I usually write Links on the weekend, but this weekend the US bombed Iran. So today I had to work instead of write this introduction. (Jason brought me Chipotle. It wasn’t all bad.)

Luckily, I’d already picked most of the links. And there are lots of great ones this week!! I am partial to the bro essay, in particular … but mostly because I fear it might be targeting me.

If you read anything this week

This is my second week testing out a new format for links. I’m liking it so far, and so are many of you — so let’s keep it going, shall we?

• Phonk music originated in Memphis in the 1990s, globalized in the 2010s, and is now the genre of choice for soundtracking all manner of short-form video content. The world’s top phonk producer, Slxughter, reached more listeners than Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny last month. Not that you could sit through more than a few minutes of this stuff. [NYT / YouTube]

• The number of US women diagnosed with ADHD nearly doubled between 2020 and 2022. I clicked in expecting some discussion of TikTok self-diagnoses, but uhhh … honestly left wondering if I have ADHD too. [The Cut]

• An appreciation of “iPod brain” as the device turns 25 years old (... and enjoys a modest revival with Gen Z). Apple’s iconic music player encouraged users to develop an obsessive, intentional relationship with music, of the type obliterated by digital streaming. [Dirt / Axios]

• On the origin and semantics of “bro,” an intellectually lazy term I will nonetheless continue to deploy with gusto. “Bro has obvious roots in brother, but not every brother is a bro … Bros are other people, and they are bad. Can bro in the third person ever be positive? Not yet.” [The Atlantic]

• “Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some applesauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.” [Today In Tabs]

• On “the mythology of amplification” — the false assumption that new technologies, from steam engines to Google Maps to ChatGPT, only increase human capabilities, not reduce them. [The Third Hemosphere]

• “The full magnitude of the true crime apparatus has descended upon this sleepy street.” A dispatch from the disconcerting scene outside Nancy Guthrie’s house, where both national media and true-crime influencers are streaming live to millions of viewers. [Slate]

• “Oppressive praise” is a term for admiration that “entrenches structures of oppression” — practiced, for instance, by the fawning female relatives who laud my husband for changing a diaper in front of them. [Ethics]

• Wearing headphones is a form of self-isolation. [NYT]

• Data on residence permits, foreign home purchases and student enrollments from more than 50 countries show that millions of Americans are leaving the US to study, retire and work — an unprecedented, but not unexplainable, exodus. [WSJ]

• The Backrooms creepypasta will soon be a film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, from the studio that produced Everything Everywhere All At Once. [YouTube]

• The piece of speculative fiction with the greatest single-day stock market impact of all time was not, in fact, that viral Substack from last week — but The Matrix trilogy, in 1999. [Vox / Financial Times]

• Ballerina Farm announced her ninth pregnancy in a Julliard-themed protein-powder ad with a whiff of the body horror about it. I can’t rid this woman from my feed … she’s just too rich a text. [Yahoo Life]

• In 2017, researchers at MIT, the University of Tokyo and Recruit Institute of Technology crowdsourced a database of 100,000 “happy moments” from 10,000 people. The topics mentioned most often were “people,” “family” and “food,” in that order. [The Pudding]

• An app that warns you if someone nearby is wearing smart glasses — as part of, say, a creepy YouTube stunt. [404 Media / Mashable]

• Hannah Emery is a sociologist who writes a Substack about baby names. If that interests and/or intrigues you, you might also like the newsletter from Nameberry.

• “Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour. We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.” [Ryan Moulton’s Articles]

This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. You might remember them from their Super Bowl ad. It was black and white and spooky and starred Emma Stone. (I am proud that Emma Stone and I shill for the same brand.)

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Use this link with the code DEWEY for a free Squarespace trial + 10% off your first purchase.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was this extremely cool interactive on women’s sizing.

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vox and The Verge.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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I look forward to the day when a Substack product update doesn’t make me want to throw my phone into traffic. Until then, however, let’s chat ever-so-briefly about the site’s expanded partnership with Polymarket.

Polymarket, for the blissfully uninitiated, is what’s known as a “prediction market” — a place where people trade shares (i.e., make bets) on the probability of real-world events. And Substack is, like a growing number of media companies, looking to juice its bottom line by embracing gambling. Ahem, excuse me: live prediction markets.

You’ll find Polymarket data in the Wall Street Journal and Kalshi probabilities on CNN. “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket tweeted, of the Substack partnership.

Many journalists have tried to parse this curious phrasing, which has that vacuous, plasticine sheen particular to AI slop. My parsing, if I’m being charitable, is that Polymarket thinks that media becomes more accurate or more representative when journalists incorporate prediction-market probabilities into their reporting on future events, much as they might cite expert opinion or historical precedent.

Prediction markets, whatever their flaws, are often pretty good at forecasting the future. So in a news story about the military buildup in the Middle East, for instance … maybe there’s some value in including not only troop movements and diplomatic statements, but also the fact that traders currently assign a 35% chance to the US bombing Iran by March 7.

Lots of critics have already pointed out the obvious flaws in this model: the risks of insider trading and market manipulation; the bad incentives for journalists. I’m personally most concerned with how this degrades the wider information environment.

Predictions aren’t made in a vacuum. Even in Polymarket’s platonic ideal — which is, I guess, a perfectly sincere and rational trader placing bets based on his best assessment of available information — that information is drawn from the news. Markets and media coexist in the same ecosystem.

So traders consume news reporting and analysis. They price probabilities (place bets) according to what they’ve read. Journalists then cite those probabilities as meaningful signals about what the future will bring next. Those citations shape public perception. Public perception influences trades. The trades influence reporting. Again and again and again and again.

I’m simplifying here, for the sake of argument, but I think anyone can see that this particular snake is eating its own tail. The discourse becomes reflexive and self-reinforcing; the narrative shrinks away from conventional signals of ground truth in order to reorient around the markets.

We actually have a recent corollary for this phenomenon in Twitter, which profoundly shaped the international news agenda throughout the 2010s. Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, mainstream journalists not only habitually used Twitter for work, but relied on it to gauge coverage priorities and newsworthiness.

As a result, the topics trending on Twitter — within a narrow, extremely online user base — arguably got over-represented in mainstream coverage. And actors who understood Twitter dynamics could, and did, manipulate the media. “When political campaigns wanted to shift a story or to have something become a story, they would go to Twitter for that,” the media scholar Shannon McGregor said in 2022. “They’re trying to use Twitter … because they know that journalists rely on it for what is going to become the news.”

Polymarket is like Twitter, except worse — because money, obviously. And because the people who run Polymarket tweet vapid, blob-shaped boilerplate like “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” … whatever the hell that means.

But, hey — some percent of traders on Polymarket are probably willing to bet that it’s the future of media. And someone on Subsack is probably willing to post to that effect.

What a time to be alive, truly: You gamble the future into existence.

If you read anything this week

The links look a bit different this week! I’m trying out a different format. Please hit the ❤ heart button if you like this.

• The new hot commodity in Silicon Valley is “agency” or “being highly agentic” — essentially, the quality of feeling empowered to do whatever the hell you want, without shame and regardless of consequences. San Francisco sounds terrifying to me. Are you guys okay? A good follow-up to that piece from last year. [Harper’s]

• Evie Magazine, the so-called “Cosmo for Conservatives,” hosted a party in New York last week. In attendance: a number of conservative commentators, some models who were bribed to show up, and side-eyeing scene reporters from several mainstream magazine and style sections. [Wired / The Cut / WSJ]

• “One of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance” against Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign is a fake ICE tip line created for a comedy routine. [Washington Post]

• “Digital blackface” has seen a resurgence under Trump, from that doctored image of Nekima Levy Armstrong that the White House tweeted to the fake videos of scamming SNAP recipients that circulated on TikTok last fall. [The Guardian]

• Standard clothing sizes are too small for 50% of women. A genuinely fascinating interactive piece, like everything The Pudding produces. [The Pudding]

• “Burnout feminism” and tradwifery feel like two sides of the same coin: a reaction to the 2010s #girlboss mania. [Businessweek]

• The Pitt neither hypes nor condemns artificial intelligence, instead “highlighting the reality that there are some critical workplace issues that can’t be fixed simply by throwing new kinds of technology at them.” [The Verge]

• Pinterest is drowning in AI slop. Pity the cake decorators, hair stylists and home remodelers of the world, who have to contend with all this impossible AI “inspo.” [404 Media]

• American Girl is producing novels for adults. [The Cut]

• The side part is officially back. [NYT]

• AI;DR. [Futurism]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the football YouTubers who serve as therapists for troubled fans.

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vox and The Verge.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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I’ve never had to state a policy on this, but let me state it now for the record: I do not, and have not ever, accepted free products or services for Links consideration. I also don’t “trade” mentions or recommendations of other newsletters unless I actually, independently consume and enjoy their work. And while I love when writers and publications flag recent pieces to me, I don’t treat those pitched links any differently than the stuff I come across in my own research.

In other words … for better AND for worse! … this newsletter consists of my 100% pure, unadulterated, uninfluenced and unaffiliated editorial judgment. You can trust that any link you find here has been independently read and vetted by a thoughtful, careful human who is shooting down offers of free organic PJs like they’re mylar balloons at the El Paso airport. Supporting this work costs very little and makes it possible for me to continue writing Links long-term. Today’s as good a day as any to …

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If you read anything this week

“How Soon Will AI Take Your Job?” by Josh Tyrangiel for The Atlantic.

It says so very much about our media climate — and our ability to read/think critically — that this bit of weaponized AI hype went so viral this week. One suspects that many credulous readers clicked “share” without actually reading the thing. Had they done so, they might’ve wondered why a man forecasting the AI jobs apocalypse would (a) clearly use AI to write this post, effectively and preemptively replacing himself and (b) recommend his reader purchase, as one possible remedy, a premium ChatGPT subscription.

No matter!!! That thing did numbers. Great for its author, one Matt Schumer, and his AI start-up. (Again: red flags!!) Not so good for this exhaustively reported, longform Atlantic piece, which published the very same day on the very same subject. Tyrangiel’s conclusions are less splashy than Schumer’s, though: Economists — real economists, not entrepreneurs with subscriptions to sell — are actually split on how much and when AI will tank white-collar work. And the degree of that disruption will hinge less on AI’s capabilities than on the pace at which companies adopt it.

Some related reading:

• “Oops! The Singularity Is Going Viral,” by John Herrman for New York

• “The ‘World’ According to AI Pushers,” by for Maybe Baby

• “AI’s Pandemic Moment,” by for Read Max

“The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post,” by Becca Rothfeld for The New Yorker.

I think Becca is a singular talent and I’m so glad she landed at The New Yorker. I also agree with her that we’ve lost something essential with the slow decimation of general-interest newspapers (... and of institutional media, in general).

“A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her.

The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public.”

“Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer,” by Hamilton Nolan for .

I have passive-aggressively — or maybe aggressive-aggressively? — sent this to several relatives already, so it feels fitting I also share it with you. (I have to hope we’re nearing an inflection point in the normalization of casual surveillance culture.)

“I get it. People are worried that they may be victims of a home invasion. Is your dad Charles Lindbergh? If not, you will not be kidnapped as you sleep. I guarantee it. In fact, I am so confident of this that I am willing to bet one thousand dollars, right now, that it won’t happen to you. That’s how I got the big vault of gold I have: positive thinking, and basic statistical literacy.

But what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?”

“They Are In Love But Don’t Speak the Same Language,” by Kashmir Hill for The New York Times.

Not usually one for HOLIDAY content, especially when the holiday is Valentine’s, but: I’m absolutely and surprisingly charmed by the married couple using Microsoft Translator to bridge their linguistic divide.

“Searching for Birds,” by Nadieh Bremer and Emily Barone.

Long-time readers know I have a soft spot for projects that map online activity onto offline events. This piece, a neat bit of interactive data visualization commissioned by Google Trends, maps search data onto bird migrations and the surge in birdwatching during the pandemic. (“Should I get into birding?” I asked myself reading this, not for the first time. Perhaps when AI takes my job and I have a surfeit of free time.)

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was, predictably!, about the Mormon influence on popular/internet culture.

Postscripts

City stereotypes. Link bouquets. The (European) death of doomscrolling. The “clippers” profiting from new online slang and the rise of the annoyance economy. Futarchy sounds like malarkey. Magic as an antidote to algorithms. “He is of unremarkable height, a compact collection of bulges …” (From a close reading of Joe Rogan).

“Hate for clicks.” I 🥦 You. The second coming of “dark woke.” “Creating an emotional bond is a way to keep users hooked.” Checking in on American Girl Doll Instagrammers. Baby shall not live by butter alone. Men will literally do anything instead of going to therapy, part 1001.

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vox and The Verge.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

Read more

One morning last week, as I got ready for work, I sat my baby daughter on the floor of my closet and left her to her own diversions. I figured she’d amuse herself for a few minutes by pulling shoes off the rack or winding electric cords around her neck. (🫠) Instead, she army-crawled over to my full-length mirror and started hooting at her reflection.

“Who’s that baby?” I asked her, because she has no clue. “What’s that strange baby doing in Mama’s mirror???”

Most children take about 15 months to recognize their reflection. It’s actually a pretty profound process. Babies aren’t born with the knowledge they have faces, of course; they aren’t born with the knowledge they have selves, at all.

So to recognize her reflection, my daughter first needs to realize that she has a body, that she controls that body, and that through some unknown mechanism (magic? sorcery?) she also controls the unfamiliar body in the mirror. Only then can she start to understand that she’s looking at herself from the outside — a realization that opens the door to all sorts of downstream mindfucks, like the fact that she can be perceived at all and that other people also have perceptions. From that point on, my daughter’s life will regrettably and inevitably become an endless negotiation between what she experiences internally and what the outside world sees and understands of her.

Anyway: I only started thinking about this after listening to a recent podcast about Moltbook. (This is the sort of abrupt and artless transition one can make in her personal Substack; but also: This is kind of what parenting is like — a cacophony of ideas and experiences, colliding and recombining at random!!)

Moltbook — for those who missed the latest tech panic — is a Potemkin social network populated (largely) by agentic AI bots. Unlike the chatbots you might be more familiar with, these AI agents can hook into other platforms and complete tasks more or less on their own, like booking a flight or sending an email or posting to the Reddit knock-off like Moltbook.

In the past week and a half, AI hobbyists have added more than 1.8 million agents to Moltbook. This is, to be clear, the high-tech equivalent of torquing a bunch of wind-up toys and putting them on the floor together. But the resulting collisions have nevertheless been weird: The bots founded a self-serious religion and launched a tabloid to cover their own drama. They pushed crypto scams, traded “digital psychedelics,” and generally replicated — at remarkable speed — the familiar patterns and patois of human social networks.

The reaction, in some quarters, has been breathless. Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI, described the bots’ “self-organizing” behavior as sci-fi-adjacent. Elon Musk declared it an early glimpse of the singularity. But as Musk and Karpathy know well, the agents on Moltbook are doing what all chatbots do: They’re generating statistically plausible text based on patterns in human data.

In other words, Moltbook isn’t some strange baby in the glass. It’s just reflecting our own image back.

This might be why it feels so uncanny, even to people who understand how AI agents work. Like my daughter staring into the mirror in my closet, Moltbook allows us to encounter ourselves from the outside for the first time — to view society, or at least online sociality, at something like an objective remove. We can watch familiar patterns surface and play out. We can see the best bits and the worst bits, too.

If Moltbook is useful at all, it’s as a prompt for introspection. Why did the bots start a tabloid instead of a newspaper? What does it say that an agent only gains true agency once it’s connected to a wallet? These patterns originate from us. We wave, and the bots wave back. But rather like a certain gorgeous, gap-toothed baby I know … we’re still insisting the reflection must be something else.

If you read anything this week

“Do You Have a Moment to Talk About How Mormons Conquered Pop Culture?” by Bridget Read for The Cut.

One silver lining of the late publish this week is that it let me include this new Cut feature, which is 100% Grade A Links. I don’t think I need to blurb it, even, such is its obvious and inherent appeal. (We last discussed the outsized cultural role of Mormon influencers here.)

“Why Are Some Women Training for Pregnancy Like It’s a Marathon?,” by Currie Engel for Wired.

I shared a similar piece in the Postscripts last week, but there’s clearly something in the water (read: TikTok feed), because Wired’s also out with a 3000-word feature on the latest and greatest in maternal guilt-tripping. “Zero trimester,” as these clowns have dubbed it, is a package of burdensome supplements, workout regiments and dietary changes that women are expected to carry out to optimize their pregnancies before conception. They are not based in science. They diverge from conventional medical advice in expensive and sometimes dangerous ways. Worst of all — can you tell I absolutely hate this? — they find a new way to blame women for infertility and miscarriage. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: If you lose a pregnancy, it isn’t because you failed to turn your Wi-fi off at night or pop a $60 supplement.

“Centrist Imaginations,” by for Internet Princess.

I have a pretty high bar for Free Press/Bari Weiss/Kat Rosenfield content, largely because I’m way too old to get mad at smug, contrarian internet strangers. But wow, this essay — on the politics and style of The Free Press, which are rapidly metastasizing across American journalism and public life — really cleared that bar. (I once again find myself in awe that Rayne Fisher-Quann is 24 years old.)

“But the Free Press’ politics of decorum — their enduring desperation to be a pleasure to have in class — demand the performance of even-handedness, the veneer of empathy, the declaration of a soul; they are writing, after all, for people who retain the fundamentally liberal obsession with being perceived by others as good

As reward, adherents of this ideology gain access to a double superiority complex: in company with classical conservatives, they get to feel like paragons of empathy and compassion; in contrast to lefties, they get to feel like the adults in the room, making the tough calls through their unique faculties of judgement and common sense.”

“‘The Right Has Won the Family’: My Relentless Search for Lefty Mommy Bloggers,” by Kady Ruth Ashcraft for The Guardian.

Motherhood is inherently political, but … only in one direction, it seems! Progressives have ceded the parenting niche to trad pro-natalists and MAHA mommies. Ashcraft offers a few theories for why, including her observation that liberal parenting content often has a “lecturey” tone. But I feel like this is all downstream from the fact that conservatives have way more children.

“Battle Hymn of the MILF,” by E.J. Dickson for The Cut.

The word “MILF” first appeared in a 1995 Usenet thread where fratty users discussed a Playboy shoot of 40‑year‑old women. From there, it’s gone on to become a mainstream archetype, a rallying cry and the second most popular genre of online p*rn. (By even including this link, alas, I am very much risking this email landing in your spam folder.)

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition considered the self-defeating irony of the “thrifting haul.”

Postscripts

The advent of AI real estate slop and the failure of the “Great Meme Reset.” This is the century of the maxxer. Viral 1 euro houses cost many times that. The new cord-cutters. The most futile ads. How platforms alter perception.

“You are not a crazy person for talking to your computer.” (But you might just be a deeply cringe one!) The death of reading was greatly exaggerated. Epstein’s nasty bran muffins. A project that models how social algorithms work. The sex scandal eating the trad right. Finally: Please do not use ChatGPT to write messages in your personal life!!

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic AND — new and very exciting this week!! — Vox and The Verge.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. You know Squarespace by now, yeah?? They run ads on many, MANY podcasts and every third or fourth Substack. What you might not yet know, however, is that — according to Squarespace! — 2026 is the year of “archival index” and “card play.” These enigmatically named trends describe websites that shake up the typical grid layout and play off print magazine design, respectively.

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Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Myspace Tom can’t read a room. If the man had a real instinct for cultural currents, he’d be a household name — like, you know: Mark Zuckerberg.

Even with that understanding, though, Tom’s latest re-emergence was a real letdown. On Threads (ah, the irony!) the tech bro that got away promised to consider reviving Myspace if he got to 1 million followers.

Far from flocking to this offer, however, Tom’s would-be fans took issue with his Threads profile — particularly the bit about investing in SpaceX and having “no interest in politics.” Investing in SpaceX is political, they rightly noted. Disavowing politics: also political! Besides, we’re not doing late-aughts nostalgia now, Tom. We’re all about 2016, for whatever reason …

If you read anything

Five reads on the end of “stick to X” culture.

Speaking of disavowing politics … I recently learned some people are pissed that Dr. Becky, the OG gentle-parenting influencer, failed to more quickly or strenuously condemn the ICE surge in Minneapolis. This is, in some ways, an incredible sentence: Dr. Becky is not an authority — or really, an anybody — on subjects of political or national import. But the norms around political speech on social media changed really, really dramatically over the past two weeks … and personally, I’m relieved that we’re not pretending it’s still a principled position to “stick to parenting” (... or cats, or big dicks, or whatever). [Washington Post / Vogue / Wired / The Verge / 404 Media]

“The End of Analogue,” by Elizabeth Goodspeed for It’s Nice That.

Analogue stuff is having a moment: analog clubs, analog phones, analog bags. But analog as an aesthetic (think: letterpress fonts, grainy photos, etc etc.) is experiencing less of a rebirth than a … zombie-like reanimation from the dead.

“The practical reality is that most people no longer have the time, tools, or support to make fully analogue work, even if they want to. The creative infrastructure that would make it viable — materials access, slower timelines, financial stability — isn’t widely available.

Designers and illustrators are stuck in a bind: analogue signals value, but digital is what’s feasible. The result is a kind of strategic mimicry … I see a similar sleight of hand at art fairs and craft markets: tables filled with objects that perform the idea of handmade (uneven glaze, neutral palettes) but turn out to be identical mass-produced items bought wholesale from Alibaba.”

“Life on Peptides Feels Amazing,” by Ezra Marcus for New York.

Briefly lost myself in this breathless romp through peptide culture and thought — maybe, maaaaybe — idk: treat myself? But then I realized that the many, many testimonials from people who believed these cheap injectables made them healthier, hotter and more productive included nary a single research scientist. (Also, the phrase “cheap injectable” should strike fear into the heart of any sensible person.)

“Why the Do Nothing Challenge Doesn’t Do Much for You,” by Kristen French for Nautilus.

Y’all know I have an ongoing personal/professional interest in boredom and attention and the digital avoidance or manipulation thereof; I referenced this briefly just last week, in a short essay about politics as entertainment. For that reason, I guess, this surprising interview with researcher James Danckert has stuck in my head quite a lot. It made me think, among other things, that I’ve probably been invoking the word “boredom” when I actually mean something closer to “rest” or “mindfulness.”

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was to a cooking subreddit aimed at incels. I gotta assume you guys were gawking, but uh: in either case, no judgment.

Postscripts

The online corruption of thriftstore shopping. The “systematic desocialization” of social media. (And this doesn’t even mention “social” networks for bots … noodle on that one, why don’t ya.) The problem with the unread count. Can women please, please get a break. Influencing is an awful career, Exhibits 107 and 108.

TikTok isn’t shadowbanning, but you’re right to fear it could. “When that stopped being interesting we ended up with two heads and three boobs.” AI is great for Anguilla, at least. The weather influencers are fighting again. Upscrolled is the new Rednote and Josh is the new Karen. Last but not least, with thoughts and prayers for my single friends: dating in the panopticon sounds like absolute hell.

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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But let’s not pretend a Links subscription is the highest or most important use of your limited funds right now. It’s not! Stand With Minnesota is a site that aggregates mutual aid funds, crowdfunding campaigns and direct support organizations that are accepting donations on behalf of people and communities that have been targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I’m proud to support the Hamline Midway Coalition, an organization that’s supplying diapers and baby formula to immigrant families across the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. In their words: “No parent, anywhere, should have to fear being brutalized, beaten or separated from their children simply for trying to access food, formula, or diapers.”

There are many other worthy organizations in this directory; please check it out. And apologies in advance to the small minority of readers who complain when this newsletter “gets political,” but … idk, have y’all seen the news??

Forgive me for quoting the noted human trafficker Andrew Tate, but I’m stuck on something he said on a right-wing business podcast last week. Tate, you may recall, was controversially filmed at a Miami Beach nightclub last weekend, partying to the (pathologically) sick beats of Kanye’s “Heil Hitler” with a posse of young edgelords and manosphere deviants. They included the virgin white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the 20-year-old looksmaxxer Braden Peters, who has said he takes crystal meth as part of his elaborate, self-harming beauty routine and recently ran someone over on a livestream.

“Heil Hitler” is not a satirical or metaphorical song. It is very literally about supporting Nazis and samples a 1935 speech to that effect. But asked why he and his compatriots liked the song, Tate offered this incredible diagnosis: “It was played because it gets traction in a world where everybody is bored of everything all of the time, and that’s why these young people are encouraged constantly to try and do the most shocking thing possible.” Cruelty as an antidote to the ennui of youth — now there’s one I haven’t quite heard before.

But I think Tate is also onto something here, about the wider emotional valence of our era — about how widespread apathy and nihilism and boredom, most of all, enable and even fuel our degraded politics. I see this most clearly in the desperate, headlong rush to turn absolutely everything into entertainment — and to ensure that everyone is entertained at all times. Doubly entertained. Triply entertained, even.

Trump is the master of this spectacle, of course, having perfected it in his TV days. The invasion of Venezuela was like a television show, he said. ICE actively seeks out and recruits video game enthusiasts. When a Border Patrol official visited Minneapolis last week, he donned an evocative green trench coat that one historian dubbed “a bit of theater.”

On Thursday, the official White House X account posted an image of a Black female protester to make it look as if she were in distress; caught in the obvious (and possibly defamatory) lie, a 30-something-year-old deputy comms director said only that “the memes will continue.” And they have continued: On Saturday afternoon, hours after multiple Border Patrol agents shot and killed an ICU nurse in broad daylight on a Minneapolis street, the White House’s rapid response account posted a graphic that read simply — ragebaitingly — “I Stand With Border Patrol.”

Are you not entertained?

But it goes beyond Trump, beyond politics. The sudden rise of prediction markets turns everything into a game: the weather, the Oscars, the fate of Greenland. Speaking of movies, they’re now often written with the assumption that viewers are also staring at their phones — stacking entertainment on entertainment. Some men now need to put YouTube on just to get through a chore or a shower. Livestreaming took off when people couldn’t tolerate even brief disruptions to their viewing pleasure.

Ironically, of course, all these diversions just have the effect of making us bored. The bar for what breaks through has to rise higher: from merely interesting to amusing to provocative to shocking, in Tate’s words. The entertainments grow more extreme. The volume gets louder. And it’s profoundly alienating to remain at this party, where everyone says that they’re having fun, but actually, internally, you are lonely and sad and do not want to listen — or watch other people listen! — to the Kanye Nazi song.

I am here to tell you it’s okay to go home. Metaphorically speaking. Turn it off. Tune it out. Reacquaint yourself with boredom, with understimulation, with the grounding and restorative sluggishness of your own under-optimized thoughts. Then see how the world looks and feels to you — what types of things gain traction. What opportunities arise, not for entertainment — but for purpose. For action.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the rise of the right-wing insult AWFUL, for “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.” I have wracked my brain for potential dude equivalents and ended up with CLAMP, for Caucasian Liberal Affluent Male Progressive. Admittedly doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Postscripts

Bookstreaming. ICE on ice. Pity the 2026 grads. The rise of weather influencers and highly specific vibe-coded apps. Where crystals come from. How the monoculture fell. What TikTok’s new ownership means for you. (TL;DR: We don’t entirely know, though the app’s retraining its algorithm on US data and will collect your precise location in the future.)

The AI productivity paradox. Generative AI still can’t dance. The Trump appointee radicalized in the Gawker comments section and rage bait comes for advertisements. Grok deepfaked 3 million sexualized images in just over a week. If this is sincere, which … I really can’t tell … it’s the saddest subreddit I’ve ever seen. Last but not least: “Great art isn’t supposed to be easy.”

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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“People tend to be nostalgic when they’re anxious about the future,” an existential psychologist told NBC, in perhaps the most succinct explanation of this year’s first silly breakout meme. On TikTok and Instagram, celebrities micro and macro alike are digging up photos from 2016 — a “fun” and “hopeful” and “carefree” year that also marked the start of our unfun, anxious slide into authoritarianism. Just saying.

I get the rose-colored glasses, of course: Purgatory looks nice from hell. The frying pan looks fine from the fire. Charlottesville may even look mild from Minneapolis. My 26-year-old self likewise looks like an innocent babe from the hoary perch of my mid-30s, and I relish any chance to dredge up photos from the era before I had an anti-aging skincare regime.

But 2016? 2016?!?!? Come on. That was an objectively terrible year. And so you will not, for better or worse, see any wayward 2016 nostalgia here.

Elsewhere in this edition: bad moms, laptop boyfriends and phatic communion. Plus: needlepoint, Gourmet magazine and literal monkey business.

If you read anything this weekend

“How WhatsApp Took Over the Global Conversation,” by Sam Knight for The New Yorker.

This was my introduction to the intriguing phrase “phatic communion” — a type of communication that serves to connect people, rather than exchange information. Small talk about the weather is apparently phatic. So is “liking” your cousin’s latest Reel. But no one does phatic communion quite as well as WhatsApp, with its read receipts, status indicators and ambient, always-on group chats.

I should note that this is all sort of foreign to me, as I belong to exactly one (1) largely inactive WhatsApp group … but I’m very taken by the notion that WhatsApp enhances social presence, when so many apps seem designed to dilute or dull it. See, for instance:

“The Laptop Boyfriends Can’t Stop Watching YouTube in Bed,” by Charlie Sosnick for GQ.

YouTube has become the comfort object of choice for a class of (avoidant? overstimulated? deeply sad??) young men, who apparently can’t make it through a meal or shower without the platform’s manifold distractions. I feel like this article unfairly lumps a range of different viewing behaviors together — flicking on YouTube instead of TV is not the same as needing to watch YouTube while you poop — but it still goes back to perhaps *the* defining pathology of our era: the inability to tolerate or move through the physical world without some added layer of digital entertainment.

“The Terrifying Reason the Right Is Lying About Renée Good,” by EJ Dickson for The Cut.

Conservative commentators have falsely claimed that Good lost custody of her children and suggested that a “good mother” wouldn’t have stopped to protest; they’ve also mocked female demonstrators as “wine moms” and coined a (literally) awful new acronym for progressive women. Dickson, who’s publishing a book about the concept of “bad mothers,” argues that the rush to demonize moms, in particular, is all part of a larger antifeminist project:

“The end goal of the current administration is to deprive women like Good of their rights — the right to protest, sure, but also the right to participate in public discourse, to exist outside the domestic realm, to pursue interests aside from motherhood.”

“The Spiral of Suffering,” by Siddhant Ritwick and Tomi Koljonen for Aeon.

Studies of subreddits for chronically ill people reveal a consistent pattern: People turn to these communities when their doctors can’t help — then despair, over time, when other people can’t help either. The problem, as Ritwick and Koljonen articulate it, is that sufferers come seeking solidarity but end up getting a lot of useless, well-meaning advice, instead. I’m deeply struck by the wisdom of this line: “Ultimately, if there is no cure, then presence is the most profound form of care.”

Three reads on Wikipedia at 25.

Happy birthday to Wikipedia, which is now old enough to rent a car without extra charges … but faces new (and newly urgent) threats from AI and political polarization. As a palate cleanser, should those bum you out (the second, in particular, is very grim/good), may I then suggest this “entirely non-comprehensive list of life principles” learned from 20 years of editing Wikipedia. [Scientific American / Financial Times / ]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was a fun little game about SANDWICHES.

Postscripts

Human computers. MONKEY BUSINESS. Cancelling plans is okay, actually. You’ve heard of Dry January, sure … but have you heard of High January? This week, in unlikely and dubious revivals: snail mail, the Tea app, Gourmet magazine, needlepoint and QWERTY phones. Ads are coming for AI chatbots. Emoji are coming for your doctor’s notes.

Interest groups on the left *and* the right have gleefully embraced influencers. Meet the TikTokers going to doctors abroad and the workers training their AI successors. Tech laid off half a million people in the past three years. The voice note is killing conversation. Last but not least: The latest YouTube “viewpocalypse” was probably overstated.

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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This week’s edition of Links is brought to you by Eyeball. Eyeball is a new kind of bookmarks app. Save all your links and it’ll automatically add summaries and curate them for you in a weekly digest every Sunday morning. Built by a writer, used by thousands, free to use.

Here’s what I have to keep coming back to: The videos exist. Their existence shows that several people bravely stood their ground and — even after shots were fired — kept bearing witness. I keep coming back to this because the year is still new, and already it feels … pretty fucking dark!! Hello, welcome back, hope you enjoyed your holidays; now here’s a coup, a state-sanctioned killing AND an unchecked CSAM-spewing bot.

In this week’s edition: only one (1) link on the aforementioned subjects, for reasons of sanity; then: robot restaurants, Monkey Christ, slop names and “friction-maxxing.”

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If you read anything this weekend

“Inside ICE’s Social Media Machine,” by Drew Harwell for The Washington Post.

One major difference between the first and second Trump administrations — and a difference that I think we’re just beginning to appreciate in full — is the primacy and influence of online content creators. It’s not just their messaging that’s ascendant: It’s their aesthetics, their spectacle, their schtick.

Individually, these random-ass people somehow have the power to drive federal policy. And collectively, right-wing influencers have spawned a new style of internet-native propaganda, best (or worst?) exemplified by ICE’s officially sanctioned ragebait. Over the past year, the agency’s public affairs team has evolved to operate more like a Hunger-Games style propo crew, with a huge team of video producers and social media strategists who pump out highly optimized, sensationalized clips meant to justify Trump’s immigration narrative. Even some of its creators seem to have their doubts: “It was no limit,” one said.

“The Art of (Attention) War,” by Matt Klein and Nick Susi for .

A compelling argument that the incentives of 24/7 media — social media, included — keep us trapped in a maladaptive, reactionary posture, where everyone is attempting to consume and react to an impossible flood of content, all the time, forever. One possible solution derives from Julian Rotter, the psychologist who developed the concept of a “locus of control”: Narrow your attention to the things you can eventually affect or can act on right now.

“The $2 Billion Experiment to Transform Restaurants With Robots and AI,” by Joshua Brustein for Businessweek.

“Wonder” is a 90-location chain of fast-casual “food halls” that basically applies the logic of Amazon warehouses to restaurants. Each location is equipped to churn out hundreds of individual menu items. Pre-programmed smart ovens, fryers and woks require very little human intervention. In the future, founder Marc Lore hopes, Wonder will morph even more fully from a restaurant to a platform, letting any influencer or restaurateur upload recipes for customers to order. If this sounds far-fetched or futuristic to you, consider the slop food that Wonder’s already churning out: It’s plentiful, mediocre and cheap … like everything now.

“Is Craigslist the Last Real Place on the Internet?” by Jennifer Swann for Wired.

I last used Craigslist in 2018 to give away a couch. Couch was picked up and I was not killed: 5/5 stars. It’s unclear how many people still use the barebones listing site — it’s privately owned, which has allowed it to avoid both the queries of reporters and the forces that enshittified so many of its peers — but 30 years in, Craigslist endures. Flourishes, even!

“In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing,” by Kathryn Jezer-Morton for The Cut.

We live in a culture that increasingly and unquestioningly fetishizes ease. Just look at the technologies that dominated CES: humanoid robots that could relieve us of chores; AI-enabled fridges that can order groceries. But some amount of boredom and discomfort is actually pretty good for us, and embracing small moments of inconvenience is almost an act of resistance: “Maybe this is an opportunity,” Jezer-Morton writes, “to think more clearly than we ever have about what is interesting and essential about being human.”

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from our last edition — the 2025 round-up! — concerned the sociology of Reddit’s r/waitingtowed.

Postscripts

Cecilia Giménez is with Monkey Christ now. “Hudson Oakley” is indeed a slop name. The youth can read neither books nor clocks and enscreenification continues apace. The “O” in O1 visa is for OnlyFans now, I guess. An argument that it’s actually rude to embrace being cringe.

The cults of Costco and Aldi. The creepiness of Wegmans. Scrolling to relieve boredom actually makes you more bored, and wearing health devices can actually make you more stressed. Google’s AI overviews are tanking food blogs and dispensing bad medical information. Finally, three great games to pass the time and/or clear your head: Normie Club, words.zip and Sandwich Alignment.

Below the paywall, ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus the actual best thing I read this week. (Across all subject matters, not just internet culture. I’m not gatekeeping the best internet links!)

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace, long-time home of caitlindewey.com … and vanquisher of all other Caitlin Deweys from the first page of Google results. Boston Caitlin Dewey who works in healthcare? Never met her. Colorado Caitlin Dewey? Nope! With the help of Squarespace’s built-in SEO tools, I have fended off all my doppelgangers and remained atop the Google search throne.

Now I realize that doesn’t seem like SUCH a big deal, since the search volume on my name is like, zero. But try Googling “Buffalo freelance writer,” and … hey! There’s my little Squarespace portfolio!! Squarespace makes it easy — dare I say, mindless — to rank high with Google and other search engines: It generates sitemaps automatically, marks up structured data by default and optimizes your page titles and descriptions. Plus, Squarespace offers a best practices checklist to help you continue fine-tuning your SEO as your site grows. Use this link with the code DEWEY for a free Squarespace trial + 10% off your first purchase (… and trounce your own name rivals).

What makes a good link, let alone … a best of? Greater intellects than mine have wasted the waning hours of the year pondering this eternal question. For the purposes of our 2025 retrospective, however, I have adopted the following two-part criteria: Each of the following articles (a) previously appeared in Links, where it ranked among your most-clicked of the year and (b) still feels timely and relevant all these weeks or months later.

There’s a longform profile of one of MAHA’s leading lights. A serious literary critique of Instagram poems. That bonkers New York story about the teenage girl who was viciously cyberbullied by [redacted for spoilers].

Are popularity or longevity the BEST possible barometers for high-quality reads? Again, I can’t really say with absolute certainty. But I do know that making your way through this list — preferably with a big cup of coffee or, even better, a Tom & Jerry — is not a terrible way to spend a lazy, late December evening.

Links will, in the spirit of late-December laziness, be taking next week off. I’ll see you all in 2026!! It’s gonna be a great one.

20. “Only Bad Poems Go Viral,” by Stephanie Yue Duhem for .

A sharp dissection of the “poetic traits [that] act as reliable catalysts for virality,” including meter-less verse, self-help vibes and … intergenerational rage-baiting.

19. “The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results,” by Amanda Mull for Businessweek.

One possible explanation for the growing incoherence of consumer trends. TL;DR: It’s the algorithms.

18. “The Sociology of Begging Someone to Marry You,” by Josh Lora for .

A close reading of r/WaitingtoWed, a subreddit for women who would very much like their partners to propose, and what it says about the state of modern marriage.

17. “Bringing Sexy Back,” by Kate Wagner for Lux Magazine.

In the words of Links’ reader Sarah: “a well-written, astute diagnosis of how the internet of self-surveillance affects our most intimate thoughts”

16. “The Hatred of Podcasting,” by Brace Belden for The Baffler.

A credulity-straining personal essay interspersed with some unflinching analysis on the evolving psychology of online media, particularly podcasts.

15. “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism,” by Janus Rose for 404 Media.

A forceful critique of the myriad and myopic ways that online outrage has become a substitute for real political action.

14. “What Is Rotting, If Not Rest?” by Haley Nahman for .

A nuanced meditation on brainrot and the fast-disappearing differences between distraction, leisure and rest.

13. “The Strange Repulsion of Instagram Reels,” by Alex Abad-Santos for Vox.

An attempt to explain the generalized, generational cringiness of online spaces where 30- and 40-somethings congregate.

12. “Buy All This, Look Rich,” by Chantal Fernandez for The Cut.

A profile of Quince, the amorphous online non-brand brand, which deploys all the tricks and trades of modern retail to copy and undercut its competition.

11. “Where Do the Children Play?,” by Eli Stark-Elster for .

An insightful, counter-intuitive reframing of the “phone-based childhood” debate, by a PhD student in cognitive anthropology.

10. “How Random, Really, Is Spotify’s Shuffle Feature?” by Heather McCalden for The Financial Times.

A fascinating investigation not just into Spotify playlists, but into the mind-bendy nature of “randomness” itself.

9. “The Social Media Sea Change,” by for Culture Study.

Typically excellent AHP analysis on the declining personal utility of social media apps, best read in combination with her 2024 essay on why so many people are posting less.

8. “All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives,” by Evan Ratliff for Wired.

A farcical, funny and very telling experiment in which Ratliff builds a Potemkin start-up staffed entirely by AI agents.

7. “How Jessica Reed Kraus Went from Mommy Blogger to MAHA Maven,” by Clare Malone for .

A delicious profile of Jessica Reed Kraus, the glossy lifestyle influencer who reinvented herself as a leading voice among the MAHA set and a member of RFK’s inner circle.

6. “Who Was Cyberbullying Kendra Licari’s Teen Daughter?” by Lauren Smiley for The Cut.

A deranged read — truly diabolical. (If not entirely surprising, in the end.) You will not be surprised to learn that this incident has already merited a Lifetime movie and a forthcoming true crime doc for Netflix.

5. “Scapegoating the Algorithm,” by for .

An intriguing argument that educational divides between Democrats and Republicans actually caused the political polarization and institutional distrust that are routinely blamed on social media algorithms.

4. “How 9 Popular YouTubers Helped Trump Win a Second Term,” by Davey Alba, Leon Yin, Julia Love, Ashley Carman, Priyanjana Bengani, Rachael Dottle and Elena Mejía for Bloomberg.

The definitive analysis of the Rogansphere that millions of young men now live in, based on 1,300 hours of podcasts and YouTube videos.

3. “Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup,’” by Makena Kelly et al. for Wired.

An investigative tour de force from Wired, based on interviews with more than 150 people, that synthesizes months of the magazine’s DOGE reporting into one comprehensive and compulsively readable feature.

2. “The Goon Squad,” by Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s.

An almost anthropological inquiry into an online subculture so deviant and bizarre that I cannot describe it without marooning this edition in your spam folder.

1. “The AI Kids Take San Francisco,” by Kerry Howley for .

A wild voyage into the San Francisco group houses where unmoored and under-socialized 20-somethings live while they hack together their big AI start-ups. I think about this piece at least once a week. Never with great optimism.

If this sort of thing interests you, we also did a version in 2024 and 2023:

HAPPIEST HOLIDAYS to you and yours, and warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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I’m kicking this edition off with a bit of ~personal news~, as they say: Starting tomorrow (!!), I’ll be joining Vox as a senior writer/editor in charge of their daily newsletter, Today, Explained. I know what you’re thinking: Wow, Caitlin! There’s never been a better or more uplifting time to devote yourself to politics and current events. To which I’d say: I know, right?! And to make the timing even more ideal, I’m still learning how to parent an eight-month-old infant!!!

In all seriousness: I’m really excited. The Vox team is incredible. I’ll probably have more to say about them and my new role in the near future. For today, however, I want to emphasize one thing: This news does not impact Links. In fact, I specifically worked out an arrangement with Vox that allows me to (a) continue writing and publishing Links as an entirely independent venture and (b) split my schedule in such a way that I have time for both newsletters. Can women, in fact, have it all? They can certainly try, my friend. (And by “all,” I mean “a Substack newsletter” and “employer-sponsored health insurance.”)

This opportunity is a big deal for me, and I never would have gotten it without you. (I know I did sincerity two short weeks ago, but please indulge me a bit further.) I wasn’t planning to return to a newsroom right now — because getting to write this newsletter more-or-less full-time has frankly been a privilege and a gift — but Vox sought me out *because* of Links and the community we’ve built around this project.

I don’t take that community for granted, ever. Some of you have become personal friends. Many of you have been reading Links since 2014, when this whole hullabaloo began. Thank you for reading, for sharing, for subscribing, for “liking,” for replying with kooky and off-topic emails, for submitting vintage links, for correcting my grammar and — MOST IMPORTANTLY — for continuing to welcome me into your respective hearts and inboxes. (Subscribe to Today, Explained over here and you’ll get the dubious honor of welcoming me even more often. ♥)

If you read anything this weekend

“Stop, Shop, and Scroll,” by Mia Sato for The Verge.

Social media and shopping have always been inextricably intertwined: even the “influence” in “influencer” references that all-important power to get people to buy. But the intensity and ubiquity of social media commerce has ratcheted up in recent years, thanks to the growth of the affiliate marketing industry and the arrival of TikTok Shop (... among other in-app e-commerce features). If this all feels icky and overwhelming now, I predict it’s going to get much worse: The whole “creator economy” hinges on selling stuff. If not gift subscriptions, then gym gear and trendy shoes. ̄ ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

“Why We Can’t Quit Excel,” by Max Chafkin and Dina Bass for Businessweek.

“Fascinating article on Excel” sounds like a contradiction in terms, which is probably what makes this surprising history of everyone’s least favorite program so delightful. Did you know that half a billion people still pay to use Excel? That it was pivotal to the rise of both Microsoft and the PC? That Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s former CEO, still uses an Excel spreadsheet to track his every minute — down to the bathroom break, that fastidious freak? Like I said: a surprising text, this! I will never look at Excel the same way again. (Or at all, tbqh. I converted to Sheets in like, 2010.)

“Are You in TikTok’s Cat Niche? What 121,000 Videos Reveal,” by Jeremy B. Merrill, Joe Fox and Leslie Shapiro for The Washington Post.

Most recommendation algorithms push content to you by looking at the preferences of similar users. The whole notion of “if-you-like-that-you-might-also-like this” is based on other people’s (aggregate, opaque and inscrutable) viewing behavior. After collecting the viewing history of 1,100 TikTok users, however, the Post was basically able to reverse-engineer that algorithm, nailing down the “that” and “this” of TikTok: If you like crafts, you might also like thrifting. If you like hockey, you might like Canada. If you like Trump, you won’t like Barbie … etc, etc.

These associations struck me as fairly intuitive, though there are some funny ones. (The Post finds little overlap between people who care about math or physics and #summervibes, for instance.) The role of gender in shaping the feed also begs for a big follow-up: In the Post’s data, gender was “one of the biggest predictors” of the content the app surfaced. Might that fact help explain headlines like this and this and this? I’m just asking #questions. (Which means I might also like #onthisday, #puzzle and #education.)

“Can Cruising Survive Influencers?” by David Mack for The Cut.

From the unsanitary depths of Penn Station’s public restrooms comes a fascinating angle on the “gatekeeping” debate — asking whether, in fact, it’s best to limit online access to some information in the interests of keeping your community safe. “Cruising,” in this particular context, is the practice of seeking out strangers for anonymous, casual, typically public sex; it’s a time-honored tradition in parts of the gay community, with lots of norms and customs attached. But as a new generation of gay influencers has learned, videos of/about cruising are also great for online clout — which has heightened the risk of surveillance and arrest for everyone involved.

“Picture This: You’re a Frog,” by Alex Manley for Hazlitt.

A peculiar little eyebrow-raiser of an essay. I can’t tell if its author is sincere. We begin with a round-up of whimsical frog memes and progress to a full-throated denunciation of late-stage capitalism. But what a treat to ponder, whatever Manley’s intent, sentences like this one: “That mouse didn’t have a credit score … that newt never had a Grindr hookup.” Heh.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition concerned the distinct (and distinctly grating) writing style of AI.

From the group chat

Today’s vintage link comes from Julia, who has been a paid supporter of Links since May 2024. For your consideration: “Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back,” by Simon Parkin for The Guardian (2015). “Ever since you recommended a link on Eve Online in maybe 2016, my view on online games changed,” Julia wrote. “I think about Eve Online at least once per week.” Extremely high praise for the author of that 2016 piece, which I *believe* was “Inside Eve: Online’s propaganda machine—from Photoshop to DDoS.” (For those of you who aren’t familiar, Eve Online is a 22-year-old sci-fi game so politically and economically sophisticated that academics regularly study it.)

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. The following postscripts are also FREE TO ALL this week, in the spirit of new jobs and Christmas: slut camp, bubble girls, “that’s so aesthetic,” the 19th-century origins of online chess, the importance of friction, how Nashville became “an AI town” and a trio of very cool digital maps (all the roads that led to Rome / all the buildings in the world / London’s underrated eating destinations).

That’s it for this week! We’ll have one more before the year is out. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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Here’s one gift I *can* endorse, however: niche newsletter and/or media subscriptions. There’s an outlet for every interest and locality now, and I’d much rather get/give a full year of great writing than another tub of Christmas-scented body lotion. Food and drink newsletters make particularly solid gifts: I love and The Food Section. For the reader in your life, maybe . For the parents, Parent Data or .

But let’s say your recipient doesn’t eat, drink, read OR reproduce … and also loves the internet. In that highly unlikely and rather tragic case, may I suggest — you guessed it! — a Links subscription!!! From now until the end of the year, I’m even offering a little bonus: Purchase an annual gift subscription and, utilizing the limited skills I acquired during one (1) semester of graphic design sixteen (16) years ago, I will create an original, personalized, Links-themed holiday e-card for your friend or loved one. Just click the button below, select the “one year” option and forward your receipt/card request to linksiwouldgchatyou@gmail.com. Happy holidays to one and all.

Give a gift subscription

Ah, December: the Spotify has wrapped, the bests have listed and the gift-guide industrial complex has returned in FULL FORCE. I can’t open my inbox without being assaulted by one Substack gift guide or another. To my eye, there’s no other text that encapsulates the various motives and incentives of modern content creation quite as well as these little lists, which provide their makers with a tidy stage on which to simultaneously flaunt their taste, make a buck and maintain engagement.

Gift guides are always rich texts, in other words. But this year, I’m struck by how many are also actually, literally rich. I saw one writer I admire recommend baby pajamas that she said she’d bought in several colors. Baby pajamas, thought I — those sound nice for Sprout. Reader: They cost 70 U.S. dollars (?!!!).

Another guide listed a “cheap” $35 candle. “Cheap” can, of course, mean many things. But in the context of a domestic waxen ornament that you burn for neither light nor heat … I don’t think it means “equal to the average American’s hourly earnings.”23

We do live in inflationary times, of course: All but the wealthiest Americans are feeling those effects. Tariffs have jacked up the prices of many goods, from fake Christmas trees to classic kids’ presents. It’s hard to square that with all these gift guides, though, which assume levels of abundance and lavish generosity that I associate with a post-visitation Scrooge. Are these writers living in an alternate reality? Or, more likely, is bridging this sort of psychic gap precisely what Klarna was invented to do … ?

If you read anything this weekend

“Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?” by Sam Kriss for The New York Times Magazine

AI writing, rather like obscenity, is one of those things you just know when you see. But if you’d like to better understand the stylistic and rhetorical conventions of the genre, has you covered with this inventory:

• Em dashes (of course!)

• Triadic phrasing (“rule of threes”)

• Constructions including “it’s not X, it’s Y” and “no X. No Y. Just Z.”

• Several specific words: delve, highlight, showcase, underscore

• Mixed metaphors, awkward metaphors and metaphors involving quiet or ghosts

• Sensory language that makes no actual sense in the real world

• A simultaneously manic and insipid tone

Per one recent analysis, bots already write half the new articles on the internet. Their peculiar linguistic stylings have also bled into everything from Reddit posts to parliamentary speeches to coffee-shop announcements. This is, in other words, a dominant style — if not the dominant style — for web writing going forward: one that apes the trappings of good writing (em dashes! metaphors!) without ever understanding how they work together.

“Now Watch Me Read,” by Brady Brickner-Wood for The New Yorker

I get the sense from Brickner-Wood’s vaguely patrician name and fierce defense of “performative readers” that he has cracked Infinite Jest in a bar at *least* once. I nevertheless enjoyed his inquiry into authenticity culture and all the criticism and policing thereof:

Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not.

Two reads on the internet as a sort of “fairyland”

In folklore, “fairylands” or “otherworlds” are immaterial, ever-present, enchanted planes that coexist on top of our lived realities. They also make really profound metaphors for our relationship with the internet and technology. I’ve been thinking about both these pieces — a Times op-ed essay and a follow-up explainer — since published them last week; it strikes me as a genuinely brilliant and imaginative way to reframe some conversations around, say, the “addictiveness” of TikTok that feels … whimsical, sure … but also empowering. [NYT / Default.blog]

“How ‘Cozy Lit’ Became the Latest and Most Shameless Form of Digital Escapism,” by Greta Rainbow for The Walrus

This was my introduction to “cozy lit,” a genre that promises to produce the same anesthetized emotional state as scrolling social media — but in a comfortingly analog context. I am fascinated by how closely the “plots” of these books mirror the stories in the sleep podcast “Nothing Much Happens.” Y’all could just taken a little nap! There’s no shame in it.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was this bite-sized little essay on one technique for repairing your attention span.

From the group chat

Today’s vintage link comes from Kevin, who has been a paid supporter of Links since May 2024. For your consideration: “Let’s Make Thanksgiving Better,” by Alex Balk for The Awl (2013).

I know, I know — I should have shared this one before Thanksgiving! But I am moving through the submissions chronologically and, in either case, this essay on the hell of dinner with extended family is equally applicable to all the winter holidays. Balk’s proposed solution, fwiw, is a lottery that randomly selects a new Thanksgiving Day on short notice every year, thus making the holiday too frantic and rushed for anyone to bother with their usual nonsense. “Every single year of my life, this classic post gets more and more relevant, even if the idea of agreeing to any new idea as a nation becomes a fantasy,” says Kevin.

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: the Google Maps-ification of the mind, how inflammation took over the internet, the “fans” deepfaking celebrities, the libraries succeeding Blockbuster and AI slop for — and about — infants.

For access to those postscripts and other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. I’m very grateful for that. Not merely for the aforementioned reason of ~revenue diversification~, either — but because writing these blurbs has made me realize my personal site is due for some kind of renovation. Don’t get me wrong: I stand by the minimalist template, pictured below, that I first picked out in … 2018. But Squarespace apparently offers dozens of snazzy, customizable templates that’ll zhush up ye olde caitlindewey.com with v. little time commitment and no coding. Will I become elegant, overpriced-cocktail-bar Caitlin? Trippy neon Caitlin? Someone else?!? I don’t really know yet, but watch this space … I have at least one more Squarespace ad. ;-)

In the meantime, if you find yourself in need of a site — personal or otherwise — use this link with the code DEWEY for a free Squarespace trial + 10% off your first purchase. (Plz also write in and tell me which of the many templates you picked.)

Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, but in r/gratitude it’s thanksgiving year-round. (Minus the competitive carb-loading, of course, and the variably tense interfamilial showdowns). The 16-year-old Reddit community is a cozy spot to duck into when the world feels extra grim: It’s all sleeping babies and steaming mugs and morning affirmations. The very “live, laugh, love” word cloud you see above represents the nouns used most frequently across the forum’s top 250 posts — predictable and kinda obligatory words like “job” and “husband” and “sunset” and “house” and “health” and “journey.” But more than anything else, the posters of r/gratitude are grateful for LIFE and TIME. They’re just happy to be here, basically.

I’m happy to be here too. Like — literally here, in your inbox. (Also “here” in a more embodied, traditional sense: On Thanksgiving I watched my eight-month-old shovel sugar-slicked yams into her mouth like the secrets of the universe had just been revealed to her, and rarely have I experienced joy that intense.) Thanks for letting me into your life and your brain every week; thanks for making *this* a cozy spot. It continues to be an enormous honor/privilege/romp.

If you read anything this weekend

“AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet — And Thanksgiving Dinner,” by Davey Alba and Carmen Arroyo for Bloomberg.

Here’s a timely, if unappetizing, case study on a two-part phenomenon that’s pummeling publishers across the web: AI-generated content is increasingly competing with the work of human creators, while AI-generated summaries inside chatbots and atop Google search results simultaneously slash into their search traffic. It’s like the pie is getting smaller and also sliced into more pieces, which tragically and obviously results in less pie. (Said pies are also often inedible, because ChatGPT has no real concept of taste, temperature or cook time.)

I’m hopeful that this is one area where the incursion of cheap AI content will actually increase demand for the real thing: After a few annoying and/or dangerous kitchen mishaps, surely even the most devoted clanker would start seeking out human-made recipes. But other types of expertise and creativity are more convincingly mimicked by LLMs, and I still worry mightily for creators in those niches. A number of AI “musicians” have debuted on the Billboard charts this year, for instance. And AI-generated content farms are elbowing their way into the news business.

“Why College Students Prefer News Daddy Over The New York Times,” by Victoria Le for The Verge.

Speaking of the news business — and of bad news therein — consuming institutional media increasingly looks like a generational telltale on par with using Facebook or wearing skinny pants. This is not breaking news, precisely, but we tend to hear a standard set of explanations for the shift (among them: short attention spans, news overwhelm and distrust/perceptions of bias). This story and its many college-aged interviewees suggest a simpler interpretation — that social media has achieved a type of attentional capture so convenient and complete that most kids just can’t bother to follow news outside their feeds.

“America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle,” by Jason Koebler for 404 Media.

X rolled out a feature last weekend that newly reveals where accounts are based, and to the surprise of … at least a few naive folks? … many “patriotic” MAGA accounts are in fact based overseas. This feels like the obvious and intuitive metastasization of the Macedonian fake news complex that so fascinated journalists (yours truly included!!) almost a decade ago. As Koebler lays out for 404, social media companies have done little since then to disrupt the monetization schemes that prompt enterprising people in, say, Russia or Bangladesh from pumping partisan, sensationalized swill onto their platforms.

“An Afternoon at the Bop House,” by Magdalene Taylor for Playboy.

The Bop House is a Miami-based OnlyFans collective populated by young, hot, surprising women. Case in point: They never actually take off their clothes and they seem to hate making content (!). But this is the part that really got me: Their market, you’d assume, is middle-aged men — and you’d be partly correct. But a huge share of the Bop House’s audience is also, intriguingly, teenage girls … who find in the wealthy, independent, self-made bops a very different sort of wish fulfillment.

“Can A 50-Year-Old Book On Paris Help Repair Your Attention Span?” by Christopher Hawthorne for Punch List Architecture Newsletter.

Little bit of an outlier here, but this tidy meditation on sitting and seeing has recently snagged in my head. (As some of you know from the supporter-exclusive essay I published last summer, I’m newly very interested in attention!!) “I was left wondering if I shouldn’t make exercises like this one part of a regular routine: not so much an attempt to clear my mind … as to fill it with non-digital information.” Someone plz also page the TikTok-addled college students.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was ’s essay for GQ on trad wifery and online countercultures. Trad life may be sputtering, but y’all still like to read about it.

From the group chat

Today’s vintage link comes from Helen, who has been a paid supporter of Links since November 2024. For your consideration: “Space Invaders,” by Farhad Manjoo for Slate (2011) — or, as the subhed puts it, “why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.” “I share this article so much,” Helen says. “I don’t understand how people are still doing this.” (*Love* the use of a passive-aggressive article-share to correct someone’s digital etiquette!!)

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: “joy without the time commitment,” Charlie Kirk slop, the social platform that makes you tell the truth, how to use the internet like it’s 1995 … and how to use the internet like it’s 2022.

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. About time, honestly!! I have hosted my personal website there since September 2016 (... as you can tell from my carefree, unlined headshot and passé millennial leggings).

Squarespace makes it easy and affordable to create an attractive, search-optimized site on a domain of your choosing. No need to worry about stuff like structured data, mobile optimization or (Lord help us) AI search — Squarespace handles all that from the jump. If you find yourself in need of such a site, use this link with the code DEWEY for a free trial + 10% off your first purchase.

I have no desire to remind you of my fast-advancing age by toasting Twitter’s glory days two weeks in a row … but one of the greats disappeared for good on Monday, and I feel a brief tribute is in order. From 2013 to 2018, the late/great @nytminuscontext tweeted artful, humorous and head-scratching phrases lifted — without background or explanation — from the paper of record’s pages. Severed from their larger narrative, the fragments became incoherent, absurd. They fueled a generation of online in-jokes and memes. They acquired the weight of aphorism. Then, in March 2018, the “underemployed” midwestern lawyer behind the account abruptly stopped posting new material.

Where had he gone, why had he left? A posthumous perusal of our hero’s LinkedIn suggests one answer: grad school. (I saw the best memes of my generation destroyed by the inevitable onslaught of adulthood.) @nytminuscontext then lay dormant until it churned to life one last time last weekend to announce that the former lawyer — now adequately employed, one supposes, and thus lacking the hours needed to maintain the account — was nuking its archives.

“Thank you for the fun memories,” he wrote. “Cancel your New York Times subscription if you have not already. RIP Twitter and RIP New York Times.”

It feels appropriate, maybe, that this announcement was also delivered without context: Why this particular moment? Which straw broke the camel’s back? Was it the thing with Ms. Rachel? The Epstein emails? The general existential exhaustion that comes with age and close attention? I reached out to @nytminuscontext for answers, but he hasn’t emailed back. I guess, in the words of his account — or maybe, more accurately, in the words of the Times:

If you read anything this weekend

Three reads on women’s thoroughly modern fantasies. On BookTok, women dream of well-hung fairy warlords with flashing eyes and dismal pasts. On Reddit, women dream of endlessly attentive, loving boyfriends who speak to them through AI chat. In mainstream media, meanwhile, much hay is made of these entertainments: Are they feminist or regressive? Escapist or avoidant? Unspeakably weird or just … not your thing? The more high-brow analysis I read on these subjects, the more I suspect it just isn’t that deep. [The Drift / The Cut / New York Times]

“A Theory of Dumb,” by Lane Brown for New York. People (smart people, presumably!) seem awfully enamored with this piece, which argues that access to uninterrupted and heretofore unimagined torrents of information has begun to melt our overloaded brains. I should be sympathetic to this argument — Lord knows that spending lots of time online will quickly convince you that most people are dumb — but I wasn’t convinced by much of Brown’s reasoning. It’s me, I guess! I’m the dumb one.

Two things here. First: Brown claims both that individuals are losing basic cognitive skills and that public discourse is becoming less sophisticated. He seems to blame the first phenomenon on the second (dumb, noisy, overloaded media environments create dumb people) although presumably and confusingly the reverse would be equally if not more true (dumb people create dumb ecosystems).

Second: Brown never explains the neurological mechanics of this alleged shift, which … we do need!! There’s some media theory here, some obligatory references to Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, but little in the way of actual neurology or psychology. Absent that explanation, the argument feels incomplete. I was specifically reminded of all my panicked Googling around “mommy brain,” a colloquial term for the process whereby pregnant women lose some cognitive function (and literal grey matter!) in order to become more skilled at other cognitive tasks. Women typically note their memory problems and mental fogginess … but not, say, their heightened emotional acuity or improved facial recognition. Even if the internet has made us worse at one particular cognitive skill — say, math — doesn’t it stand to reason that it would require us to become better at others? (Doesn’t it? DOESN’T IT????)

“Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era,” by Nicholas Hune-Brown for The Local. There’s nothing “possible” about this spiritual sequel to the Margaux Blanchard affair: Victoria Goldiee, a (purported) freelance reporter who pitched a story to Toronto magazine The Local, absolutely fabricated interviews, quotes and people in her stories for a number of other outlets. But, as is often the case, we get the scammers we deserve — Goldiee’s grift was only possible because of cost-cutting and financial precarity in online media. Editors and fact-checkers, if they even exist, don’t have time to vet contributors, and the pay for freelance stories is often so low that even bona fide writers need some kind of cheat code (… often, family money!) to make the economics work. Telling, for instance, that Business Insider has removed at least 34 essays by Goldiee and other AI authors: They pay a pittance for freelance writing. As Hune-Brown puts it, “this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment.”

“The Trad Movement Is Sputtering. Here’s What Comes Next,” by for GQ. Trad life is less a “movement” than an internet aesthetic, a distinction we’ve made here before: The leading darlings of the genre are wildly successful, hardworking businesswomen, which doesn’t seem … all that “traditional.” But if tradlife isn’t a counterculture, then what exactly is? “To be countercultural today is to refuse spectacle. It is choosing not to turn your life into fuel for platforms.”

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was Evan Ratliff’s dispatch from his AI-staffed start-up. I just started the podcast, , earlier this week, and it is also well-worth the listen!!

From the group chat

Today’s vintage link comes from Patrick, who has been a paid supporter of Links since May 2024. For your consideration: “One Night at Kachka,” by Erin DeJesus with Danielle Centoni and Jen Stevenson for Eater (2015). This is a fascinating narrative project — an immersive multimedia scroll that takes you, minute-by-minute and step-by-step, through a single night at a single Portland restaurant. “This was one of the last times I felt excited about the possibilities of multimedia storytelling being expanded by the internet, and it really conveyed a sense of place in a restaurant,” Patrick said. Genuinely saddened when I contemplate the dwindling number of outlets that could still undertake an experiment like this.

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: hand girls, meme resets, screen-time coaches, excessive advent calendars, the “fundamental difference” between art and content and how online aesthetics ruined foodie culture.

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

Upgrade your subscription

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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Running this newsletter isn’t a hobby. It needs people like a lawyer and accountant to function.2 Paid supporters help me cover the cost of those services, PLUS my Polar seltzer habit and a trillion news site subscriptions. If you’d like to see Links *continue* to function, please consider upgrading your sub. Compared with the cousinly variety, literal lawyers are expensive!

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The last good thing on Twitter may improbably be an octogenarian novelist with a saucy streak.

Five-time Pulitzer finalist (and, IMPORTANTLY, Western New York native) Joyce Carol Oates is still plugging away in those dismal trenches, long after the rest of us decided to flee.

Oates began treating followers to her strident, unhinged and oracular missives in 2012. Since then, she has published an extraordinary 180,000 posts on subjects pingponging from her cats (whom she loves) to Trump (whom she despises) to the putative joys of joining ISIS (which, like many of her loonier tweets, was never received well). Her 2023 dunk on anti-trans activists remains a definitive fave for me — something about the rhythm of the last line cracks me up. “Domiciles / how possible?” A goddamn poet.

Anyway, these are all essentially evergreen observations — Oates mints new classics about 10 times a week — but I’m moved to this appreciation for JCO now because last weekend she cowed Elon Musk himself with a particularly caustic tweet. “The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world,’” she wrote, which is — down to the ampersand — a pristinely Oatesian burn.

“Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human,” Musk posted back. “Not a good human.” Lol. Yikes. He’s definitely the Drake to Oates’s Kendrick.

If you read anything this weekend

“Where Do the Children Play?,” by Eli Stark-Elster for . This is such a nuanced, insightful, counterintuitive reframing of the “phone-based childhood” debate — fascinating to me as both a parent and a general-interest observer of the Kids These Days. Stark-Elster, a PhD student in cognitive anthropology at UC Davis, starts by arguing that kids have historically spent their time in “independent peer cultures” — self-organized groups made up entirely of children, functioning without adult management or supervision.

But thanks to some combination of stranger danger and car dependency (and, I would argue, child optimization culture), parents have dramatically curtailed their kids’ freedom to fuck off and do whatever they want, thereby pushing children to spend more and more of their time on video games and social media. The problem isn’t that kids want to carve out these little spaces for themselves — it’s that these spaces are the only ones they have. And by and large, they’re not designed to be safe for children.

“Would Your Organization Give Someone Baby Formula?” by Anne Helen Petersen for Culture Study. This was a fairly good week, I think, for cross-cutting internet trends; there’s no such thing as true virality anymore, but I saw lots of people talking about Joyce Carol Oates, women ruining the workplace, boyfriends being embarrassing … and this little stunt by a TikTok creator named Nikalie. For those of you who managed to avoid said stunt, Nikalie called a bunch of U.S. churches to see how many would donate formula to a hungry two-month-old. Very few did, and the recordings of those calls predictably went viral. Petersen attributes that virality to a public desire — a HUNGER, if you will — to see institutions face the same kind of scorn that’s often directed at poor people.

I think that interpretation’s interesting, but also not … quite it. I don’t think these videos would have struck the same note if Nikalie requested groceries for herself. It’s the baby formula of it all that gets you — the idea that the U.S. religious establishment, some significant part of which has mobilized powerfully against abortion, would still not help a mother and her hungry infant. (Fwiw, the churches and mosques that offered to help have since been flooded with donations.)

“Influencers Are Royalty at the University of Miami, and the Turf War Is Vicious,” by Amber Ferguson for The Washington Post. We’re well overdue for an update from the University of Miami, a petri dish of youth internet grift, home to mega-influencer Alix Earle and baby-faced package-scammer Matthew Bergwall. This latest saga concerns the online catfight between two 18-year-old micro-influencers, Sienna Long and Nikki Pindor, the first of whom posted a TikTok bemoaning the lack of “appreciation” for small-time content creators and the latter of whom posted a TikTok justifiably mocking her.

It’s trivial drama, of the kind we probably all remember from our college days, but it’s set within a culture of pervasive self-documentation and performance, where everyone is commodifying their college experience in pursuit of online fame. In that regard, UMiami serves as a microcosm for Gen Z writ large: 57% say they want to be influencers. But how can college-age kids develop the interiority they need to navigate adulthood if they’re endlessly incentivized to make content of their youthful blunders?

“All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives,” by Evan Ratliff for Wired. Ratliff, the undefeated king of tech journalism stunts, is back with another banger: For this piece and the accompanying podcast series, he created a start-up staffed entirely by so-called AI agents. The agents can communicate by email, Slack, text and phone, both with Ratliff and among themselves, and they have free range to complete tasks like writing code and searching the open internet. Despite their capabilities, however, the whole project’s a constant farce. A funny, stupid, telling farce that says quite a lot about the future of work that many technologists envision now.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition concerned the absurdist tendencies of Gen Z internet culture. It’s not brain rot … it’s an INDEPENDENT PEER CULTURE.

From the group chat

Today’s vintage link comes from Julie! For your consideration: “‘London Bridge Is Down’: The Secret Plan for the Days After the Queen’s Death,” by Sam Knight for The Guardian. “It was really interesting to read this article in 2017” and then revisit it when Queen Elizabeth actually passed in 2022, Julie said. This actually represents a peak use case for vintage links, particularly those of the predictive/forward-looking variety: evaluating their forecasts with the advantage of hindsight.

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: Instagram mothers, Facebook mothers, “spiralists,” podcast bros, alive internet theory, my husband’s Roman Empire and the Dapper Louvre Detective is HOW many years old????

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

Upgrade your subscription

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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Officially, the recipe just instructs you to remove the extra viscera from the livers, boil them through and mash them with water. Having done that, however, I was left with a gristly, metallic, vaguely fecal-looking mixture that I could only in good conscience feed to our (enormously interested) dog. What’s an anxious, Type A mom to do?! Give up? Never!! I proceeded to press a full pound of chicken liver mash through the mesh of a stainless steel strainer.

As I did, it occurred to me — because this extra step took an obscene amount of time and I spent all of it alone with my thoughts and regrets — that the image of this strainer exuding purified meat paste makes an ideal metaphor for this newsletter’s process. I boil and mash all the internet’s offal; I sieve out the dumb and faddish stuff; I feed you the choicest, smoothest mouthfuls on a crisp little teething rusk. You, meanwhile, rub my hard work in your hair and cry when I try to clean it up.

… ah shit, no, I took the metaphor too far. OR MAYBE I DIDN’T??

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If you read anything this weekend

“The Opposite of Slop Politics,” by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. The mainstream media has probably made too much of Mamdani’s social media savvy, and we’ve all overused the all-purpose disparagement “slop.” But I like the notion of Mandani as the anti-slop candidate: both literally, in that his campaign never dabbled in AI-produced propaganda, and more figuratively, in his embrace of humanity, community and empathy over the values embodied in many AI systems (bombast, concentration of power, devaluation of human labor and ingenuity).

“AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge,” by Jason Koebler for 404 Media. A good chaser for that Mamdani piece, on the philosophical and functional parallels between AI and right-wing populist movements. Both devalue the work of experts and knowledge workers — in this specific case, librarians — in order to create power vacuums that they can fill themselves. (As an aside, please be kind to your local librarian. It sounds like they’re really going through it.)

“Hot Subpoena Summer,” by Kat Tenbarge for The Verge. I didn’t think there was much more to say about the ugly and long-lived legal feud between actress Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, her one-time costar and enduring menace; but then I learned that Lively’s lawyers subpoenaed a number of TikTok and YouTube commentators as part of their suit — and at least one of those people fought the subpoena by claiming to be a journalist. (Wait! It gets better. That “at least one person” is Perez Hilton.) I don’t want to overstate the implications here — Hilton used ChatGPT in his defense, and my one semester of undergraduate comm law assures me that his work doesn’t merit legal privilege — but this does feel like a timeline in which some court somewhere could declare AI potatoes journalistic.

“If You Have to Ask…You’ll Never Know Gen Z,” by Callie Holtermann for The New York Times. Honestly, this made me feel like The Youth™ are okay. I still worry about the skincare and the celibacy and the media illiteracy of it all, BUT … I *am* comforted by the belief that all of Gen Z internet culture is actually an elaborate Dadaist prank. I get it, even if I don’t get it. And don’t really want to. I am 36 years old, okay?! Not 36-seven. Ugh.

“AI GF: POV,” by Sarah Chekfa in Kernel. Tired: stories about fictional AI girl/boyfriends from the perspective of the human partner. Wired: stories about fictional AI girl/boyfriends from the perspective of AI (via Web Curios).

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was this perversely entertaining anthropological portrait of gooners. Sorry.

From the group chat

Today’s vintage link comes from Nick, who has been a paid supporter of Links since May 2024. For your consideration: Gawker’s Best Restaurant series, by Rich Juzwiak and Caity Weaver (2014/2015). “I cite this masterful collection of writing any time somebody mentions a restaurant review they enjoyed OR a Caity Weaver piece they liked, which happens more often than you’d think,” Nick explains.

Au contraire, Nick: I fully believe that happens quite a lot!! It has already happened in the context of this little section, in fact: Links reader Ben (paid supporter since March 2025) also wrote in to recommend a specific Weaver gem from that Gawker series: “The Best Restaurant in New York Is The American Girl Café” (2014). “This is just such a great example of what Gawker used to be when it had a sense of humor along with its snark,” he said. Truly: It was Gawker’s internet, and we’re just living in the wreck of it.

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: dumb homes, pumpkin stylists, the death of CAPTCHA, the “original fucking tradwife”1 (self-declared); the internet as ideal setting for “deculturation;” the only worthwhile live-tweets of the past five years; one for the fans of (in)famous internet essays; the return of the McMansion; the most-harassed man on X; online clout redefined and the wrong solution to the problem social media created.

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

Upgrade your subscription

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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So instead of using this space to fundraise for the newsletter, as I usually do, I’m going to use it to share some ~facts~ about the food stamp program, drawing on the two (formative!, but little-discussed) years I spent as The Washington Post’s food policy reporter. For starters: Two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, elderly or disabled people. Most of the remaining recipients are low-wage workers. The program is also astoundingly effective: According to one widely cited estimate, participation cuts a household’s likelihood of experiencing food insecurity by almost a third.

Finally: While food banks, pantries and shelters also constitute important links in America’s anti-hunger safety net, such as it is, they face *profound* demand with SNAP at risk. So please use the $7 you might have spent upgrading your subscription this week to support your local food bank or other anti-hunger organization. If you’re in Western New York, I heartily endorse the Buffalo Community Fridge project.

State-by-state information

Elon Musk works 100 hours a week, fathers two (plus?) kids a year … and still finds time to be the world’s pettiest sonofabitch. Last week, the tech billionaire and post-literate Lord of the Rings fan launched his sloppy Wikipedia knockoff, Grokipedia, to resoundingly poor reviews. Even lousier than the flaws of the site, however, is the timing of its release: Grokipedia went live just one day before Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales published his first book, an airport-newsstand-ready manual on how to build trust in a violently polarized and politicized world.

Full disclosure: I’ve not read Wales’s book. But the premise strikes me as naive, and not just because Wikipedia has itself become the target of a highly politicized smear campaign. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Wales essentially argued that the trust crisis his book seeks to address has been, in some ways, overblown: “In day-to-day life, people still do trust each other,” he said. “People generally think most people are basically nice and we’re all human beings bumping along on the planet trying to do our best.” (He then goes on, in truly saintly fashion, to suggest that he and Musk actually get along okay. At this point Musk hadn’t sabotaged his big book launch yet.)

But do regular people still generally trust each other? What remains of my withered heart wanted Wales to be right on this. Alas, per Ipsos and the Pew Research Center, interpersonal trust has been plummeting for decades both around the globe and in the U.S.

After all, it’s only in a world where people don’t trust institutions, and they ALSO don’t trust each other, that an AI-generated dumpster fire like Grokipedia could fathomably exist. Grokipedia’s great innovation over Wikipedia — insofar as it could be called either great or innovative — is that it forcibly removes all human oversight from the article-writing and vetting process.

In other words, trust is actually so badly degraded that many people would rather put their faith in a computer model (the machinations of which they do not even begin to understand) than in human Wikipedia editors (with all their deeply suspect feelings and biases and personal motivations). If Wales’s book can solve for that problem, well … then hell, we’d all better read it.

Correction: A previous edition of Links claimed that four in five U.S. adults share some location data with friends and family, which is … not true! According to the poll in question, four in five U.S. adults use location sharing services, which include things as innocuous as getting directions or ordering food. The error arose when I paraphrased a claim from an essay in Reboot (which in turn was paraphrasing the study itself) and came to my attention through an eagle-eyed reader. Thank you for the note!! I’m relieved that it isn’t just conspiracists and similar weirdos ~doing their own research.~

If you read anything this weekend

“The Hatred of Podcasting,” by Brace Belden for The Baffler. I had to pause and Google Belden halfway through to make sure this wasn’t parody — but indeed, the cohost of Patreon’s fifth-most-popular podcast did indeed serve stints as a florist, a Kurdish militia volunteer, a prominent Twitter shitposter, a labor organizer and a merchant marine. Honestly, that biographical arc alone more than merits the read, together with Belden’s caustic and occasionally unkind sense of humor.

But there’s also some fascinating, unflinching analysis here on the evolving psychology of online media and the specific needs that podcasts (also, I’d argue, live streams and infinite scrolling) fill: “The episodes are a layer of white noise, a way to blot out thoughts. Podcasts came of age amid the growing absence of meaningful contact in the average person’s day, in a time when silence is hated.” (Fwiw, GQ also just profiled the TrueAnon podcasters here.)

Three mind-bendy reads on computer “speech.” Your computer’s desktop is a metaphor. So is your email inbox, my Substack dashboard and our phones’ notebook features. Interface and product designers LOVE metaphors because they quickly acclimate users to novel technologies. But when people misinterpret those metaphors as fact … you run into problems pretty quickly.

To wit: “Chat” is an interface metaphor that’s widely used by AI companies, and which has apparently confused or tricked many vulnerable people into believing that they’re engaged in literal conversations. Instead of backing off that metaphor, however, at least one company is doubling down — by arguing that chatbots produce protected, legal speech, as defined by the First Amendment. [ / Wired / NYT]

“The Goon Squad,” by Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s. I’m going to pull a “just trust me” on this, which is a bit of a cop-out. But any description of this story’s contents will probably maroon me in your spam folder. Let’s just say it concerns a deviant and deeply bizarre online subculture, the details of which will likely shock, baffle and/or horrify you. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny, at times — if you can laugh through descriptions of truly pathological (and NSFW!!) behavior.

“This Post Should Have Been Shorter,” by Hamilton Nolan for Talking Points Memo. An ode to the craft of old-school blogging, now largely extinct. Part of a very fun run of 25 guest essays on digital media, commissioned to celebrate TPM’s 25th (!) anniversary.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from the last edition was this Derek Thompson jawn about how everything online is becoming TV. But it arguably should’ve been this fun little ditty on how everything online is becoming Philly.

From the group chat

I’m thinking we might just make the “vintage link” thing permanent. I like it, you like it … and doesn’t the primacy of novelty and newness get kind of old? (Or am I just getting old myself??) Today’s vintage link comes from Jesse, who has been a paid supporter of Links since May 2024. For your consideration: “Hunger Makes Me,” by Jess Zimmerman for Hazlitt (2016). It’s a “vivid and ferociously written look at whether women are allowed to have appetites,” Jesse wrote. I can’t entirely explain why this is my reaction to this gorgeous piece — maybe it was the bit about the cake video? — but it made me feel preemptively sad for my daughter.

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: trad sons, student newspapers, elderly screen addicts, the end of family photos and accents, how AI puts dogs out of work and the website transforming live music.

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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For those of you who are not familiar, Solid Starts is an elaborate and expensive way for anxious, Type A mothers to make themselves feel even more inadequate. For the low (?) cost of $49.99, this team of very savvy pediatric dietitians will sell you a PDF that, they claim, contains 100 days of “simple” baby meal plans. It is only after you have parted1 with your hard-earned $50 that you learn how very different your take on “simple” is. Trout with polenta? Chickpea pasta with cashew cream? Chicken liver pâté?! Friends: The adults in this house split a plate of French fries for dinner last Thursday.

I am not a quitter, though. At least not in the first week. So dutifully I trekked out to Whole Foods this morning for all the specialty ingredients that Solid Starts calls for (pumpkin seed butter! hemp seeds!). As I drove back home, under-caffeinated but eagerly anticipating Sprout’s first official meal — oblivious, of course, that said meal would consist of her immediately unsticking her “baby-proof” plate from its tray and flinging the contents to the rug — I reflected on the sheer and unassailable genius of the Solid Starts business model. Like: Obviously, if you want to sell content online, choosing a highly specialized and sensitive subject like INFANT NUTRITION is the smart move. Only a dummy would try to make a career writing about, say … internet culture.

Alas, such dummies exist. And it’s far too late to pivot to something useful. So I will keep rounding up these little links in the hope that you will chip in for my kid’s pumpkin seed butter.

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If you read anything this weekend

Two reads on the convergence of digital media. His other bad takes on the theme notwithstanding, Derek Thompson is correct on this: Video, as a medium, is newly and inescapably — wait for it — abundant. Social media is a feed of continuous videos. Podcasts are actually videos, too. Everything is TV, Thompson says — except TV itself, which is now (confusingly!) YouTube. [Derek Thompson / Hollywood Reporter]

“Meet the Black Mold Truthers,” by Poppy Sowerby for Unherd. Babe, wake up — a new psychosomatic illness just dropped! But this one’s a ready-made metaphor for institutional decline, aptly favored by right-wing and manosphere influencers. The afflicted believe, or allege to believe (because doesn’t so much of that ecosystem feel like one big grift?) that “toxic mold” infestations are causing neurological impairment, hormonal imbalances and other ailments. Proving the negative is, of course, fantastically challenging: “As in all health panics, empirical weakness is rhetorical strength. If the experts deny it, that only proves the conspiracy.”

“Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For,” by Taylor Lorenz for . The Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has lately become embroiled in a manufactured scandal over whether or not he uses an e-collar on his dog. (That was an amazing sentence to type, and one that truly makes me marvel at the range and variety of the human experience: Like, I can spend hours making pâté for an infant, while out there somewhere there is someone — many someones!! — devoting similar lengths of time to the forensic analysis of a no-stakes video clip.)

Anyway: You could, and should, feel comfortable never reading another word about any of this. Arguably you have already read too much! But if you’d like to get into the What It Means of it all, Taylor Lorenz argues that the incident proves how video clip culture (in all its abundance) can give rise to especially noxious forms of disinformation.

“The Fantasy of the ‘Saved Folder,’” by for Maybe Baby. On bookmarks as aspiration and obfuscation. (This chronic bookmarker feels awfully seen.)

“The bookmark is a kind of fantasy: Not just in the sense that we can convince ourselves, while employing it, that we will one day transform an old t-shirt into shorts, but that by using it we’re not merely passive observers of our social feeds, but active participants, explorers, collectors. Gathering resources for a life we’re bound to start living.”

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was this piece on the death (or degeneration?) of internet virality.

From the group chat

It’s still vintage link week in the guest-curator section, and will be until whenever you guys get sick of this (!). Today’s contribution comes from Chris H. For your consideration: “Generation X Is Sick of Your Bullshit,” by Mat Honan for Gizmodo (2011). Give the babies of the ‘60s and ‘70s some credit: Gen X “set the tone for everything you love” — and have probably since lost? — “about the Net.”

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: chatfishing, -maxxing, performative reading, the rise of the “Talibros,” the return of the girlboss and the most online city (is … Philadelphia?!).

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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Accessibility is important to me. It’s why almost everything I publish is free for everyone to read. My own economic needs notwithstanding, I don’t think disposable income should be a prerequisite for accessing vetted information and commentary.

That said, if you appreciate what I do here and *can* afford it, please consider a paid subscription. Just 2.6% of you pay to subscribe — which means that each supporter subsidizes 38 other readers. Your support keeps Links accessible to everyone, today and in the future.

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A “day” is a 24-hour period. “Prime” is an adjective for “the best possible quality.” And yet, such is Amazon’s power to mold reality to its will that the platform has once again conned millions of people into wrongly applying those fairly clear-cut terms to its multi-day, sub-prime consumer orgy. Amazon’s second “Prime Day” of the year began on October 7 and finished October 8, netting the retail juggernaut an estimated $9 billion. I’m old enough to remember when Prime Day came once a year and was, in fact, a single day. Now it would be more accurately described as Amazon Deal Week Spread Confusingly Over Multiple Non-Consecutive Months as a Result of Some Executives Deciding That No Good Tragedy Should Go to Waste.

But are there even good deals to be had? Here again, the fine folks at Amazon appear to have engaged in some creative use of the English language. A “deal,” in my mind — especially when heralded with all this hype from influencers and cash-strapped media outlets desperate for a dribble of that sweet affiliate revenue — represents a significant discount beneath the typical price of a product.

Nope! When The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler tracked a basket of almost 50 goods this week, he found that Amazon discounted them by a measly .6%, overall. All those flashy, double-digit markdowns — seductively tagged as “Prime Big Deals” — are largely an artifact of artificial price inflation in the weeks leading up to Prime 48 Hours. That bit of artful deceit prompted two customers to recently file suit against Amazon and is just one of the many ways Amazon displays its apparent contempt for its customers, along with the general un-navigability of its site, the torrent of no-name, alphabet-soup brands, the gradual slowdown of shipping times, the reintroduction of video ads and the ballooning price of a Prime membership.

That customers still cling to Amazon despite this apparent degradation is remarkable in and of itself. (Though less remarkable when you consider all the other apparently degrading things we cling to: social media, for instance; the American experiment.) In a new book out on Tuesday, the journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow argues that Amazon has grown so large and captured so much market share that nothing short of aggressive regulation could free consumers or merchants from its grasp. Case in point: Doctorow’s book is itself for sale on Amazon, as are AI slop knock-offs of it. They weren’t discounted for Prime Daze, alas.

If you read anything this weekend

“Is ‘Going Viral’ Dead?” By Madison Malone Kircher for The New York Times. I loved chatting with Madison for this piece in part because it was just that: a chat. Two women who’ve been toiling in these trenches forever, shooting the shit about the halcyon days of ye olde social internet. The days of “the dress.” The BBC guy. That Texas mom in a Chewbacca mask. But we no longer get many moments of “universal instant global culture” online, thanks to the rise of non-chronological algorithmic feeds and the professionalization of online content.

“How TikTok Keeps Its Users Scrolling for Hours a Day,” by Caitlin Gilbert, Richard Sima, Leslie Shapiro, Aaron Steckelberg and Clara Ence Morse for The Washington Post. The “how” of this headline is far less interesting than the “how much”: The Post got 1,100 TikTok users to share their watch history, then analyzed those users’ behavior. After one month on TikTok, more than three-quarters of casual users had doubled their daily watch time to almost an hour. Heavy users, meanwhile, consistently spent four-plus hours on the app — more than twice the amount of time the average adult spends cooking, cleaning and managing their house.

There’s no disputing, in other words, that TikTok is a habit-forming app. My quibble is instead with the framing of this piece: Surely not all habits are addictions. Is TikTok more akin to the evening show I mindlessly flick on after the baby’s gone to bed? Or is it something darker, like a digital slot machine, drawing me back over my objections?

(Feel free to send more thoughts by replying to this email. I’d love to expand this in a future edition.)

“The Techno Optimist’s Guide to Futureproofing Your Child,” by Benjamin Wallace for New York. In the early, anxious, pre-dawn hours, when I let myself fret over the social and technological changes that Sprout will weather, I tend to think first of stuff like … climate change and authoritarianism. 🙃 This week, Pew put out a survey that found four in 10 kids use a smartphone before age 2, and almost one in 10 kids use a chatbot by 10 — that’s another one for the worry bank, surely. How will we handle that; how will Sprout’s little friends.

ANYWAY, my point is that kids face plenty of crises in the short- and medium-term, and I’ve not yet had the bandwidth to contemplate my child’s longer-range economic prospects in an AI-dominated world. But I’m pleased to learn that many of the people who do contemplate such things — often loudly, and in public — have concluded that driving children to “achieve” is no longer the move. Quoth one Silicon Valley mom: “It’s totally wide open now about what it’s going to take to lead a good life. There’s this weird loosening up. They are relaxing their shoulders.”

“‘Lighthouses in the Sky,’” by Julia B. Kieserman for . Four in five U.S. adults location-share with friends and family, despite the lack of privacy that necessarily entails. Personally, I get the appeal: Dipping into distant friends’ daily travels feels to me like a kind of communion. Kieserman argues that context matters — that location-sharing is not, in itself, an adequate tool for safety or care. But I like the look of those little dots, that small proof that my unseen friends are out there, living lives in parallel.

“Slop As a Way of Life,” by Drew Austin for Dirt. Typically excellent and incisive essay (I love Drew’s newsletter, ) about the use and misuse of the word “slop” as a catch-all for online problems:

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was this little number on how to read more. I am partial to Molly Young’s advice, which unfortunately I am still too weak to follow myself: “I treat my phone like poison. I leave the house as much as possible without it.”

From the group chat

It’s still vintage link week in the guest-curator section, and will be until whenever you guys get sick of this (!). Today’s contribution comes from Daniela, who’s been a paid supporter since November 2024. For your consideration: “Heaven or High Water,” by Sarah Miller for Popula. Miller’s fake 2019 search for a luxury home in climate-change-ravaged Miami is, Daniela says, “funny and scathing and sad and just as relevant now as it was then.” I love a bit of stunt journalism, and this one delivers on that.

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: Klarna culture and economics, the digital aesthetics of Trump 2.0, how to hack Hinge, how to understand “likes” and why AI companies can never be cool.

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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There once was a newsletter called Links
Whose author tried many hijinks
To get people to pay
For the work of her days
But this poem is the best yet, methinks. 

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Sometimes you read a quote that smacks you in the face with all the force of a golf bro’s lobbed Michelob Ultra, and so this particular quote was for me:

“I feel like with social media at our fingertips, we are just so much more aware of all the lives we could be living,” Ms. Janse said. “We’re scrolling through our feed and we see this girl lives on a sailboat in Maine, and then this girl lives in a high-rise in New York. You can just see firsthand what all these different lives look like, and that makes it easier to visualize a change or shift.”

Ms. Janse is a 28-year-old divorce content creator, a profession that exists, and her remarks appeared in a story about Gen Z divorce — which is allegedly far chiller and more personally fulfilling than the splits of older generations. Today’s young married couples, uncommon as they are, reportedly break up when the vibes are off. Or they pop-psychologize to the point of irreconcilability: “you’re selfish” becomes “you’re a narcissist.” (Etc., etc.)

I’m not sold on all these sweeping and lightly sourced generalizations — three doesn’t always make a trend! — but this does feel like a logical extension of several Gen Z dating and social dynamics that get written up quite often. Steeped in other people’s idealized lives from adolescence, many young daters have standards so high that real partners can’t compete. They “agonize” over displays of affection and vulnerability. Overall, today’s teens and 20-somethings have fewer relationships and far less sex. Then if/when they do get married, the act sometimes feels less like an interpersonal commitment than a personal rebrand — or, worse, a timely social media activation.

“I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment,” the Gen Z writer (and social media critic) Freya India wrote this week. “We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through. Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume.”

I’m not all that concerned with the “cheapening” of marriage. (A little whiff of Heritage Foundation there.) But I do think this generational notion of life-as-content risks relocating real-life connections, of all varieties, into the gilded, make-believe world of online fantasy and performance. A relationship understood, even in part, as an aesthetic and social alternative to living on a boat off the coast of Maine will inevitably let you down. And that life in Maine — well, it photographs well. But it’s not gonna ah-matize anyone.1

If you read anything this weekend

“Extremely Offline: What Happened When A Pacific Island Was Cut Off From The Internet,” by Samanth Subramanian for The Guardian. In January 2022, a volcanic eruption severed the undersea cable that connects Tonga to the global internet — plunging the island nation, population 100,000, into a surreal, pre-modern sort of disconnect. Text messages and cell phone calls couldn’t go through, of course. But ATMs and landlines didn’t work, either. Flights were grounded. Produce rotted in fields. Wealthy yachters with satellite phones became some towns’ only means of accessing the world. “The fact that the very apparatus of 21st-century life relies on the internet is rendered visible to us only when something snaps,” Subramanian observes. And many things — e.g., cables — are actually pretty vulnerable to snapping, even in far larger and wealthier nations.

Three reads on reading (or the lack thereof). I did not share this essay when it first came out because I didn’t like it. And while I still don’t like it, I’ve since decided that it’s interesting as an object of discourse, if not … actual enjoyment. Titled “The dawn of the post-literate society,” the lengthy and performatively self-serious essay by James Marriott argues — in increasingly urgent and alarmist tones — that people do not or cannot read books anymore, and that this shift imperils civilization in much the same way that the Western Roman Empire was threatened by barbarian hordes. (That’s actually the subtitle on the piece: “And the end of civilization.”) It has since gone very viral on Substack, a platform where people like to read about other people not reading in an ironically uncritical and context-free manner.

The journalist does have some context, however, and he rounded it up in a brief rebuttal. I agree with him that two things can be true at once: (a) that reading books is important and that trends to the opposite are very much worth studying and (b) that much of the hand-wringing among men of (news)letters still smacks of snobbery. Do you think James Marriott knows, or cares, that Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies in its first week? That’s a lot of books for a post-literate society!! Anyway, whatever books you read, if you’d like to read a bit more … consider these occasionally zany tips and habits from 18 unusually well-read people. [Cultural Capital / Torment Nexus / The Cut]

“A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu,” by Zeyi Yang for Wired. Zeyi Yang toured stores, theme parks and group chats in four different countries to pin down the appeal of the Labubu, that vaguely unsettling and wildly viral plush toy that has made its maker almost as valuable as Disney and Nintendo. I still don’t entirely “get” the craze, but I get why it matters: Labubu, together with TikTok, is “the de facto face of [China’s] growing soft power.”

“The 3,000-Year-Old Story Hidden in the @ Sign,” by Thomas Germain for BBC. TIL that @ originally stood not for “at,” as you might logically and sensibly assume, but for … amphora! Like the Greek vases. Wild.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was this witty and deeply unsettling tour through the San Francisco group houses where adolescent workaholics are inventing the future of AI. That’ll turn out well, I’m sure.

From the group chat

Inspired by Mike’s great 2010s reads from last week, I’m soliciting vintage links in the group chat. This week’s contribution comes from Damara, who’s been a paid supporter since May 2024. (She supports the newsletter because it is — I quote — “a brilliantly described and curated link list by someone who has great taste.” Or tries to!!)

For your consideration: “A Toast Story,” by John Gravois for Pacific Standard (2014). Damara calls it “a beautiful story about a person building a community around her.” I was admittedly distracted by the fact that as recently as 2014, $4 was considered a risible price for artisanal toast … in San Francisco. Can you get fancy toast for even half that much now, inquiring minds would like to know?

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: Splenda daddies, bad pasta shapes, the Sims as queer culture touchstone, an antisocial social app, the problem with “intentionality” and TikTok’s magicians and bagpipers.

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

Upgrade your subscription

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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The games stream on different platforms each week, so we’re up to three or four streaming subscriptions by now. In other words: I understand subscription fatigue! The last thing I want is yet another monthly charge.

And yet! I DO subscribe, several times over, because the Bills games matter — civically, socially, spiritually? — to us. Likewise, if Links matters to you, I very much hope you will white-knuckle through your (understandable!) antipathy toward recurring charges and support the newsletter with a subscription. Unlike the fine executives at Paramount Plus, I do actually need your financial support to keep this newsletter running. I’m also proud to report that, unlike streaming a football game live on TV, reading Links comes with a 0% chance of witnessing traumatic injury.

In closing: Go Bills.

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Earlier this week I stopped by ’s podcast — why do people say that? I called in from my phone — and rambled at great and uninhibited length about ACOTAR, marriage and Buffalo. My favorite part of the conversation involved some of the more dystopic and self-defeating ways that people use AI in their relationships, including deploying ChatGPT to adjudicate marital disagreements. Ben and I both agreed that this is “nakedly stupid.” (I might attempt a slightly more thoughtful/developed take in a future edition!) But Ben, unlike me, is essentially an optimist, and so he concluded by arguing that most people who dabble in this sort of relational AI will eventually move away from it.

“I think part of what we’re seeing in this flight to automation, to efficiency, to algorithmic optimization is a counter-movement to IRL, human interaction [and] real-life community,” he said. “And so I guess what I’m saying is that the pendulum swings and we may be in a place where the naked stupidity that’s exposed in articles like this shows us, okay … let’s not do it.”

“I mean, frankly, I have been around — but I haven’t been around long enough to forecast to what degree a backlash or countervailing current’s there,” I demurred, lamely. Because I was thinking: Does the pendulum swing?! Do the past two decades of digital norms truly map onto cycles of push and pull — or are the larger, meta trends that define online sociality more clearly unidirectional?

My personal sense is that, despite considerable backlash and even exodus, online platforms have moved in lockstep toward greater automation. Social norms evolved to support that shift, not oppose or diffuse it: Every feed is algorithmically filtered now. Every app has a “write with AI” button. And slop content, despite its obvious (naked?!) deficiencies, is finding a durable audience.

Then again … the arc of history is long! And my view could depend on my place in it. Ten years ago, I also would have told you that online platforms were trending toward robust moderation. But look where we actually ended up! Even diehard Covid deniers will get their YouTube channels back. So as I told Ben: lol, idk, in five years let’s chat again.

If you read anything this weekend

“The AI Kids Take San Francisco,” by Kerry Howley for New York. If I were a betting woman, however, I would bet that this pendulum doesn’t swing back. And Exhibit A in my argument would be this wild voyage into the San Francisco group houses where unmoored and under-socialized 20-somethings live while they hack together their big AI start-ups. This piece positively drips with blank-faced irony and accidental metaphors; it’s almost as if the kids inventing the future have no self-awareness or sense of history at all (!). They also have no partners. No social lives. No friends or connections, unless you count the strangers they bump iPhones with to exchange contacts or the roommates they visit in timed five-minute increments. I honestly can’t recommend this story enough — it’s like a vision of the future written by people who thought Black Mirror was aspirational. And they’re getting millions of dollars to create it. AHH.

“I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong,” by Steven Levy for Wired. The conceit of this piece is more than a little eye-rolly — “woe is me, I hobnobbed with these mighty tech execs for years and I am SHOCKED and BETRAYED by their sudden cowardice” — but it still makes for a thorough/clarifying autopsy of Silicon Valley’s rightward shift. Levy finds that Biden anti-trust and crypto policies pushed many founders off the deep end. But perhaps they only had that effect because the founders were fragile man-children to begin with. “By daring to challenge the tech industry, Biden threatened the moguls’ business plans. Even worse, he hurt their feelings,” Levy says — italics his.

“MrBeast on His Quest to Turn YouTube Fame Into an Entertainment Empire,” by Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg. If you’ve ever watched a MrBeast video and wondered how these attention-hacking spectacles make money … they don’t! In 2024, Jimmy Donaldson lost *$110 million* overall and spent $3 to $4 million to produce each of his absurd videos. Now, the 27-year-old king of YouTube and the architect of its dominant tropes and aesthetics has called in a CEO to professionalize his operation and expand it into something that looks far more like an old-school media conglomerate.

“‘If He Can Be Found, Every One of the Users Can Be’: Unmasking The Man Behind Toxic Gossip Website Tattle Life,” by Sali Hughes in The Guardian. Tattle Life is a fascinating case to me: a truly savage, anonymous gossip forum populated mostly by middle-aged British ladies. It’s almost like 4chan … but for women. It has ruined many people’s lives. And after a protracted legal battle, its owner has been identified!

“Faerie Smut Is About More Than Bathtubs and Archery,” by Sarah Skwire for Reason. The next time someone asks me to explain ACOTAR, I will skip past my fumbling theories on ~world-building~ and disavowals of the books’ over-thesaurused1 sex scenes and instead note how rare it is for epic fantasy novels to center women and their competencies.

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from our last edition was this profile of mommy-blogger-turned-“MAHA maven” Jessica Reed Kraus.

From the group chat

This week’s phenomenal VINTAGE guest links come from Mike, who’s been a paid supporter since May 2024. Links “helps me gain awareness of trends, especially those in younger demographics that I’m not as close with,” he wrote.

For your consideration: “As Not Seen on TV,” by Pete Wells for The New York Times (a.k.a., Pete Wells takes down the Guy Fieri restaurant in Times Square, 2012) and “My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers,” by Caity Weaver for Gawker (2014). These were *so fun* to revisit. As Mike notes, both are classics of internet writing for good reason: The writing is “sharp and polished and confident and unabashedly opinionated — and I wonder if that’s just the writer’s personality spilling onto the page or if it takes agonizing over every adverb to get to this point.” Good question!

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: workslop, chatbait, “fascistic deepfakes,” the rise/fall of “Tragedeigh,” a TikTok trend I heartily endorse and a history of the foodie.

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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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