Dylan Callaghan

Across 13 experiments totaling nearly 8,000 trials, GPT-4o selected the face humans typically rate higher on competence or trustworthiness 74.88 percent of the time, far above the 50 percent chance rate of the forced-choice task.

Scaled to the height of an adult woman, all four current Fashionista Barbie dolls now fall inside the normal range for two key body proportions. The original Barbie did not come close. Curvy Barbie sits nearest the average of the reference group across most individual measurements. Ken’s individual measurements moved toward the male average, but his overall shape moved slightly away from it, and he remains outside the normal range.

Showa era Godzilla films, made between 1954 and 1975, are read as an allegory of Trump’s career rather than a metaphor. While the two are often conflated, allegory implies a path that events will follow while metaphor only says what a thing resembles. Seven films are read closely, three singly and the last four as a group, with the 1954 original treated as the baseline. The author calls the essay exploratory and declines to offer a comprehensive account of the films and their equivalents.