A disproportionate number of Anthropic employees seem to be the children of novelists or poets. Still, their first stabs at screenwriting lacked a certain je ne sais quoi: in one scintillating exchange, the Human asks the Assistant if it’s actually important to add salt to spaghetti water.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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via The New York Times:
Gen Z Can’t Afford a First Date
by Troy Closson
published on August 3, 2026
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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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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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New York Mayor Ed Koch was annoyed, and he later referred to Donald Trump as “piggy, piggy, piggy.” In return, Trump called him a moron. The Mayor, he said, was “extremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely disloyal human being.”
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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One of the pleasing facets of plagiarism is that it doesn’t exist—not in the eyes of the law, that is, and especially not if those eyes are American. There is intellectual-property law, and a law that prohibits the trafficking of counterfeit goods. There are laws against copyright infringement. If plagiarists are sent to prison, however, it will not be because they have filched a slice of poetry, or half a juicy ballad, and passed it off as their own.
~ Anthony Lane via The New Yorker
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