“It’s no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by [A.I.] have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.” – words by @chaykak.bsky.social – illustration by Ariel Davis

Geese has a magazine??

fantastic essay of art criticism and art history

Andrew Marantz traveled to a film festival in northern Italy to become the first foreign journalist to land a substantial interview with Péter Magyar, who ousted Viktor Orbán as Prime Minister of Hungary. www.newyorker.com/news/the-new...

my piece from the pre-reboot Believer! vintage

From the @semafor.com media newsletter: The controlling investor in Letterboxd is looking to sell its stake in the company. They've solicited interest from Versant, and last year approached the Ankler about purchasing it. www.semafor.com/article/04/2...

My profile of Laurie Metcalf is in this week's New Yorker. We talked about Steppenwolf, "Roseanne," and her tremendous performance in "Death of a Salesman"—as well as her partnership with the once-cancelled producer Scott Rudin and her role in his Broadway comeback. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

"If you tell people often enough that your product is going to upend their way of life, take their jobs, and very possibly pose an existential threat to humanity, they just might start to believe you," @chaykak.bsky.social writes. www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

the pointless, militarized occupation of Washington DC continues with these armed, camo'd figures constantly patrolling the safest, calmest areas of the city. Glad my corner grocery store and the steps leading in to Kalorama Park are so heavily guarded

I think about this five year old @chaykak.bsky.social piece at least once per month (including now, as I sit on the couch reading Intermezzo and count six articles of Uniqlo clothing on my person). dirt.fyi/article/2021...

I'll be attending the newsreel.co launch event. Looks like @chaykak.bsky.social will be on the panel titled "The Algorithm Broke. Now What?"

Friends, some personal news! I'm starting a newsletter called Porch Party. My proposition: the Trump admin is really NOT business as usual, and the effects on people's lives that I hear about daily are mostly not making it to the public. Let's change that. Sign up here: www.porchpartynews.com

In the New Yorker this week, a story I've been trying to get off the ground for 5 years... about a Hollywood stuntwoman-turned-personal-injury-lawyer, her ex-con fiancee, high-speed crashes with 18-wheelers, and economic desperation in 21st century America. It's set in New Orleans and it's a doozy.

"The history of struggle against technology is also the history of struggle over what makes the human different from the machine." @chaykak.bsky.social on @thomas-dekeyser.bsky.social 's TECHNO-NEGATIVE in @newyorker.com : www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

‘Our hatred of social media or of artificial intelligence is not some novel phenomenon, Dekeyser reminds us; it’s a feeling that has existed in some form across millennia.’ @chaykak.bsky.social reads @thomas-dekeyser.bsky.social’s new book, 𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘰-𝘕𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦. www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

say what you like about BlueSky, I still love this labeler that tells me who went to a fancy private school

This is the biggest stretch of an acquisition since when Jack Dorsey made Square buy Tidal because he wanted to be friends with Jay Z

this is a really new phenomenon! slopaganda is incredibly fast and very glossy, easy to take seriously

new column: I talked to the Iranians making the viral Iran war LEGO videos, describing their goals and 24h turnaround process. AI "slopaganda" is the new language of geopolitics:

I saw this on Industry

great essay by Sophie Haigney about an age of agency without morality [gift link]

🎙️ON AIR: We're talking to @newyorker.com's @chaykak.bsky.social, @nytimes.com's Tiffany Hsu and @washingtonpost.com's @drewharwell.com about how social media and AI are disrupting and distorting Iran War coverage. ❓What Qs do you have about the use of disinformation as a tool of war? 📻 Listen:

new @newyorker.com column! We all loved the weather app Dark Sky. When Apple shut it down, nothing seemed as good. Now Dark Sky's co-founder Adam Grossman is back with Acme Weather, a really nice weather app that tries to solve the problems of the genre www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

An unaccounted for part of the economy is how much young people virulently hate AI, despite how aggressively it's being forced on them. They realize it's making their friends dumber and ruining the world and they want nothing to do with it. From the Penn student paper: www.thedp.com/article/2026...

Some personal news: After nearly eight fantastic years, today is my last day at @wsj.com. Next month I'm starting with @nytimes.com to cover cybersecurity, intelligence, and more. I'm thrilled to be joining such an excellent team, and can't wait to get started.

Google is now screwing with the 10 blue links in traditional search and rewriting headlines - including ours - to be the worst kind of slop. This sucks so bad www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

Silicon Valley has embraced a new buzzword—“taste”—and in recent months it has become “as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the 2010s,” @chaykak.bsky.social writes. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/vCNpCn

A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to an aura of artisanality. But has the online ecosystem become so polluted that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all? newyorkermag.visitlink.me/ofYtig

Huge job opening at Bloomberg in SF: bloomberg.avature.net/careers/JobD...

Great piece by @chaykak.bsky.social . Tech companies know AI i s anti-taste. To have taste is to discern. AI trained indiscriminately on data is not discerning www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Great to have @chaykak.bsky.social back from paternity leave. His latest column is a rousing defense of...us! Hooray for humans. "No large language model has yet been programmed to feel anything, and no number of branded baseball caps is going to change that." www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

On "Ezra Klein", Jack Clark of Anthropic kept talking about "taste" as what they look for in hiring, now that Claude codes so well. When pressed, he defined "taste" as experience. In addition to the functions Chayka talks about, taste also seems to be a way to replace and diminish "expertise."

New @chaykak.bsky.social column on a none more K. Chayka topic: Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste. www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

my latest @newyorker.com column is on the AI industry's ironic obsession with "taste", a human capacity for a fundamentally anti-human technology www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

it's the greatest day of the year

dear friends and colleagues, i am relaunching my Worksona. as part of that process i have made a LinkedIn for the first time. please connect with me on there so that our Worksonas can interact and do Business www.linkedin.com/in/nicole--he

lmao closed all summer. DC is a wreck these days

Jay Graber is stepping down as the head of Bluesky. Revisit a profile of the tech leader in which she talks to @chaykak.bsky.social about her efforts to build nontoxic social media. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/zcBW0Q

THREAD: I got laid off from NYMag/Vulture after 14 years. The family lost 75% of income + medical. Now mzs.press bookstore, once a side project. is do-or-die for Judith & I. I feel weird telling you this because others are doing much worse. But if you could like or share this, we'd be so grateful!

I'm back from parental leave for a while; if you emailed or messaged me in the last ~3 mos please try again!

fraise géante, labubu miniature et tasty crousty 🍓 pour @lemonde.fr, avec l'éclairage de @chaykak.bsky.social

Reading ‘Filterworld’ by @chaykak.bsky.social and loving. Highly recommend - the concepts in it affect all of us now, the chapter on Netflix will peel your eyelids back. amzn.eu/d/6ZnHPsB

This was the year that AI-generated images and videos became, sometimes, indistinguishable from real ones. But as @chaykak.bsky.social writes, “if 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

check it out For the first time, every cover, article, and issue in the magazine’s hundred-year history can be enjoyed on newyorker.com. www.newyorker.com/news/press-r...

THE YEAR IN SLOP, 12 beautiful months of 2025 AI garbage, from the viral to the violent, the random to the racist www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

i have said this before but if you are actually interested in influencing people beyond a narrow circle of too-online journalists you will be making direct to camera videos on tiktok, instagram and youtube. if you primarily post on text-based social media then you're just dicking around.

I wrote a @newyorker.com column on 2025 as the year of video podcasts and multimedia pundit personality cults, faces, voices, outfits, and all www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by David Ostow. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our humor newsletter to get more funny drawings and satire right in your inbox: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/QGOoMt...

Maybe it's just me, but this was a headwreck of a read. Seemingly there's now a whole new "craft" emerging - producers who help aspiring musicians to "humanize" their AI generated songs.