Music takes on a different purpose by mid-August—who isn’t feeling a little lazy and crooked by now, spiritually overserved and ready for a nap? Crank the boom box; head to the hammock.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker
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Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay
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Japan in the 1980s pioneered the type of export-led, low-consumption development model later adopted by China and other Asian nations. A heavily managed financial market steered cheap financing toward manufacturers, and an extensive web of explicit and implicit subsidies and industrial policies directed taxpayer funds toward the promotion of exports. This was the institutional background for Japan’s high savings rate, which in the postwar period initially financed Japanese corporate investment in rebuilding domestic productive capacity, then financed Japan’s sizable budget deficit in the 1970s.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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Five American Universities
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Artificial Intelligence won’t replace all entry-level white-collar jobs, but it will cause an extended period of pain, during which an increasing number of employers, wowed by new advances in technology, decide to quietly stop hiring many recent college graduates. This will accelerate the already widening unemployment gap between young, college-educated people and everyone else.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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Since well before the pandemic, we’ve lived in a world of low-friction digital communication, where passing an obligation to someone else is extremely easy.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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Five American Universities
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When customers sign up for loyalty programs, like the one offered through the McDonald’s app, they might not fully realize the extent to which their data is being aggregated and used in predictive models.
~ Reece Rogers via Wired Magazine
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In the E.R., interactions between patient and doctor rarely unfold neatly and logically. A patient starts with a description of chest pain, circles back to a fever, remembers a medication he stopped taking, mentions a family history of heart disease only after his wife prompts him, then adds one more symptom as the encounter is wrapping up. But the A.I. scribe converts that wandering, stuttering exchange into a tidy clinical synthesis — a miracle, it seems! The messy human sprawl of the visit returned to me clean and perfectly punctuated in less than a minute.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine
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Interesting Read
via The New York Times:
Teaching in an American University Is Very Strange Right Now
by Frank Bruni
published on April 6, 2026
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