The New Critic’s July 18th party in New York celebrates its readers and contributors, offering an all‑night open bar to paid subscribers for $30 a year.

The Manifest conference, its fourth summer run at Lighthaven in Berkeley, gathers about 800 rationalists from the Less Wrong community. The event’s focus is forecasting, yet attendees propose sessions on everything from futarchy to prenatal IQ screening. At the center of the chaos was Aella’s “Get Hotter With Aella” workshop, where men tried to learn how to project desire through “reinforcement learning”‑style feedback.

Victor attempted to emit a beam of light from his penis, while Alex struggled with robotic stiffness. The sessions illustrate Manifest’s belief that humans can train their brains like computers, optimizing every facet of life. The conference’s playful experiments, coupled with the New Critic’s subscription perks, showcase a subculture that blends science, satire, and social engineering.

Despite the absurd soldados, the underlying theme remains: knowledge, data, and feedback can shape human interaction, even if the methods are sometimes…unconventional.