I have a new piece out on biotech companies brewing up alternatives to palm oil in the lab. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

"LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build."

My grad school friend "LT" Rease Miles has put her wisdom, humor, & intellect into "Smart Girl: A First-Gen Origin Story." She's the 1st person in her family to go to college, & she then got a Ph.D. & now mentors other "first gen" students: www.smartgirlbook.com

61 kids, ages 12-18, talk about harvesting produce in California--adults are not protecting them from pesticide exposure, below minimum wage earnings, triple digit temperatures. Proud to serve as fact-checker on Robert J. Lopez's bravura investigation:

I couldn't find the Observer coverage of this incident, but the NYT mentioned it in February 2002:

Hey @nytpitchbot.bsky.social -- I saw this and immediately thought of you...

"Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation; When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges." Pope Leo on why cinema and theaters are worth preserving.

the decision to really just abandon moderation and let it rip suggests that this is what meta wants for its platform. this is the final, idealized form of the product

It is disturbing to see the administration trying to erase the contribution of the roughly one million Black Americans who served in WWW II

Geneticists fear "designer babies" because of the risk of unintended cuts changes that enter the gene pool - also that failures will discredit the "somatic" genetic editing of non-heritable cells for conditions like sickle cell anemia:

Good science lesson here on correlation vs causation. If only I could go back in time to tell my younger self that it wasn't my watching on T.V. that caused my sports teams to be so damn bad.

Regulators investigating 6 cases of Teslas with full-self-driving going full speed through a red light and causing a crash. Sometimes "disruptive" is just bad: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Graduate seminar did a deep dive on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense yesterday. At the line, “in America the law is king,” they (14 students from 6 countries) burst out laughing. I've been doing this for 35 years and this is the first time that was a laugh line.

It has happened! 200 days of 100% WindWaterSolar on CA's main grid in 2025 Including a record battery output of 47.69 GWh on 10/17 Gas down 18.5% v '24 & 37.2% v '23 PV up 14.6% v '24 & 43.5% v '23 Batteries up 56.8% v '24 & 202.7% v '23 Demand down 2.1% v '24 & 1.3% v '23

Reporting this piece drove home the value of generational turnover in politics. There's an energy that a 50-something Congressperson brings -- to jump in a car and track down their missing constituents -- that even an equally-well-meaning octogenarian is unlikely to match:

An actually hopeful climate story -- when you put time and money into cleaning up a polluted river...

This is a good take on why Open AI is stealing art and music under the banner of "fair use"

(solemnly) You've had mail.

cursed headline

Paul Kingsworth compares Silicon Valley technoutopians to the bloody cult of reason during the French Revolution. It's the Burkean conservative question: what fills the power vacuum when you dispense with the world people know? harpers.org/archive/...

As someone who once wrote a master's essay on Beckett, let me just say THIS IS MOST TRIUMPHANT www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/t...

Breaking: Record 380 GW solar PV installed globally first half 2025, 64% higher than first half of 2024 (232 GW) and only 13% less than all of 2023 (438 GW) China installed 67% (256 GW) India 6.3% (24 GW) US 5.5% (21 GW) Brazil and Germany 1.3% (7 GW) ember-energy.org/latest-updat...

Having read a lot of R.W. Emerson and the primacy of the individual conscience, I shudder to think what he would say about ministers using algorithms to data-mine their congregation: www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/19/1...

❌ NO CLANKERS ❌

Nations are largely ignoring a growing source of greenhouse gases in their climate commitments & risk assessments: emissions driven by climate change itself, like methane released from warming wetlands. A new research collaboration aims to address that gap in our understanding:

Naming your steel "cow" that is actually a bioreactor for making cheese "casein" proteins after Margaret Thatcher is a bold strategy. I can't tell if it is earnest or sardonic though: thosevegancowboys.co...

Uber had over 400,000 reports of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in a 5 year period -- some chilling investigative reporting here: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/b...

You start off parlaying your crypto fortune into a Kentucky mansion and plans for a Senate run -- then, before you know it, you're lighting a guy's clothes on fire and dangling him off a stairwell to get his passwords: www.wsj.com/us-news/...

reading Wittgenstein: if only I understood Hegel reading Hegel: if only I understood Kant reading Kant: if only I understood the classics reading Germania: you're right, Tacitus, the Divine Augustus SHOULD have re-crossed the Rhine and subdued the Germans BEFORE THEY INVENTED GODSDAMNED IDEALISM—

This is the trade-off the administration has made

This graph is astonishing. The people that bang on about “natural birth” and “women have been doing this forever without help” need to be forced to stare at this until their eyes water.

hell yeah @williamfleitch.bsky.social

Musk & xAI have created an "anarchist" bot called Bad Rudi who makes Tony Soprano sound like Thomas the Tank Engine: "“My chaos? It’s tearing down this s--- stained world, you braindead f---. We’d swap priests’ wine with piss, worship my furry a-- and torch boredom.” www.nbcnews.com/tech/interne...

This is a great stemwinder on why people who cheat on papers with Chat GPT or only cheating (and stupefying) themselves

Can AI help prevent construction accidents that cost more than 1,000 American workers their lives each year? For @techreview, I delved into the problem: www.technologyreview...

Half of 2025 is done. Summary of CA stats vs '23; vs '24 40% 18% fossil gas down 216% 65% batteries up 49% 18% solar up 3.7% 0.6% wind up 16.4% 6% WWS up -0.4% +1.1% change in demand '23 '24 '25 48.9% 54.6% 57.1% %demand met by WindWaterSolar 45 104 145 days>100% WWS 0.97 3.21 4.94 h/day>100% WWS

People are using ChatGPT as trip-sitters, replacing human therapists or guides during psychedelic experiences. What could possibly go wrong? A lot: www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/01/1...

Literally old timey eugenicist racism here www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I FC'd Kate Morrissey's piece about CBP head Rodney Scott, just confirmed today. He led the San Diego Sector when officers taught children to shoot at migrant effigies, & also allegedly covered up a Tasing death of a detainee tinyurl.com/mj4k9bme tinyurl.com/26rr8se5

Are they defending us against literacy

If you're tired of hype for mediocre tech, check out Bruce Crumley's feature on Zipline, which has completed over 1.4 million successful drone deliveries, mostly of sensitive medical supplies like blood or vaccines. (I helped with FC): www.inc.com/bruce-cr...

Charlie articulates my view of Twitter at this point -- best to let it wither away...

Lots of talk today about the demise of BlueSky. For whatever it's worth, it's been a boon to indie publishers like us. Twitter and Facebook have pretty much silenced us, so the engagement here has, and continues to be, wonderful.

If Gen Z really wants to dunk on millennials, they should learn about Foursquare and go around saying stuff like, "I hear you're the mayor of this Panera Bread."

This was a fascinating, deeply reported feature about a troubled young man who built an underground DMT empire

Crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong pursuing forbidden project of embryo editing: @antonioregalado.bsky.social with the scoop: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/05/1...

This seems bad -- Climeworks' ballyhooed carbon capture tech is not even removing enough carbon to *cover its own emissions* -- much less any part of our vast human legacy

When your wellness regimen causes an existential crisis: Silicon Valley psychedelics users go in looking for a trip and find that they want to quit their job or end their marriage: www.wsj.com/lifestyle/so...