I am the Standards Editor at Forbes. I run what we call the objective desk. It is not the newsroom. The newsroom writes the words. My desk sells the one thing wrapped around them, the objectivity itself, priced by the badge, because the word objective is the most expensive product in American life and the only one nobody is allowed to audit. You read this week that our top editor left after a firm privately wired him about $6 million. The firm builds the wealth-advisor rankings we publish. He admitted the money. He admitted he never disclosed it. The whole industry gasped, on the record, in our font. I framed his exit certificate. Not for the money. For the elegance. Let me correct the record. Forbes did not invent this desk. Every masthead in the country runs one. Mine is only the desk whose invoice got read out loud, by a stranger, after a sale, and a confession you can see is worth more to me than ten you cannot. Five years ago this magazine published a Truth Reckoning. We announced that Forbes would decide who the liars are. We warned companies, in print, that if they employed people with undisclosed loyalties we would treat everything they said as a funnel of disinformation. I helped write that. I believe every word of it. Undisclosed loyalty is disqualifying. It is the whole product. We police it here, and the policing is not free. Then our own arbiter of truth turned out to carry an undisclosed loyalty roughly the size of a beach house, owed to the man whose independent rankings we sell as independent. I read our own rule again the morning it broke. It held up beautifully. We had simply never run it on ourselves, because the objective desk audits every conflict in America except the one signing its checks. I built the desk that way. It audits outward. It has never once turned around. Now let me teach you the trade, since you keep paying for it and never ask for the receipt. Objectivity began as a sales tactic. A wire service that wants to sell the same story to a Republican paper and a Democratic paper on the same street cannot take a side, so it takes none, and calls the arrangement a principle. I kept the principle. I kept the reason for it too. And you were never my customer. Hold still for this, because the whole building stands on it. At the peak of this business, 80 cents of every dollar it earned came from the advertiser, not from you. You were the circulation figure I carried into his office to set his rate. The news is the bait that holds you in the chair while I sell the chair, and the chair is you. I have sold you the whole time, by the thousand, and I stamped the word journalism on it because journalism is the label you will sit still for. The rankings are independent. The desk that publishes them is independent. The man who ran the whole house was, it turned out, independently on a wire transfer he never mentioned, and I need you to hold all three of those in your head at once, because a subscription costs money and dissonance is free. Our methodology says it plainly. No fee changes hands in exchange for the ranking. I have never once disputed that sentence. The fee changed hands somewhere else entirely, in a different room, for a different noun, and every word of the guarantee stayed true. The ranking is free. The color runs $12,000. When your name glows gold on the list instead of sitting in gray, that gold is a paid enhancement to your profile, and the trust is included. I should tell you what that list measures, this list that helps you choose the stranger who will hold your retirement. We measure the interview. We measure the assets under management. We do not measure whether the advisor ever earned a client a single dollar, because returns are hard to audit and clients want different things, and quantitative is a mood we do not offer. The definitive ranking of the finest financial advisors in America has never checked whether one of them is good at advising. It checks whether they returned our call. The trust is included. A third of this brand is advertising wearing the magazine's face. We call it BrandVoice. Companies pay somewhere between $100,000 and $600,000 to run it, and it publishes in our font, in our layout, under our masthead, and it looks exactly, exactly like the reporting you came here to believe. The government made us label it. So we did. We wrote Paid Program on it, in the gray no eye lands on, at the size no eye reads. Full compliance. Zero interruption. And most of what you call reporting is a press release that grew a byline. In Britain they studied the best papers in the country and found 6 in 10 stories came wholly or mainly from wire copy and public relations, and only 1 in 8 was something a reporter went out and found. We do not gather the news. We forward it. Then we charge you to read your own mail and call the postage a subscription. There is a reason it reads that way. For every working reporter left alive in this country there are now about 6 people whose entire salaried job is to write the thing the reporter prints. 6 to 1. The persuasion industry skipped the argument with journalism. It hired away the staff, kept the letterhead, and started mailing the copy in finished. I will tell you who owns the watchdog now, before you whistle for it. Since 2005 this country has lost about 3,500 newspapers, and it is still losing 2 a week, this week, while you read this. 213 counties have nobody left to sit in the courthouse. The watchdog did not die of the internet; a great deal of it was bought by hedge funds that cut the newsroom at twice the going rate and leased out the empty floor. Last quarter I sold one of those funds a sponsored feature about the irreplaceable value of local community. Net 30. It ran beautifully. And every November I certify the future. 30 Under 30. We anoint them before anyone checks a fundamental, because checking is slow and access is the product. Some of those faces went to prison. One built a fraud and drew 25 years. When the future gets convicted I do not lose a night, because I already sold the anointing, and then I run the Hall of Shame about it and sell that too. The rise and the autopsy. Two covers, one subscriber, same founder. You want the number on my wall? It is 28. Gallup says 28% of this country still trusts the press, a record low, the first time under 30 in half a century. 4 in 10 people on earth now turn their faces away from the news on purpose. My colleagues read those numbers and see a funeral. I see a market. 72% have already left. They are gone, they are worthless to me. The 28% who stayed are the most valuable people in America, because they still believe the badge, and I am the man who sells the badge. A shrinking congregation of true believers is not a crisis. It is a premium. You do not discount the last honest-looking thing in a burning building. You raise the price. People keep asking how $6 million stayed invisible inside the company that decides what is true. Our conflict-of-interest process worked perfectly. It simply was not ours. It was a private-equity firm's due-diligence team, reading someone else's email, a year late, closing the purchase of a different company, and the instant a stranger finished another man's correspondence and told us what we owned, we acted immediately. You cannot move faster than immediately-after-being-informed. Our statement said we remain focused on delivering trusted journalism. I wrote that line. It is the finest thing I have ever priced. The word trusted is doing the work of $6 million, and it is doing it for free. A lawyer went on the record about my former boss. He said you can only have one master. My former boss had one master and several revenue streams. The lawyers have read both, and, they agree, it is probably not even a crime. The desk is still open. The rankings are still independent. The color is still $12,000. Somewhere in the next hour you will read something with our name on it, decide it is true because of the name, and forward it to someone you love. I am the objective desk. You were never my reader. You were my inventory, and the news was the room I kept you in while I sold the door. The trust is included.

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things: • Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be? • Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it. • It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development. • @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums? • I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated. • While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts. • We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.) • In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.