Autumn is almost here, this is what I've been reading since last we hung out:
In the words of J. Lo, “Oh, it was a summer.”
Jeff went home to help care for a parent going through cancer treatment, we finished settling into our new house, we finished coordinating our upcoming trip to Japan for my sister’s wedding, I made a major career decision, we hosted X. and Y. (my best friend and her husband, for those not in the know), and we’re already planning another wedding next year in Latvia for my other best friend H. and her partner V.. A lot has gone wrong in the year so far, there has been some hard, sad stuff to deal with but when I try and type out an update I am once again comforted by how fortunate and relatively safe my life is. In the year of Our Lady Beyonce 2025, I value those qualities more than ever.
It’s manifesting in some truly old lady hobbies and habits. I’ve been baking, cooking, knitting, and gardening like never before. I have next to know idea what I’m doing with those last two, but boy am I having fun making mistakes.
The dichotomy between feeling less and less control in the wider world and valuing my safe spaces and people more seems to sum up the way a lot of the culture is feeling right now. There is so much happening, everywhere, all the time that it’s hard to balance staying engaged and informed and not go mad. However you are managing this (or not), please let me know.
My first ever dahlias.
Call me a commie, but I don’t think that foster care should require or in any way be connected to profit of any type, much less private equity.
Watching the mini-MAGA civil kerfuffle over the Epstein files has been fascinating. If you don’t know what’s happening, The New York Times did a really good summary write up (thought it doesn’t delve into the truly batshit areas of QAnon and the wider conspiracy theory web). Trump rose to prominence on conspiracy theories, and conspiracism has been a major element of his and his surrogates messaging; what happens when you lose control of a narrative you have purposefully inflamed for your own benefit? I doubt this will “bring down” Trump, whatever the hell that means for a man who will be in power for three and a half more years, but it could very well cause more than one person in his administration their jobs. But after the better part of two decades watching him wriggle out of consequences I don’t have much faith that a conspiracy backlash would be THE THING that breaks his coalition. No matter how satisfying it would be.
AI is continuing to remake the web in record time, just as social media remade it before, and search engines before that. This is an excellent piece that explains what this means on the ground for platforms, publishers, writers, and creators. The most quality content is increasingly paywalled and what’s left is increasingly garbage. All of that adds up to: traffic apocalypse.
Also in AI, algorithm brain rot is real and it’s operating at the highest levels of government. “It's the perfect crystallization of what America has become: the world's most powerful content creator.” This line HAUNTED me.
Charlie Warzel is an instant-read for me, and his latest in The Atlantic perfectly sums up what I think is the most balanced, nuanced, accurate view of AI as the technology currently stands in 2025: it is devastatingly mid. It isn’t anywhere near the capabilities of its wildest hype me, and is very unlikely to get there under the current LLM scaling approach. And in spite of being so much less than its PR, so less capable than its marketing, it’s still probably going to disrupt and ruin everything anyway due to our inertia.
Sorry to hype the Times so much this week but this piece (which references to and links to another article from earlier in the year equally worth a read) is a refreshingly global view of migration. Way too much of the discourse in both the US and the UK is so self-focused, but a species level perspective is what’s required for this subject.
Anne Helen Petersen remains my favourite writer working, and if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter and podcast, you are missing out. She generously makes free content as well as paywalled, and this free podcast episode is so good: why is Katy Perry cringe now and why is it a bad thing for her? What happened, and what does it mean for the culture at large? It ends on one of the most earnest conversations I’ve listened to about the current “vibe shift” back to earnestness, and reasons to be hopeful.
We are cringe, yet we are free.
A historian and a branding and marketing expert
God, I love Amanda Mull. If you follow me on social media, you know that I HATE Labubus with a fiery passion. My hatred is gut level, a reflexive response to something ugly and cheap. Mull of course, has a much better and more nuanced take.
More Labubu content, for the haters
May he roast in the hell to which he was so gleeful about condemning others.
Incredibly relevant to today, given the bleak overlap of conspiracy, epidemiology and our political…climate.
Wow. Just…wow. This piece by Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame is…possibly career ending? Anyway, please read this take by Jia Tolentino as a companion piece if you do choose to indulge.
I’m not going to share any of the talking heads reactions to the shooting of Charlie Kirk earlier this week - not because his death isn’t a tragedy. It is. All gun violence of this type is and I wish for the legislation and controls that I believe would have made it much more likely for Kirk to be alive right now. He was also a fascist who contributed significantly to the deterioration of discourse and the radicalisation of young men through misogyny and racism. Both are true at once: Kirk should be alive right now, and he was a damaging figure who should not be flown home in Air Force Two at taxpayer expense, celebrated from the Oval Office, or eulogised by the press the way he is getting right now. But I wish to be spared any shaming or decorum policing about propriety or accusation of violent sympathy from the same pundits and influencers who have been promoting “Alligator Alcatraz” merch, cheering genocide, and performing cruelty by meme, soundbite, and verbal molotov cocktail - all for profit - for a significant portion of my adult life. If the tone of American political life is volatile, Kirk deliberately helped make it that way and cultivated big checks and lots of influence doing so. He’s not a martyr unless you agree that women and people of colour are inherently inferior to white men, antisemitism is an acceptable worldview, and that children are an acceptable sacrifice to the Second Amendment. And if you do agree with that, this internet space is not for you.
The one thing I will share is this piece from the excellent Garbage Day newsletter, about the one thing we can confidently assume about the shooter in these early days: he was terminally online. It’s the rising theme of a lot of mass violence incidents in the US these days and it’s important to have at least a working knowledge of the complex, overlapping online spaces that are radicalising people, mostly young men. It is NOT a coherent ideological space. It is half a dozen competing and warring factions in a trench coat. And the trench coat is armed.
