The genius of LBJ, does Claude have feelings, our Caesarist moment, and more.
From around the web
1. Power bank
This week, we’re dusting the snow off our shoulders and talking about power: who has it, why, and what they’re doing with it. To kick off, I’m recommending Henrik Karlsson’s fantastic essay on Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ. Henrik shows how true political operators view power less through formal structures (offices, titles) and more as an asset to be extracted from countless small and often overlooked sources (favors, relationships) that can grow into massive leverage over time.
Since he sees the world always in terms of tools that let him bend people to his will, Johnson becomes a true connoisseur of leverage. He notices potential sources of power in places where I’d never think there was any. For example, he seems to realize, sometime in his twenties, that knowing how to get someone else a job gives you purchase over them. So, while still working as a teacher, he begins collecting jobs. When he quits a position, he does it in such a way that he can pass the job on to one of his friends. And when they quit, he makes sure the job goes to another person he wants to control—often by orchestrating so that the person who has the job quits at the worst possible moment for the employer, and the person Johnson wants to get the job comes in the same day with their CV and explains how they can take over and solve the problem.
2. Moral machine
Since it is 2026, the obvious next question: What about AI? Does it have power? Agency? Anthropic seems to think so (or at least worries that it might have feelings). Lux scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman liked Benj Edwards’ piece in Ars Technica examining Anthropic’s new 30,000-word “Claude Constitution.” The curious document treats Claude as a potentially conscious entity deserving moral consideration, and it is unclear whether the company’s move toward anthropomorphism reflects genuine philosophical uncertainty, strategic marketing, or both.
If you want a model to behave as though it has moral standing, it may help to publicly and consistently treat it like it does. And once you’ve publicly committed to that framing, changing it would have consequences. If Anthropic suddenly declared, “We’re confident Claude isn’t conscious; we just found the framing useful,” a Claude trained on that new context might behave differently. Once established, the framing becomes self-reinforcing.
3. Spectacle state
To more human concerns: Laurence found a fascinating new index that synthesizes multiple theoretical frameworks from comparative politics and political sociology to estimate authoritarian consolidation in the United States. The index characterizes the week of February 2 as a “Caesarist” moment for the country, where a government is ruling through spectacle rather than genuine consent. As analogues, it points to Taiwan and South Korea during those countries’ democratic transitions, and Argentina post-junta.
This is a dangerous moment precisely because it combines high authoritarian risk with low consolidation capacity, creating unpredictable escalation as the regime faces mounting resistance it cannot institutionally overcome.
4. Critical mass
Finally, statistical power! Lux’s David Yang shared a new study on Epstein-Barr. Almost everyone gets infected with EBV at some point. The big mystery is why some people never even notice they have it, while others get seriously ill. (At the worst end, EBV-related cancers kill 130,000–200,000 people each year.) Scientists have long suspected that differences in people’s genes partly explain why outcomes vary so much from person to person. But until now, studies trying to find these genetic links have been too small to get clear answers—which is why the researchers for this study found and validated a new method to study the genomes of a much larger group of people.
In 1964, Anthony Epstein, Yvonne Barr and Burt Achong observed actively replicating viral particles from Burkitt lymphoma, discovering the virus that now bears their names: the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV). EBV was subsequently recognized as the first known human oncogenic virus, the cause of infectious mononucleosis, and an agent in developing and exacerbating multiple autoimmune diseases. Despite these wide-ranging pathogenic roles, EBV infection is nearly ubiquitous, infecting >90% of adults worldwide, with most individuals remaining asymptomatic.
