. “Meaning, you do a scene, it’s all flat, and Keenen says, ‘If you pick up your pencil, look to the right and say the same joke, it’s gonna work.’ You trust him, you do it, and it kills. Most people don’t know comedy. They can’t fix it. You stumble on a great joke, you don’t know why it’s great. But Keenen had that ability. I’ve been acting over 30 years, there’s maybe two or three people like that.”

By the time Jamie Foxx joined in Season 3, the show had hit its stride. But breaking in wasn’t easy. “When I saw Damon walk in and Jim walk in, it was like fucking Jurassic Park,” Foxx recalled. “I was the eighth-funniest person in the room at any given time. I had to be quiet sometimes to learn my way.”

Black comedians had been honing their craft since the days of vaudeville, through the early days of television, and into the transformative decades of the 1960s and ’70s, despite segregation and institutional racism. Bert Williams, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy—these were artists who used humor to subvert the status quo and carve out space where there had previously been none.

By the 1990s, that legacy had taken root. And as Keenen Ivory Wayans assembled the cast of In Living Color, he sought talent outside the industry’s usual pipelines. “Minority talent is not in the system, and you have to go outside,” he told the press at the time. “We went beyond the Comedy Stores and Improvs, which are not showcase places for minorities.” He pulled in unknowns and rising stars—his brothers Damon, Shawn, and Marlon, alongside T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, Kim Coles, and Tommy Davidson. Jennifer Lopez danced as part of the “Fly Girls,” with Rosie Perez as choreographer. There was one white guy: a rubber-faced impressionist from Canada named Jim Carrey.

The show’s success kicked off what would become a cultural boom. I didn’t have the language then to describe what was happening, but I felt it—this rush of pride, this sense that we were finally being seen not just as characters on a screen, but as full, complex people. The ’90s were the first time I remember being able to flip through TV channels and see Blackness represented in a way that felt real and expansive: in Martin Lawrence’s outrageous antics, the aspirational brilliance of A Different World, Living Single’s confident cool, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s blend of humor and heart.

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Of course, tensions simmered behind the scenes. The Wayans family’s bold vision for In Living Color eventually collided with the instincts of Fox network executives, who found the show too raw, too provocative—especially in contrast to the pastel wholesomeness of NBC’s The Cosby Show. But the irreverence was the point. It was what made the show matter. And it was what drew comics including Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx into its orbit. Rock famously left—or was pushed out of—SNL after growing frustrated with the limited roles he was given. “SNL is a pretty white show,” he later said. “And In Living Color was just hip. The shit was hot.”

It was hot because Black creative power was being unleashed across every creative industry—television, yes, but also film, fashion, and music. “I think a lot of Black culture was finding its voice during that time,” Larry Wilmore told me. “If you talk about Black shows on television [before that], many of them were created and run by white people.” That shift—from being the subject of stories to being the storyteller—is what made the ’90s revolutionary.

I am a product of that revolution. I came of age watching Black characters who reminded me of people I knew, who were messy and hilarious and ambitious and flawed. They shaped how I saw the world and how I saw myself moving through it. I’m a journalist now, but I grew up loving comedy because it was one of the first places I saw truth telling as an art form. Jokes that punched up, that slipped past defenses, that revealed something deeper while still making you laugh.

The boom of Black comedy unfolded against a backdrop of real political change: the end of the Cold War, an economic boom, and shifting demographics that made America more diverse—and more reflective of voices that had long been kept on the margins. The decade also saw a resurgence of Black political consciousness, inspired by the civil-rights generation and fueled by modern injustices—the beating of Rodney King, rising incarceration rates. Black TV responded in kind. Shows tackled racism, sexism, and classism. Even sitcoms, cloaked in laugh tracks, were often sly Trojan horses for deeper truths.

The audience was changing too. More Black people were attending college and joining the middle class, which created demand for more nuanced portrayals. Before the ’90s, TV ratings among Black and white audiences were nearly identical. But by the decade’s end, Black viewers had more options—and made different choices. Seinfeld, while beloved by critics, never broke into the top 10 for Black households. This was more than a shift in taste. It was a cultural realignment. And through it all, the lineage of Black comedy stayed unbroken.

Jamie Foxx named himself in tribute to Redd Foxx, the comic who went from performing in nightclubs where he was the only Black person onstage to his role on the breakout hit Sanford & Son as Fred Sanford. Arsenio Hall gave Chris Rock his big break, which led him to SNL. Arsenio also mentored Will Smith, paving the way for The Fresh Prince—and shared a screen with Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. That movie featured John Amos, who’d starred in Good Times, and a then-unknown Samuel L. Jackson.

By 1992, even as the golden age of Black sitcoms was peaking, a struggling playwright in Atlanta named Tyler Perry put on his first play with $12,000 of his life savings. Three decades later, he would be a billionaire, having founded the largest Black-owned studio in the country.

When you compare American comedy in the 1920s of Redd Foxx’s childhood with American comedy in the 2020s, one thing is clear: Black comedians have had one hell of a century. Many of these comics were more than entertainers. They were cultural translators and civil-rights figures in their own right. They didn’t change the world by marching on Washington or facing down fire hoses, but because they climbed onstage night after night, often in rooms where few looked like them, and dared to be brilliant.

Without In Living Color, and Keenen Ivory Wayans’s vision for it, we may never have witnessed the rise of Damon Wayans, Jim Carrey, Tommy Davidson, Jamie Foxx, Kim Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, David Alan Grier—even Jennifer Lopez. Without them, there would not have been any “golden age” of Black comedy. The path that led to a Secretary of State Colin Powell or a President Barack Obama might have looked very different. And I don’t know that I’d be sitting here today, writing this essay.

This essay was adapted from Bennett’s new book, Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy From Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms.

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