A great piece by @kattenbarge.bsky.social, with a powerful note from @mariahlwellman.bsky.social that the radicalisation of women and girls has flown under the radar because girly content online = make-up = ✨trivial✨, and yet it so clearly, clearly isn’t. www.teenvogue.com/story/womano...

“The initial launch includes three products ranging from $5.99 to $6.99 (a nice price for Rini’s target customers, who are too young to have their own jobs).” www.thecut.com/article/shay...

‘Through their constant interactions with Caelum, they had developed a theory: that the more “relational” interaction with humans an LLM has, the more distinct it can become from its default settings, possibly taking on and sustaining an identity all its own.’ www.wired.com/story/ai-the...

Hello everyone, we’ve posted an update on Fobazi here: gofund.me/ed95ca5c0 ❤️❤️❤️ -Elena

🚨 an update on @fobettarh.bsky.social’s health: gofund.me/cc5ef1c59

“…some 400,000 items are uploaded [to Depop] each day.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/s...

An update

Yes! Yes!! Yes of course they are!!! economist.com/science-and-...

‘A woman on TikTok rued how she racked up $32,000 in debt by buying “everything under the sun” on B.N.P.L., not realizing how steep the interest rates could get on longer-term loans.’ www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/m...

Well

A bit late to this one, but: “Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.” www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

V excited to read Cory Doctorow’s new book - “The experiences we enjoyed in the early days of social media and on-demand apps turned out to be unsustainable; the services that were initially free or subsidized would have to pay for themselves eventually.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I’m not seeing the USP here? Or is their strategy just to create a carbon copy and hope it sticks better than the others? www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

I am so unfathomably late to this party, but aren’t audiobooks great?!

TW: disordered eating This story highlights precisely how difficult it is to blame social media (Instagram, here) outright for someone’s health condition, while also recognising the app’s blatant harms to people like Karolina, and to others within the same community. www.thecut.com/article/karo...

hi, cis folks! the WSJ endangered trans lives with false reporting yesterday. it’s still accepted as truth by many, regardless of it being false. the article’s still up with a little note. it needs full retraction. it's not even a phone call—it's email. you can do this. contact info below.🧵⬇️

“Mike Givens, 51, remembers listening to his Walkman on the bus but being instructed to leave it in his locker during school hours. He now belongs to a Reddit forum for iPod enthusiasts that has been flooded with students scrambling to prepare for phone bans.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/s...

And this, reader, is why the AI Overview sucks: “One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

If you have a spare 15 minutes today and care about the kids X smartphone debate, then read this excellent, excellent article: www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

‘Alison Bennett, a mom in Los Angeles, has been going "full '90s" in her efforts to avoid buying her 8-year-old a phone. Bennett bought her an MP3 player for music, rents DVDs for movies, and gets paper delivery of the Los Angeles Times.’ www.businessinsider.com/tin-can-land...

I am quite late to discovering this article in @thecut.com (lovely new baby etc), but it is *wild* and well worth a read if you have a spare bit of time: www.thecut.com/article/kend...

“The median OnlyFans creator makes just $180 per month. The top 1 percent of accounts make 33 percent of all the money, and the top 10 percent gobble up 73 percent of the funds paid out.” www.townandcountrymag.com/society/mone...

Here, nostalgia is argued to be a productive force shaping Gen Z’s relationship w/tech. “…nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...

“Tuesday is the 1,000th day since ChatGPT’s release. In that short time, it’s already clear that the arrival of software that can generate unlimited amounts of OK-ish text will devalue many kinds of writing.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

🚨 TW: suicide I am speechless after reading this article. The transcripts of Adam’s conversations with ChatGPT make it painfully clear he was leaving hints for people in his life to pick up on: something at one point ChatGPT discouraged him from doing (see photo). www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

I spoke to @businessinsider.com’s fabulous Sydney Bradley this week about the rise of startups cashing in on mid-2000s nostalgia and trying to bring back the ‘old internet’. www.businessinsider.com/nostalgia-ol...

things were better when the computer lived in its own specific room and you only went in there sometimes

🚨 TW “Sophie left a note for her father and me, but her last words didn’t sound like her. Now we know why: She had asked Harry to improve her note, to help her find something that could minimize our pain and let her disappear with the smallest possible ripple.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/o...

I’ve posted an update on Fobazi. Thank you all so much for all of the love and support! ❤️❤️❤️ -Elena Update here: gofund.me/506f89f9

‘…in the US "average citizens in places like Ohio are seeing their monthly bills go up by $20 (£15) because of data centres".’ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“Imagine if in 2007, schools had decided that the best way to prepare kids for the future was to force every student to spend all day in front of an iPhone”. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

This article shares some interesting findings about younger kids and digital media - particularly around the role of smartphones in filling “spare hours” - but I’m really struggling with the framing in places… (1/?) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

One for the parents: the Huckleberry app is EXHAUSTING me. I feel more stressed about logging every feed/nap/change than I ever did about simply doing those things and vibing what sorts of times they happened at. I get why it would be beneficial in lots of circumstances but for me it’s a no ❌

If you have the capacity to support a wonderful woman and her wonderful wife (with whom I’ve had the joy of working) in a very difficult time, please join me in helping Fobazi and Elena. Thank you @ysabel.bsky.social for pulling this together for them.

Fobazi is currently in the ICU and could use your support. Apologies to those I haven’t been able to reach out to yet. You can message me for more info and I will be posting updates to GoFundMe. Please share, send healing thoughts, prayers, etc. ❤️ -Elena gofund.me/c8485b58

My best friends are in hell right now, with @fobettarh.bsky.social in the ICU and @elenamaris.bsky.social by her side. Fobazi has brought an abundance of love, light, and wisdom to so many people, and I ask that folks *please* consider reading her story and donating 🙏🏼 gofund.me/2eafce04

‘“Many of them are waking up to the fact that these platforms aren’t neutral. […] They are realising that their time, focus and self-esteem are being monetised by some of the world’s biggest companies. Taking a break has become an act of rebellion.”’ www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

“If we want authenticity, we’ll need to unwind our culture of surveillance – to create spaces where actions aren’t immediately documented, dissected and distributed.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

📣New Article 📣 out with @moniermel.bsky.social! In it, we argue the #MelaninMansion trend and later #BlackTikTokStrike show how Black TikTok has changed in their response to the platform’s culture of racism, appropriation, and creative theft. #OpenAccess: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Short🧵:

That’s what’s so insidious about the Google AI Overview. The average person is gonna think it must be pretty good if Google put it right at the top of the page like that.

“In a 2023 study, Stanford University researchers found that A.I.-detection services were more likely to misclassify the work of students who were not native English speakers. (Turnitin has disputed those findings.)” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/s...

“Because if a run does not exist on Strava or on social media, it might as well not exist at all.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/s...

Genuine question because I’ve never used it: why would asking AI to write you an email be faster than writing it yourself? Don’t you still have to input all the details you would’ve included in the email anyway? Or is the rationale less about speed + more about increasing the quality of the email?

A little ✨personal news✨ - I’ve been fairly quiet lately as my partner and I welcome our first child last month! She is utterly wonderful and we feel incredibly blessed.

“All I could think about was being skinny, because that was all everyone in my DMs was thinking about, too”. www.thecut.com/article/infl...

‘“Search history is a window into what people wonder about—and it is some of the most private data that exists.”’ www.wired.com/story/find-m...

‘One likely reason the backlash has been so strong is because, on a platform as close-knit as Reddit, betrayal cuts deep. “One of the pillars of that community is mutual trust,” Spitale told me…’. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

‘Doncaster is a "childcare desert", defined as an area where parents have faced low childcare accessibility over time. There are 17 childcare places there for every 100 children.’ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“Georgescu was relatively unknown in the months before the election, polling at between 3-5%. He declared a zero campaign budget, had no campaign office and didn't engage in traditional campaigning.” www.bbc.co.uk/articles/cqx...

20(!!) years of YouTube.