We are only beginning to understand the dangers that the internet—especially social media—can pose to young people’s development. We’re seeing compulsive use, disrupted sleep, cyberbullying, and exposure to harmful content. AI could magnify many of these risks by making them more persuasive and difficult to escape, and we should not wait another generation to start taking them seriously.
~ Bill Gates via Gates Notes
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The newsiness of the crimes in A Violent Masterpiece makes it feel contemporary, but the look and feel of the city—seen, so often, from behind the windshield of a car—also makes the novel a robust story of place. Noir thrives on style, on sensibility, and on situated-ness. Sure, there are bits of classic James Ellroy here: chopped sentences, words italicized for emphasis. Harper has incorporated these tropes in Jake’s narration, and it reads both old and new. The old, in this case, is peak Ellroy.
~ Carolyn Kellogg via The Atlantic
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via The New York Times:
How a Radical Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76
by Jennifer Schuessler with Photographs by Tony Cenicola
published on April 30, 2026
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Despite Elon Musk’s efforts to turn the entire written internet into Stormfront, the conversation on Twitter and Bluesky still runs through the media and the academy. And the escalating nastiness on these sites comes in part, I believe, from the precarity increasingly felt by workers in what we’ll loosely and somewhat artlessly call “knowledge fields.” These professions weren’t doing particularly well before Artificial Intelligence, and employees in these fields are deeply worried now. The actual ability of Artificial Intelligence to replace such jobs almost doesn’t matter, because nearly every corporation or university will have someone on staff ready to convince a C-suite executive or a chancellor that, if they do not replace some of their fallible and whiny employees with robots, they will die a quick and humiliating death.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
For their part, students fear being wrongly accused of AI cheating and are increasingly frustrated by instructors’ use of AI in areas that demand a human touch, such as grading, assignment creating, and feedback. Such an underground river of mutual suspicion is no foundation for a healthy classroom.
Published on August 13, 2026.
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Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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