*The AI boom = one of the costliest building sprees in world history * Past 3 years' commitments are greater than the cost of building the U.S. interstate highway system * Consumers must spend $800 billion on AI within a few years, to justify investment from 2023-24 www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-b...

New argument against AI regulation just dropped. Checkmate, atheists. www.wsj.com/tech/peter-t...

new dream dining table

we hadn't heard so many helicopters in DC since 2020 peak pandemic

For @chaykak.bsky.social's One Thing newsletter, I wrote an essay about 72, Edward Enninful's unnecessary new magazine. It's almost boldly boring and fully possessed by the Grey Backdrop Demon. onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/fashion-ma...

Trump now controls the networks with a reign of terror and intimidation.

Some news: yesterday was my last at Rolling Stone. For now, I'm going solo, doing all my TV reviewing, recapping, etc., at my newsletter. I hope you'll consider subscribing. Many more details here:

At least until this small Twombly joins it.

Enjoyed these thoughts from food critics about what they’d like to see more of (“simple foods broken down and made perfect”) and less of (“caviar, truffles, Wagyu and uni in the wrong places”) in restaurants. [nytimes.com]

this is what I wanted to read about the bizarre, disturbing Epstein birthday book @newyorker.com www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

I went on @taylorlorenz.bsky.social's podcast! as always a fun conversation

this is every journalist headshot, vol. 2

perfect story www.thecut.com/article/what...

You can listen to all the conversations @craigmod.com did during his recent TBOT book tour as a podcast series -- I started with the Robin Sloan one, and it's really great. I've listened to 3 of them now, and they are all a bit different, due to the interviewer. craigmod.com/books/things...

I was on Brian Lehrer today!

algorithmic recommendation tries to make it impossible for us to escape our own predictability; continued interaction with these sorts of surveillance systems changes our relationship to our own capability to want things—makes it alien, fully externalized www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...

If you're working on an AI consumer product startup and want to talk about the market landscape and consolidation, please email me! [email protected]

these photographs are still very funny to me

The eye exam is the perfect game design. That big E is a great tutorial that teaches you the basic mechanic. But it doesn't baby you and quickly gets hard as they introduce the small and blurry enemies.

“Editing according to traffic is not editing; it’s engineering" — David Remnick in NYmag nymag.com/intelligence...

In a new interview with David Remnick, Anna Wintour talks about appointing her successor at Vogue, the arc of her career, and what she thought of “The Devil Wears Prada.”

human wabi sabi > algorithmic sloptimizing

“You are not the first to be ghosted, and you won’t be the last… [A]bandonment has always existed, but the internet has supercharged it… [via a] move from total accessibility to total inaccessibility in an instant.” Another great take from @chaykak.bsky.social 1/2 www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Great column on ghosting by @chaykak.bsky.social — I got ghosted by a guy I see on my commute 😂 but I have also ghosted, which can feel kinder than explaining why you don’t want to see someone, tho is still brutal www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

"We might think of events as culture that can’t be faked. The new status symbol is showing up." — on the resurgence of IRL events as corporate and personal branding onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/taste-note...

helpful @jwherrman.bsky.social column on the value and business models of AI coding startups nymag.com/intelligence...

Reading this piece made me think of @chaykak.bsky.social book Filterworld and the flattening of identity caused by social media algorithms. In Filterworld, NYC can only become more NYC. www.wsj.com/opinion/pest...

If I squint - hiring the Browser Company team is a decent bet if Jira wants to compete with Linear But it feels like the new “flipping properties” is to start an AI company with zero distribution and then sell it to get stock from an incumbent www.theverge.com/web/770947/b...

Excited to present this great essay by Ashanty Rosario, a talented young journalist who attends Newtown High School in Queens, about how she's experienced the arrival of AI in the classroom. "These programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students."

In this week’s column, @chaykak.bsky.social writes about ghosting—a slight that technology has made all but inevitable.

Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.

www.economist.com/science-and-... come work with me

I reviewed Dominic Pettman's new academic monograph on the very un-academic subject of ghosting for @newyorker.com www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

The readers are going crazy for this

This makes me feel really safe, thanks

This is such a good book and it is IMO a masterclass in how to do the 'okay, here's what we don't know' in a way that is both readable, concise and doesn't get pulled into tangents.

YouTube is using AI to edit people's videos without notice or permission This might actually work as a single unified exam question for all law classes www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Can independent musicians today survive without, as one artist put it, giving their “life force to the internet?” In a new column, @chaykak.bsky.social‬ writes about how TikTok has shifted the relationship between artist and consumer.

my new @newyorker.com column profiles the Brooklyn band Cafuné, whose track "Tek It" went mega viral on TikTok in 2022. Now, their new album is decidedly anti-internet. On how social media pressures artists to mold their work in its image and changes the art itself: www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

This is great. The braided essay is both overdone and an incredible joy when someone pulls it off (rare). I went to MFA at peak braid moment (post-beard, pre-jamison) and we were told, implicitly and explicitly, to write braided essays because we hadn't experienced anything real yet.

Holy fucking shit

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business

the thing about writing and publishing books is it kind of allows you to go to college again for a few years and you can develop and then perhaps shed a version of yourself meantforyou.beehiiv.com/p/the-mortif...

great roundtable about the fate of the dreaded ~braided essay~ linkst.thecut.com/view/5c06c55...

unfortunately this is a very relevant story

these are things that don't convincingly pretend to talk back to you as an intelligent conversationalist

The exchanges between Adam and ChatGPT are devastating. This, in my mind, is the worst one. One of his last messages was a photo of the noose hung in his bedroom closet, asking if it was "good." ChatGPT offered a technical analysis of the set up and told him it 'could potentially suspend a human."

Should we continue investing in the technology that is becoming increasingly infamous for encouraging suicide? Sam Altman says of course!!!

idk if he has more than two, but 50% of the two he has would easily be $35m.