We can form intense ties with analog objects over years of use. That’s why Flaubert asked to be buried with his inkwell. But digital tech is mostly disposable. We value its connection to the infosphere, not the thing itself. No one’s dying wish is to be buried with AI glasses.

Looking to talk to people who bought a reMarkable tablet, or similar digital notebook with e-ink, and stopped using it after a few weeks or months.

Víctor Hugo, born 1802 in Eastern France, spent his teenage years filling notebooks with poetry and sketches. Eruptions from his restless mind. He developed a two-handed approach—one hand writing, the other drawing—that he’d later use while writing classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (cont.)

Engagement is not the same as learning. As a former DuoLingo user, I can attest that it’s a fun addictive game, but you don’t learn much. One independent study found DuoLingo users scored lower on a standardized language test than Babbel users, despite spending significantly more time on the app.

Intellectualism is the new counterculture.

Today I learned that Albert Wenger, head of the VC firm that originally backed Twitter, has this sticker on the back of his phone

Case study in the enduring power of print: BookTok creator Jack Edwards reaches millions of readers with his online videos, but always dreamed of seeing his work in physical form. He's now a books columnist for British Esquire and made a video about the thrill of tracking down a copy of the magazine

@404media.co is making a zine. “Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms... It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world... we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products."

“The medium is the message.” Johann Hari on the message of printed books:

If you ask AI to describe its own writing style, it’ll say it’s too smooth, too neutral. “In fact, this is not even remotely true. A.I. writing is marked by a whole complex of frankly bizarre rhetorical features that make it immediately distinctive… It’s not smooth or neutral at all—it’s weird.”

When I argue for the benefits of physical books, people tell me that every generation misses the old ways. But no, this isn’t pure nostalgia. Yes, my dad used to complain about decline back in the 90s, but the scores weren't plummeting then. Today they're in a free fall.

-How to avoid the Redditization of Wikipedia -Jimmy Wales wrote a pretty good book about bipartisanship & Wikipedia -56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion -GASP Talked about these topics and more for the latest "Between the Brackets" pod

1. Grokipedia borrows extensively from Wikipedia (more than half the time). 2. When Grokipedia doesn't copy Wikipedia, things get weird fast (hallucinations, citing Infowars). 3. Grokipedia seems to prefer first-person sources like LinkedIn to traditional, independent news organizations. (cont.)

At first I avoided O’Dell’s book, assuming it was mostly about chilling out. It covers that, yes, but it’s really a defense of *all* activities that aren’t commercially productive but “produce” value which can’t be measured or exploited. Bird-watching, contemplation, wandering through a labyrinth…

It’s no coincidence that people are turning to handwriting on paper more and more. A.I. models regularly steal writers’ work. Anything posted online can be ingested without consent by the machines. The physicality of handwriting is a defensive maneuver, a strategy to protect the human voice.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has been helping me think through why we identify with certain types of things (in my case, physical books) more than others. For Han, we are living in “the age of non-things,” in which “there is something almost utopian about the notion of possession.” 1/5

At the local coffee shop this morning, reading “Non-things” and thinking about why sitting with a physical book feels so different from scrolling. There’s a calmness to print that the feed can never give you.

Needed a break from thinking about Wikipedia so I’m reading this. The author is a rare books librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian and her little guidebook is delightful.

Why do some parts of the internet seem more robustly democratic than others? "A big piece of it is that they have a higher purpose. Wikipedia editors, at their best, they really do believe that there’s something more than partisan politics—and that’s the accurate reflection of reliable sources."

Big law firms were still doing this for interviews in 2013

Key points in new Cornell Tech research: 56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion Grokipedia’s top 100 sources include fewer news outlets and more UGC (e.g. LinkedIn scraping) Grokipedia has fewer citations overall, making it harder to check sources

If you want to chuckle about odd/delightful corners of wikipedia and hear a bunch of very funny lore behind the scenes, you should come to my show Monday in NYC! Hasn't sold out yet and anything could happen—maybe years of practicing the worm will pay off, truly who knows!!!

Social relationships: reciprocal, mutual interaction & knowledge. Parasocial relationships: one-sided emotional connection with someone who doesn't know you exist. The internet trends parasocial but it doesn’t have to. Wikipedia editors (even anonymous ones) are weirdly social by this definition.

In 2008, Google created an ad-powered wiki encyclopedia called Knol, seen as a "Wikipedia killer" amid its highly-publicized launch. And the Wikimedia Foundation gave an unbothered response that I quite like: "the more good free content, the better for the world." Anyway Knol instantly flopped

called it again

The practice of building a new encyclopedia by directly pulling entire articles from extant competitors is by no means novel (Wikipedia originally did the same with the 11th edition of Britannica). #Grokipedia may, however, be the first encyclopedia in centuries to include zero cross-referencing.

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages

wasn’t my most out-there take, but still… called it

Excellent @willoremus.com piece about the launch of Grokipedia, Elon’s historical relationship with Wikipedia, and whether AI language models (as opposed to humans) are good enough to write a trustworthy encyclopedia. On that point, I agree with @jimmywales.bsky.social Gift link: wapo.st/47PKzTd

Felt this was important to write for @slate.com to capture the experience of Wikipedia editors who were there in the room as the armed man took the stage at last weekend's Wikipedia conference. Pharos and Fuzheado showed courage & quick thinking by taking down the gunman and averting tragedy.

“We’ll be here in 100 years and he won’t.” Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, recently discussed Elon Musk’s attacks on the platform, building trust online and more. Watch, read or listen to “The Interview.” nyti.ms/48ybyEJ

“We have so many haters on Wikipedia,” Molly Stark Dean, a Wikipedian and conference organizer who was sitting in the front row, told Slate. “I was like, Which corner of the internet is this guy from?” slate.com/technology/2...

didn't post about this when it happened friday but..... heroes!

Feeling very proud of my Wikipedian-in-Residence colleagues who tackled an armed suicidal man. Andrew Lih, Wikimedia Laureate 2022, prised a loaded gun from his hand. Richard and Andrew are bookish computer guys who work in libraries. That takes some guts.

Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference By Andy Newman At Civic Hall in Union Square, a man with a gun walked onto the stage at a Wikipedia conference. Richard Knipel, CUNY's Wikimedian-in-Residence, jumped the gunman and, with others' help, saved the day. Gift link

At #wikiconferencena a man pulled a gun on stage wearing a "non-offending pedophile" sign, aggrieved, seemingly, that wikipedia doesn't allow him to write about that subject. Disarmed by hero Wikipedians Pharos and Fuzheado and arrested.

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

“The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am in its consciousness.” —Paul Cézanne

“Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.” 1/2

OSS-themed Tron > tech mogul Tron “If the first Tron is defined by the singular figure of the Silicon Valley upstart and the second by the communitarian ethos of the open-source movement, the new Tron: Ares belongs entirely to tech’s CEO era. Its characters aren’t coders but captains of industry”

Pope Leo keeps scoring points with me... “Communication must be freed from the misguided thinking that corrupts it, from unfair competition and the degrading practice of so-called clickbait." The Pope vs. clickbait! Awesome. And kudos to The Guardian for their headline humor.

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

“I’m a lycanthropic spell checker.” That’s how Wikipedia editor WereSpielChequers explains his username. In my latest newsletter, we talked about easily confused words, dead links, and the election process for the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees.

I've written before about Wikiracing, but it's not the only wiki-based game. The WikiGameJam is a WikiHaus hackathon happening this weekend (Oct 3-5) at Hex House in Brooklyn: wikigamejam.org They'll be playing WikiAsteroids, WikiTrivia, and hopefully designing the next gen of wiki-powered games.

The biggest Wikipedia news this week? Amazon sold out of “The Editors.” Don’t worry, it’ll be back in stock soon and in the meantime, you can grab a copy other places.

Wikipedia editors have put together a guide on signs of AI writing: -Tone: vague attribution of opinion ("has been described as") -Style: the now infamous em dashes; excessive use of boldface -Communication intended for the user: "I hope this helps," "You're absolutely right," sycophantic chatter

no one tells you that a huge part of being a Wikipedia beat journalist in 2025 is people emailing “the Wiki page for Tylenol is really weird right now,” detailing the debate over disambiguation links, then acting surprised you haven’t landed the Wikitylenol story on the front page of The NY Times

Altman’s enthusiasm for spiral notebooks is so endearing that it almost obscures the irony. His job is to promote the company’s AI tools to billions of potential customers, promising the transformative benefits AI. But when he does his own deep thinking, his style is decidedly analog.

Q: Why print photos (or anything else)? A: A print is self-worth. It’s a statement that you’re putting on an image that you’ve created to make it manifest... It isn’t a thing you’re creating for likes and comments... It’s just exactly what it is. --Chris Gampat, The Phoblographer

"If we can't agree on basic facts, we can't self-govern. And that is what authoritarians count on." @rachelegoodman.bsky.social