I should have realized the abrupt end to my lengthy hiatus would sound a KLAXON to the Facebook algorithm. Over the next two days, I (or, worse: my mother) heard from an astounding range of relations and acquaintances. Everyone had seen my Facebook post and had QUESTIONS — or comments, or comments phrased as questions — about my need for childcare.

Having not used Facebook in over half a decade, I forgot that it is in fact the last true social network left: a place where people you have known from many stages of your real, offline life accumulate like sediment. Nowhere else — on the internet or off it — could my mom’s best friend, my third cousin, my first cousin, my boss from 14 years ago and my semi-estranged neighbor converge in one place to commiserate over my babysitter woes. But here we are. Here they are. The glories of a Facebook post!

And I am woeful, to be clear. This is not a buyer’s market. As far as I can tell, there are two main populations of babysitters to be found in the local Facebook groups devoted to this purpose. First are the stay-at-home mothers of 3+ proudly unvaccinated children who live WAY out in the hinterlands of NY-23. These are, for me, a very hard no.

Then there are the multi-credentialed University at Buffalo doctoral students studying, like, Early Childhood Flourishing with a specialization in Testing Into the Best Public Schools. These women make more money per hour than I do. (And deservedly so!)

Where will this lead us? I don’t know. My Facebook posts, in both the groups and my personal feed, were kind of moves of last resort. If they don’t yield a babysitter sometime soon … I guess there are coffee shop bulletin boards??

If you read anything this weekend

This is the most interesting and provocative thing I’ve yet read about “clipping,” the emergent social media marketing tactic wherein low-paid, anonymous posters are paid to excerpt exciting moments from longer-form videos to their feeds. Such clips are, presumably, designed to drum up interest for the content they’re clipped from: podcasts, reality shows, livestreams, whatever. But as the clips eclipse their clippees in popularity — sorry, yeah, I am having fun — one naturally has to wonder why we need podcasts, TV shows or movies at all. [The Verge]

On the subject of algorithmic manipulation, people continue to perform both surprise and upset at the notion that music marketing firms pay microinfluencers to rave about their acts. My friends: The year is 2026! Nothing you see online is true. If your mother says she loves you, check she wasn’t paid too. [The Atlantic / The Guardian]

“Wine mom” operates in the same linguistic and conceptual sphere as the handy epithet “tech bro” — less a person than the shape of a person: a stereotype, a meme, a convenient foil. It’s lazy to dismiss someone on either grounds, and I say that as someone who says “tech bro” a lot. (But since I became a wine mom I suppose I had a change of heart.) [New Yorker]

Millennial dads spend more time with their kids than any generation in history — almost 3x the active time that men in the ‘60s did. But mothers still spend far more time, especially alone time, with their children. And the more stressful a childcare activity, the less likely dad is to do it. [Derek Thompson]

Early studies of children who play with AI toys suggest the gadgets hamper conversational turn-taking, blur the line between computer and friend and “encourage isolation and addiction.” Huh, weird — sounds a lot like the issues you see in adults who get too caught up with AI services. [Wired]

“Friends don’t come to your party because they’re worried about driving in the rain. Friends at New Year’s get so upset to hear your dad’s prognosis that, as the year turns, you’re the one comforting them. Friends don’t tell you the reason they stopped hanging out with you is that their kids don’t like your kid. Friends send you cards for a festival they don’t even celebrate because they don’t want you to be lonely. Friends vanish. You will not witness them have children, turn forty, be okay, out there. All AI companions are friends with no future. Kuyda created a friend who cannot age, fail to show up, disappear, die. But it is friendship’s excruciating ricketiness, its free-wheeling will, its horrible mortality, that brings it to life.” A lovely, life-affirming account of several (failed) months with an AI “friend,” who is not a friend in any way that makes a real difference. [The Walrus]

“Clout as a service” describes a class of industrious entrepreneurs who will, for a fee, tag you into their posts from the latest hot concert or getaway. To your followers, it appears you were actually there. To you, it must appear your life has no inherent worth. Truly: This level of FOMO (if FOMO it is) is kind of pathological. [Girl Online]

I found this criticism of New York Times Cooking … almost entirely unreadable. (Respectfully: This is why editors exist.) But the germ of the idea is interesting: Has cooking media become a little too practical, where it once was aspirational and ambitious? [Radicchio Salad]

Related: There is a lot (A LOT) of bad food content in our feeds. [Slate]

Openai.com was once the personal homepage of a guy named Glenn, and TikTok.com was once the “electronic scrapbook” of a married couple named Scott and Tomoko. One hopes they made bank off those domains when they sold. [Annie Rauwerda on Bluesky]

The internet was supposed to kill the travel agent. Instead, the profession’s enjoying a kind of boomlet — fed by Instagram influencers and the exigencies of the high-end market. Today, travel planning (or travel advising) is as much about curating a vibe as it is booking tickets. Which makes sense, because, again … Google exists. [Airmail]

Quince sells wine and caviar now, and they’re allegedly (ALLEGEDLY) both pretty good. [Eater]

I am once again begging everyone to read the appendix on Pew polls. This week, Pew reported that 40% of US adults get health and wellness information from influencers, which sounds … high! Alarmingly high, if you interpret “health and wellness” to mean “medicine.” But click into Pew’s questionnaire and you’ll find that the category also includes beauty and fitness. [Pew Research Center, New York Times, Wall Street Journal]

A disturbing follow-up to last month’s share about the gradual ubiquity of Botox: A booming online subculture also teaches young women how to source and self-inject botulinum toxin. [The Walrus]

“Maybe it was turning 40, or buying a house, or doing any number of the rites of middle-life passage (microdosing psychedelics, getting into jam bands, establishing a primary care physician) that have marched me inexorably toward the great parking lot of dreams. I am now, for the first time in my life, a card-carrying, dues-paying Costco member.” This is the single most entertaining piece of writing I read this week. [Taste]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was about the Disney adults going into debt for their (Disney, obviously) vacations.

Below the jump, ~friends of Links~ 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

Have said this before, will say this again: the coolest thing about writing a newsletter is corresponding with people I otherwise wouldn’t.

Last week, I complained about having nothing to read. Or, more specifically, I complained about having no books to read that fall in that perfect Venn-diagram intersection of “easy enough to page through at 11 p.m. when I collapse, exhausted and foam-brained, into my unmade bed” and “witty, literary or thoughtful enough that I don’t feel like the world’s most basic Booktok bitch” (... with nothing but respect and love, OF COURSE, for the internet’s Booktok bitches.)

Elizabeth Held, who writes the wonderful book newsletter , said she thinks of this category as “books that trick you into thinking,” which — yes! Grab me with a weird premise or propulsive plot and sneak some social commentary halfway in. She shared the following recommendations, all of which I immediately requested on Libby:

• Good People by Patmeena Sabit: “It’s written as an oral history/documentary so it goes fast. It’s kind of a family saga, but with a mystery at its core and has a lot to say about the immigrant experience in America.”

• Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo: “a soapy book about a woman learning her long-lost father is an authoritarian ruler in Africa. There’s a great story at its core, while it engages with topics such as colonialism and colorism.”

• “If you haven’t read The Favorites, I can’t recommend it enough for a slump. I’m not sure that it’s quite as serious as you’re looking for but it is a loose Wuthering Heights retelling.”

• “An Academic Affair is a swoony romance about the precarious state of untenured professors.”

• “All the Other Mothers Hate Me offers both a thriller and commentary on motherhood.”

Readers also sent in the following fiction recs:

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (good luck getting off THIS Libby wait list)

• Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

• Come and Get It by Kiley Reid (I have read this one, and loved it)

• The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

• Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom

• Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

• When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill

• Heart the Lover by Lily King

• The Compound by Aisling Rawle

• The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (have also read this, but loved it slightly less)

• Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

This is not an exhaustive list, but I think these selections best meet the “tricks-you-into-thinking” brief. I’m excited to get into them! (And if you appreciated or will use any of these recommendations, please give this post a heart — it’s a signal to me that I should get into books on occasion.)

If you read anything this weekend

Eternally fascinated by Disney adults; perhaps I should add the Disney adult book to my fast-growing to-read list. In the meantime, I will settle for this riveting profile of the Disney adults who go into debt to support their travel and merch habits. There’s something so interesting in the notion that these people are not paying for a vacation, per se — they’re paying for either membership in a hierarchical online club OR a sense of (childlike?) safety and succor they can’t find in the “real” world. [New Yorker]

TIL that Book of the Month — which I had previously pegged as a mid-2010s subscription-box start-up targeted to millennial women (and the long-suffering men who need to buy gifts for them) — is, in fact, 100 years old. And struggling mightily to find its place in the world. [Dirt]

Roughly one-third of Substack’s bestselling newsletters appear to be AI-generated. This analysis regrettably does not name names, but I will happily take your guesses! []

Absolutely cackling over AIBible.com, which is — as its name would suggest — an AI-illustrated Bible (... that borrows very, very heavily from big-budget epic fantasy aesthetics). I don’t know where to start, I have so many questions. Why is this reading experience gamified? Why is the chatbot in the corner prompting me to ask questions “about the Bible and mental health”? Why are Adam and Eve like, unholy hot … and is there a paid version that removes the demure greenery around their AI-generated genitals?

More to the point, how many people are sincerely engaging with this sexy Bible slop, which feels SO tacky and pandering? The answer is apparently … quite a lot! Maybe it also tricks you into thinking 🤪. [AIBible.com, The Verge]

Two new-to-me noises: “food noise” describes constant, intrusive thoughts about eating, often triggered and amplified by nonstop exposure to food content on social media. “Infrasound” is noise too low for humans to truly hear, though they might still perceive it as a pressure or hum. It’s caused by datacenters, among other things — and explains why some buildings feel haunted. Noises!! They’re all around us. [Dazed, Heatmap, Scienceblog]

A sneaky mid-read CTA! You didn’t see this coming, did you? But here it is: your periodic reminder that while this newsletter may look and feel very FUN, it actually takes a lot of WORK to produce. You can support that work for a mere $7 a month, which — in this economy — is actually not a lot. You probably spend more than $7 each month on streaming services you keep forgetting to cancel.

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“I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web quite staggering,” said Jonáš Doležal, an AI researcher at Stanford University. “We’re witnessing, in my opinion, a major transformation of the digital landscape in a fraction of the time it took to build in the first place.” A third of new websites are AI-generated, per a new study. [404 Media]

I’m not entirely sure how to describe game designer Neal Agarwal’s latest project, Cursor Camp, except to tell you that it’s planting a flag (er, cursor?) for the still-human internet. [Neal.fun]

I think we might look back on the shooting — the averted shooting? The inadvertent shooting? — at the White House Correspondents’ dinner as a watershed moment for conspiracy thinking in America. Much has been made of the fact that the shooter was himself a “normie lib.” But there are also lots of normie lib conspiracists coming out of the woodwork for this!

Per the New York Times, more than 300,000 posts containing the word “staged” were posted to Twitter after the dinner. The logic here is — what? That Trump so desperately wanted to continue construction on a ballroom that is already being built that he false-flagged a shooting in front of 1,000 journalists? The stakes are so low. The risks are so high. It doesn’t make any conceivable sense, even for a president who loves mess and lies.

If we’re going in for nonsensical conspiracies, let’s at least make them fun. For instance: “Did a Time Traveling Superintelligent AI Try to Warn About White House Correspondents Dinner?” [The Atlantic, NYT, 404 Media]

This is your sign to adopt a whimsical, over-sharey email signature. Work life is drudgery; why not GIF it up a little? [Slate]

At elementary schools like McKinley STEAM in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, teachers are trying all kinds of hijinks to lengthen their students’ shrinking attention spans — from adding movement breaks and shortening lessons to leading five-year-olds in meditation. Meanwhile, school districts around the country are souring on YouTube, which waged a predatory, decade-long campaign to get in more classrooms. [Hechinger Report, WSJ]

Related: The writer Sophie Haigney recommends the following “program of attentional reset” for people who feel like they can’t focus: “Start with reading a book that seems ‘hard’ to you, ten or twenty pages a day. (Check in with our friend Henry James, perhaps.) … [Then] do a physical activity (practicing yoga, running, going for long walks, biking around, even doing some push-ups) … and don’t look at your phone while you’re doing it.” []

Books are getting shorter to match readers’ attention spans. From 2012 to 2022, the average length of a New York Times bestseller dropped by more than 50 pages. [LA Times]

Reading this (deeply entertaining) profile of Lauren Sánchez Bezos — the woman who introduced Amazon’s founder to “joy, love and cosmetic dermatology” — reminded me powerfully of two inalienable truths:

1. There are few things more overtly political than declaring that you’re not. (Or any permutations on this theme: that you don’t like politics, follow politics, “get into” politics, etc.)

2. Even the very wealthiest people, with the very best plastic surgeons, can’t outrun the cruel march of time. And that’s okay! There’s no shame in looking 55 at 55!! [New York Times]

In 2005, we spoke about 16,632 words to another person every day. By 2019, that number had dropped to less than 12,000 — and has likely fallen further since. “In the course of a year, at least 120,000 words we each might have once said now go unspoken.” [Wall Street Journal]

I did not engage with the Jia Tolentino/Hasan Piker thing last week, and I do not intend to engage with it now. (I have a lot of places to expend my moral outrage, and you want me to worry about Whole Foods lemons?!) But this follow-on essay by Anastasia Berg, on the struggle to live an ethical or moral life in a world that presents you with so many immoral options, is very thoughtful and very good, and — unlike the saga that inspired it — well worth your attention. []

Ask.com — née Ask Jeeves — shut down Friday after almost 30 years. “Jeeves’ spirit endures,” the company said, comically. What spirit, and where? [Mashable]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was this Cut story about everyone getting Botox, which says a lot — ALL GOOD — about the demographics of my audience.

Below the jump, ~friends of Links~ 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

WHOOPS: Last week’s edition was meant for everyone, but it inadvertently only sent to paid subscribers. You can read it here. While you’re at it … maybe consider upgrading to a paid subscription? This not only keeps you in the loop through technical glitches, like the one we experienced last week, but it allows thousands of other people to keep reading for free.

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To paraphrase my friend Ethan, I don’t believe in paywalls — but I do believe that people who can afford to support the work they like/value should do so. Thanks very much! On with this week’s show…

I’m writing this edition on Indie Bookstore Day, whilst my husband and daughter debate a bookstore trip, and so it feels appropriate to write about BOOKS and … why I am not presently reading them.

I find myself in something of a literary rut. “Literary” might be too grandiose a term. In fact, it is an eternal and occasionally paralyzing tug-of-war between my best, most evolved self (who reads tasteful litfic, enlightened non-fiction, that stack of toddler-rearing books on the bedside table) and my actual, unserious self (who binged all 2,800 pages of the ACOTAR series in a roughly five-day period).

Is there any compromise between these personalities? Am I doomed to swing between the two extremes forever? Surely someone has written like, a highbrow social commentary styled as a romance between a werewolf king and an elf.

All that to say: If you’ve read any good books lately, I’d love to hear about them.

If you read anything this weekend

“I had more reverence for what I was doing, which is part of the value of death. It’s funny, these ‘files’ — what are they, even? Electrons vibrating in some container. But if they can die, if we can lose them in the way that we can lose the information that makes up a person, then they live.”

A weirdly existential profile of DriveSavers, a data-recovery firm in Novato, California, that rescues family photos, book manuscripts and other irreplaceable files from damaged and hacked devices. [New Yorker]

John Mark Comer is a celebrity pastor for the burnout generation: a cool millennial dad who quotes viral Buzzfeed articles in his sermons and says that turning off your phone can bring you closer to Jesus. [The Atlantic]

Eternally enthralled by this class of services and start-ups that seeks to reconstitute, for a profit, the sense of community and social support that people once got from friends and relatives…

The latest entrant to that category is Sage Haus, a slickly branded matchmaking service that pairs well-off families with “house managers” who take on their household logistics. A house manager does your laundry, makes your shopping list and knows when you need to send birthday cards. I am personally delighted to see society assign a monetary value to all that feminized emotional labor (!). [The Atlantic]

I always told myself I’d be someone who “embraced aging” — no injections, no hair dye, no bad vibes about my neck — but I’ll admit that aging has come on a hell of a lot faster than I expected. It doesn’t help that every third woman I encounter socially is Botox-ed to a plump, youthful sheen. DO I ALSO NEED BOTOX TO EXIST IN THIS WORLD? (No. No!! At least … I don’t think.) [The Cut]

Audio consumption is hypothetically just as habit-forming as screen use, but it’s far less studied and discussed. Americans spend roughly four hours a day listening to radio, podcasts and streaming music services. [Washington Post]

My personal theory of corporate “day in the life” videos is pretty boring: I think they extend the the well-documented online fixation with other people’s routines. But hey, sure, maybe they also express some repressed desire for pre-Covid normalcy! [New York Times / Dazed]

What is the worst thing you’ve ever said or done anonymously online? It is, I am only sort of ashamed to admit, the first thing I asked myself after reading how very, very good AI has gotten at unmasking anonymous authors based on even short snippets of text. Claude Opus 4.7 needed only 150 words to determine they were written by Kelsey Piper — and writers with lesser online footprints will be next. [The Argument]

Pity the social shopping pioneers at QVC. The company filed for bankruptcy protection last week, even though its core innovation — that a charismatic host can sell anything to bored people at home — now underpins an entire economy of social media influencers. [Bloomberg]

If Bluesky was intended as some kind of return to the early days of social media, it succeeded: It’s now struggling with an age-old set of business problems, like how to make money. [Fast Company]

Further proof that prediction markets create reality, not predict it: Last week, someone made $34,000 by betting on the temperature in Paris that day … then trekking out to the temperature sensor and heating it. [Kneeling Bus]

“Time confetti,” a term coined by the writer Brigid Schulte, describes what happens when your time gets chopped into tiny, unsatisfying fragments — typically, because you’re not giving the task at hand your undivided attention. [Vox]

MAHA influencers have discovered a new cure-all, and Big Public Health does not want you to have it. (TL;DR: It’s nicotine. NICOTINE. These people are idiots.) [New York Times]

A generation of young Wikipedia editors are making pages for niche underground musicians — giving microgenres like “dariacore” and “shitgaze” the acknowledgement they didn’t get from the music press. [Pitchfork]

If you read the preceding sentence and thought “wtf is shitgaze?” — here are the relevant pages! [Dariacore, shitgaze on Wikipedia]

“Month Offline” is a month-long, in-person program that coaches participants to give up their smartphones and redirect their attention to offline projects. Participants typically switch to customized flip phones, which still have versions of apps like Uber and Google Maps, and participate in group therapy-like sessions. [The Atlantic]

Absolutely irrelevant to internet culture, but among the most interesting links I clicked this week: a technical history of the disposable diaper, from misery-inducing plastic pants to modern Huggies. [Works in Progress]

This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. A major downside of returning to gainful employment in an actual newsroom is that someone, somewhere has put my info back in a bunch of PR databases.

Such databases promise — at least, in my understanding — to connect publicists with reporters covering relevant beats. In my experience, they’re used mostly to spam the greatest possible number of people with junk announcements related to boring, hyper-niche things.

For THAT reason, I am glad that some of the aforementioned databases appear to include my personal website instead of my email address. Because when people contact me through my website, Squarespace gives me ✨options.✨ I can route those submissions to a Google spreadsheet instead of my inbox. I can set up a Google CAPTCHA or a verification email to cut down on spam. I can build a list of all the people who contact me through my site and then turn the tables by … emailing THEM.

Having a website is nice, it turns out!! 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 — which most of you, admittedly, did not receive — was this extremely cool digital zine that tells a story through Stefan Chua’s reviews of 52 places.

Below the jump, ~friends of Links~ 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

Say what you will about AllBirds’ corporate tailspin: You gotta respect the sheer chutzpah of the sneakers-to-AI pivot.

On Wednesday, two weeks after selling off all its assets in an ignominious fire sale, the faded apparel darling announced it would abandon all environmental and sartorial pretenses and start renting out computing power, instead. Just five years ago, AllBirds was valued at $4 billion and beloved by the likes of both Barack Obama and the sorts of tech bros who still vote Democrat. Now, it plans to rent out specialized chips it does not currently possess, and may in fact be unable to obtain, in an industry where it has no preexisting relationships, expertise or other claim to fame.

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This is, I would argue, the type of brazen, self-deluded “pivot” that could only be accomplished by a white man: a rich white man with woolen sneakers on his feet and dreams of corporate reinvention in his head. Imagine, imagine, what you or I might achieve with that level of unearned confidence! Tomorrow, Links could become a fashion Substack despite my irreparably basic, midwestern taste. (I recently bought Allbirds for Jason and still think they’re … fine, actually.)

But that metaphor doesn’t go far enough, does it? Because in it, I — a newsletter-writer — would still be writing a newsletter. And AllBirds, a maker of sneakers, will make sneakers no longer. So in order for this hypothetical to hold, I’d need to spontaneously declare myself an astronaut or a Supreme Court justice or an emergency physician … and someone, someones, would have to believe it. Because as of this writing, AllBirds’ stock price is still up 351% from before the so-called “pivot.”

I’ll say this for America, at least: It’s still a place where — with enough money, a couple buzzwords and a public listing1 — you can (pretend to) be anything. Or so a little NewBirdie told me.

If you read anything this weekend

Beige remains the sad color of choice for home interiors, clothing and children’s items. Analysts blame the aesthetic needs of influencers, whose content pops better against neutral backgrounds, and the rise of minimalism as a class signifier. [WBUR]

Absolutely captivated by Stefan Chua’s “Local Guide (Toronto, Canada),” a digital zine that tells the story of the last six years of Chua’s life through reviews of 52 places. “I sometimes wonder if user reviews … are the most widely read form of writing today. I wanted to reimagine them more flexibly, and explore how they can be used to document our relationships to places.” [0117review via ]

“As humans, we only live one life. But what if we could live a million?” It sounds like a sci-fi setup — or maybe a Nietzschean thought experiment — but it’s actually the pitch for an AI platform that looses your “digital twin” into a virtual world where it goes out and meets other twins. I’m intrigued by this, in spite of myself: I like an AI project with tangible human connection as its end. (All these virtual meet-cutes are supposed to precede IRL dates, business meetings or similar connections.) Bonus points if it, uh, transcends the inherent limits of the human experience. [Wired]

Fan Social — billed as “Uber for celebrities,” but maybe better described as “Cameo for people with too much money and too few friends” — allows fans to pay hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to hang out with their favorite D-list celebrities. Feels a little ick for the fans buying lunch dates; feels more ick for the “celebrities” selling them…? But life is short, and you do in fact get just one, so — knock yourself out, I guess. [The Cut]

One school social worker in Tampa now makes more money on Mercor — the $10-billion start-up that pays white-collar professionals to teach AI their skills — than she does helping actual families in the public school system. One wonders how much money she’ll make when Mercor’s smizing, baby-faced founders have successfully extracted every last useful insight from her brain. (Or how the families of America’s social workers will feel, when it’s AI that’s connecting them with support and housing.) [Bloomberg]

I have joked to several people, over the past few weeks, that I cared more about the look of Sprout’s first birthday than I did about my own wedding. This is not entirely a joke: There was no mood board or color scheme for my nuptials, and the baby’s birthday … had both.2 Anyway! I attributed this peculiar change in priorities to some neuroticism I picked up over the past 10 years: the result of aging, maybe, or of motherhood. After reading the tech reporter Samantha Cole’s account of contracting “Wedding Brain,” however, I’m blaming the much-maligned algorithm. Even as a self-professed “cool bride,” Cole writes, the maximalist party logic of WeddingTok et al got under her skin. SAME, but for a party that the guest of honor has already thoroughly forgotten. [404 Media]

Urbanism influencers are having a moment. It probably helps that housing, transportation and urban infrastructure are the stuff of, like … foundational lifestyle content. [Dwell]

“It is inconvenient to be a person, floating through the grand and impossible world, significant in your own resplendent garden of hours but insignificant as a fleck of dust in the greater arc of the universe. It is, in some ways, inconvenient to believe that your one significant life can collide meaningfully with someone else’s, someone whom you have to put the work into finding, in the outside world, where people still sometimes go to the market, reaching and reaching and reaching.” On nostalgia, “frictionmaxxing” and “the lulling ease of screens.” [New Yorker]

Related, corrective, and a good reminder: “Friction” is unevenly distributed. When we talk about things like “frictionmaxxing,” we’re typically talking about the experience of the person ordering DoorDash … not the person delivering it. [Dazed]

My big takeaway from the Times’ check-in with four early YouTubers — including Colleen Ballinger who, wonder of wonders, is on some kind of comeback tour — is that none of these people has emerged unchanged, or unscathed, from their decades in the eye of the algorithm. [New York Times]

No one loves AI slop more than a cash-strapped small-business owner. (Bonus points if they’re over 55, I suspect, though this piece doesn’t say one way or the other.) Restaurants, in particular, have embraced AI in their ads and marketing, to truly uncanny and unappetizing affect. If it’s too good/glossy to be true … I’m not ordering it. [The New York Groove]

Phones, headphones and other digital shields make it easy to avoid conversations with strangers — but small talk is actually really enriching, rarely rejected and generally less awkward than you might expect. []

Thematically, if not literally, related: Omegle was a deeply fucked-up site that probably should not have existed. But in hindsight, it also represented some of the very best impulses (openness, discovery, connection) of the old internet. [Dirt]

The “silent scream” is purportedly the viral Gen Z gesture du jour, performed by miming an open-mouthed howl with your hands at your face (... like Munch, but way less existential). One etymologist suggests gestures have come to function as a kind of slang for a generation that favors visuals and video over everything. [The Independent]

I am loath to use the phrase “digital detox,” cringe and cliche as it is … HOWEVER: A large study of nearly 500 adults recently found that a mere two weeks of detox “effectively erased a decade of age-related cognitive decline,” esp. w/r/t mental health and attention. It sounds immediately suspect to me. (A decade? How do you figure?) At the same time, as far as detoxes go, you could do far shadier. [Washington Post]

Twitter is belatedly cracking down on its legions of online news hustlers, a ragtag band of aggregators, engagement-baiters and other assorted middlemen who make money by ripping off headlines without attribution. [Techcrunch / Links]

In the land of AI, the man with social skills is king. [New York Times]

The best free restaurant bread in America is the cranberry-walnut loaf at Philadelphia’s Parc. But you owe it to yourself and the remainder of your weekend to read the 12,000-word national odyssey that got Caitie Weaver to that conclusion. [The Atlantic]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s VINTAGE edition was this 2016 Vox essay by a writer who “eliminated dissent” from her Facebook feed. In the cold, unforgiving glare of 2026, it does read as a bit … naive.

Thank you for your patience this month as I navigated vacation, the aforementioned birthday party, multiple house guests, etc. I find myself paralyzingly behind on email and assorted sundries (a special update for paid subscribers, for instance) but I am working overtime to catch-up. This will be the week I do it (… she said to herself, with a sort of manic desperation). Or this will at least be the week I set my alarm very early and hope for the very best.

Below the jump, ~friends of Links~ 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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Hi friends. Links is on a much-needed spring break this week. And while I can’t literally pack you into my overfull suitcase, I thought we might go on our own little trip through TIME and SPACE.

The following links (and their brisk, chirpy descriptions — WOW I must have had a lot of energy) are all sourced directly from Links editions that published this week in 2016. I culled out the link rot, which was … moderately less extensive? … than you might expect. And I shed a tear for the many Links-favorite sites that have since passed on. (Motherboard! Pacific Standard! Gawker and The Awl! Buzzfeed, as it used to be, before its zombie AI pivot.)

Shout out to those of you who’ve been here all along ... this continues to be quite a ride.

A grab bag of fine vintage links

1. What your Facebook looks like when you purge dissenters. Betsy Aimee decided to cut all her cross-cutting friends from her Facebook recently. The experience was so bizarre that she promptly added them back to News Feed.

2. Who cares if teenage girls want attention? Everybody does!! Humility’s not exactly huge on social media. For some odd reason, however, we treat the trait as deviant among teenage girls ... forgetting, for a minute, that we all want to be heard.

3. One sincere argument for #banningmen: Online communities are seriously nice in their absence. No offense to my dude readers, but y’all suck the air out of a (chat) room. Which explains why there’s been a sudden surge of lady Slack chats and Facebook groups.

4. The Internet's most epic war never technically took place. Or it did — but only in virtual space. "The Great EVE War" involved 50,000 players over a period of almost two years. And to the war's participants, the whole thing felt weirdly real.

5. A talent agency for Internet-famous dogs. The shocking fact is not that this thing exists, but that no one has yet offered Dory a job. [Editor’s note: RIP Dory.]

6. Vic Berger's a satirist for the Internet age. He's a video editor who splices found footage into bizarre political commentaries. He knows he can't compete with reality — that's approaching satire, as it is. So he just tries to find the absurd and telling in otherwise typical moments.

7. Maybe it's NOT actually that funny to autotune the news. Viral videos that "songify" serious witness statements exploit people of color for YouTube views. Think of that the next time you watch Kimmy Schmidt, complete with her catchy, news-inspired theme. It's not v. “strong” or “miraculous” to turn suffering into a meme...!

8. The Web I want is honestly no Web at all. But barring that, I dig The Guardian's big anti-harassment call. It's launched a new series studying online conversation and abuse. The cool thing is the project will change the paper's comments, too.

9. Facebook is fighting fake news, but it can never really win. A year after the site launched new anti-hoax tools, sites like Empire News still smuggle stuff in. Facebook says hoax-story engagement is down, but the average fake gets 1300 likes and shares. What can we say, really, besides reader beware?

10. How YouTubers really make their millions. It's not all sponsorships and preroll ads: Performers like Zoella earn tens of thousands of dollars selling products to adoring (+ often underage) fans.

I’ll be back next week! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

Is social media most like a cigarette, a grasslands predator, a bowl of free tortilla chips at a Mexican restaurant … or some totally different, off-the-wall metaphor, yet unimagined by human minds? On Wednesday, a jury ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark social media addiction trial. The verdict essentially finds that social networks are consumer products, like cars or drugs or home appliances, and that their makers should be on the hook when they cause harm. But the proverbial jury is still out on which colorful metaphor most vividly captures that staid legal conclusion.

The leading prospect is, logically, the cigarette, as in: “Is Big Tech Facing a Big Tobacco Moment?” But Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff in the case, has LOTS of other contenders.

During his closing arguments, Lanier reportedly showed jurors a large picture of a lion stalking gazelle in the Serengeti. (“They never go after the strongest, and they never go after the boldest, and they never go after the stoutest,” he said. “They find the one they think is weaker, the most vulnerable. That’s the one that they get.”)

At other points, Lanier likened social networks to Trojan horses. (“They look wonderful and great... but you invite them in and they take over.”) Also: free tortilla chips (because once you pop, you can’t stop eating them) and baking soda (because, despite its relatively low volume, it has an outsize influence on a recipe’s outcome).

But two can play this game, can’t they? Personally, I’d say social media is less like a lion than it is a lamprey (invasive, bottom-feeding, occasionally essential). It’s like an espresso martini on an empty stomach. (Leaves me both jittery and depleted.) Social media is like the cute, hollow animal toys my daughter plays with in the tub: bright and buoyant and engaging on the outside, but undoubtedly incubating some hidden mold. (See image above.)

Anyway … that’s why Mark Lanier makes the big bucks and I write a newsletter. Whatever your preferred metaphor, we’ll all have to wait to see if this big, bad bellwether case — and a wave of other, similar suits — yields any concrete change at the likes of Meta and YouTube.

This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. Social media, as we’ve just discussed, is a bit of a shit show. Which is why your online identity should ideally exist outside three fickle platforms that could change their algorithms tomorrow.

Squarespace is about building a digital presence that is actually, durably yours: a site on a domain you control, with a design that reflects you. You can sell content or memberships directly, run email campaigns, track what’s working with built-in analytics … or none of the above!! It’s your little corner of the internet, and you can craft a space you love.

I say this as someone who has, historically, treated her website as more of an obligation than a destination. I am basically domain-squatting on my own name. But the more I sour on social media and the platform ecosystem writ large, the more appealing it is to have a stable, self-defined corner of the internet where I can — from start to finish — do my own thing.

If you are feeling a similar urge to stake a small claim in the digital wilderness, use this link with the code DEWEY for a free Squarespace trial + 10% off your first purchase.

If you read anything

Those suddenly ubiquitous AI object videos, in which anthropomorphized foods and household products are killed or raped or otherwise brutalized in viscerally disturbing and messed up ways, evolved out of a (relatively normal!) genre of life-hack content that uses AI-animated objects to illustrate how-tos and some such things. [Wired, Intelligencer]

In spiritually related news, the innocent, unpresuming “walking tour” video has gotten a dark twist in “nightlife content,” wherein YouTube creeps prowl popular bar and club districts to film young women without their consent. It’s almost as if these platforms push content to the extremes by rewarding engagement! [The Guardian]

Prediction markets, which have historically been popular with men, are increasingly targeting young women in their marketing materials, part of a larger scheme to gamify the entire culture. [The Independent]

Music executives have started treating prediction markets as a signal of fan sentiment and engagement, using them as a tool to guide marketing and investment decisions. [Rolling Stone]

None of the men in this compilation of “sweet, smart” red-pilled boyfriends sound particularly sweet or smart to me. [Bustle]

Maybe a stint in the clink can save Clavicular from the dangers of his own deranged beauty routine. [TMZ, Dazed]

The Human Line Project, a support group for people grappling with AI psychosis, has documented three primary types of AI delusion: the belief that the chatbot is conscious; the belief that the user has stumbled upon a major breakthrough in their field; and the belief that the user is speaking directly to God or a higher power through the chatbot interface. [The Guardian]

Remember the metaverse? (Lol, me neither.) The dream of vast, interactive virtual worlds feels naive — and weirdly … old-fashioned? — in the AI era. But I’m struck by the notion that VR spaces and AI companions offer competing forms of online sociality: Both are intended to resolve some of the barriers of real-life interaction, whether physical or geographical or interpersonal or … something else! But one uses the internet to transcend that friction, while the other just seeks to eliminate it. [Wired]

In a dataset of 186,000 pieces from 1,500 American newspapers, researchers found that roughly 9% of all articles appeared to contain AI-generated material. That proportion was higher in the opinion section, where many of the writers aren’t working journalists, and the Modern Love column, which often reads like slop anyway. (Kidding, KIDDING, I got my start in Modern Love. But that “unfit to be a mother” column was a doozy.) [ArXiv, The Atlantic]

TIL that the brain processes written material in small chunks of seven to nine letters, with tiny pauses in between. Those pauses last slightly longer on iPads and tablets than on paper, contributing to the feeling that it’s more difficult to read (and remember what we read) on screens. []

A new generation of weather app is trying to own up to uncertainty. Feels very of the moment (so transparent! so authentic!) but I just wanna know if it’ll rain tomorrow morning. [New Yorker]

The verdicts are in, and they are unanimous: Iran is winning the slopaganda war. [404 Media, New York]

You’ve heard influencer accent, but have you heard … lip filler accent? (Not sure this one has reached Western New York.) [Defector]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was that dinergoth dreck. In hindsight, that was one round of online discourse we need not have acknowledged.

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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No witty intro today, my friends — I’m instead carving out some time to write a note to paid supporters. It occurred to me last night, as I frosted a Grimace-colored monstrosity of a first-birthday cake, that it’s been a full year since I went out on leave … and three months since I started my job at Vox … and thus we’re grievously (grimacingly?) overdue for a little catch-up.

I should have that out pretty soon, “soon” being a relative and subjective term. My relationship with time is very dicey right now. A year? A year ALREADY? And the links, they still churn …

If you read anything this week

Putting the above paragraph through a “LinkedIn Speak” translator yields the following, grade-A corporate slop:

No witty intro today, folks. 🙅‍♂️ I’m prioritizing some deep work to connect with my premium community. 💎

A year already? Time flies when you're building. 🚀 And the links? They never stop churning. 🔗

#GrowthMindset #CareerJourney #WorkLifeIntegration #Vox #CommunityFirst

Oh gawd.

Modern friendship is, in some tellings, based less on mutual care and obligation than it is on convenience: Texts or voice notes when it suits you; “protecting your peace” when it doesn’t. AI “friendships,” lonely though they are, follow the same contours: “It’s not that AI companions are going to replace friendships per se,” one sociologist said. “They reveal what friendships are trending towards.” [404 Media, The Atlantic]

Spiritually related, from the confessions of an AI-generated admissions essay editor: “Applicants today would rather sound like that bot, who knows nothing of the world but can produce 600 typo-free words, than sound like themselves … The bot boom in academia writ large puts on display the insecurity of students [emphasis mine] just as much as it does their laziness.” [Slate]

I’ve been kicking around this idea that some types of viral AI slop operate like a kind of collective projection — they embody somebody’s very real and revealing fantasy, though they’re literally fiction. This week’s entries into that little canon include “Jessica Foster,” the poreless army influencer paling around with Trump, and Solomon Fairfax, the face of a fictional slave-revenge narrative. [Washington Post, Scalawag]

“Gig AI training” is a new and fast-expanding category of work wherein low-paid workers “micro-license” pieces of their lives to AI companies. They upload personal photos and recorded phone calls, perform daily chores on camera and complete any number of other menial tasks to help train AI systems. [The Guardian, Wired]

“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” is aging like a cut avocado. [Links / Times of Israel / NYT]

Is “Iris” … sync music now?? (Can a song ever be said to become sync music, or does it have to start out with that distinction?) [NYT]

Maybe the real reason we disdain “Disney Adults” is because we’re uncomfortable with our own willingness to be pacified by entertainment. []

New York’s Washington Square Park has become a favored stage for influencers, who film unsuspecting passerby, stage stupid stunts and generally make it the kind of place I’d walk a long distance to avoid. [Gothamist]

Many young American influencers, disillusioned by their prospects in the US — and, one presumes, in Dubai as well? — are looking to China for wellness trends, cultural cachet and sundry other inspiration. [Independent, Business Insider]

My only thoughts on that viral “dinergoth” piece: I am sorry your manga pixie dream girl dumped you, but that’s not a basis for incisive cultural anthropology. [The New Atlantis]

“Unlike athletes, who have off-seasons built into their routines by expert coaches, influencers must create content every day to feed the algorithmic gods.” The problem with runfluencers — and, I would argue, any influencer who monetizes personal performance. [Dazed]

Online travel recommendations are broken, as anyone who has Googled recently can attest: “Discovery, and the once-reliable methods of it that the internet used to provide … are now overrun with sponsored listings, gamified SEO, and so many opinions from so many different people as to make the 4.3 star rating on Google totally meaningless.” []

Tangentially related, and I realize only 12 of you will click on this, but Eater finally published a dining guide to Buffalo and it’s actually, objectively offensive. [Eater]

Chuck Norris died last week at the age of 86. He is survived by a complicated political legacy and a meme that defined the mid-2000s internet. [Slate]

Speaking of iconic memes of the era, it’s been 20 years (!) since that proto-viral video of the leprechaun sighting in Mobile, Alabama. [YouTube]

For future reference, any typos in this newsletter aren’t “misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” [Smithsonian]

If you are trying to narrate a poem
On your phone
While in the parking lot,
And you hold your hand up,
And wag your finger,
And lift one eyebrow,
To stop somebody
From backing into you,
They will understand.
They can tell
That you’re trying to create art. [New Yorker]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the normie-ization of Feeld. Feel(d) like I just learned a lot about a lot of you!!

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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Today I darkened the door of our “Peloton room” for the first time in 18 months. It’s an alcove in the attic where we used to work out, but now mostly store excess stuff. The bike was dusty and glitched from misuse; it took a long unplug, a software update and some wiggling of wires to get it to work. At long last, when the bike successfully powered on, I realized my ministrations had just endowed it with a series of thrilling new ✨ AI features.✨

Now most of these features remain unknown to me. I have not, as I said, exercised in 18 months, and I expended a great deal of my discretionary energy merely walking up the stairs to the attic.

But the “personalized plan” splashed across my dashboard did sound imminently useful and relevant: Peloton’s vast and under-tagged library of 53,000 classes is so difficult to navigate that it’s become the subject of many a Reddit thread.

Personally, I did not want to scroll through a thousand vaguely titled thumbnails to find the ideal re-entry point for a post-partum layabout like myself; far better to have a tool that could look at the literal years of data I have consigned to this platform, and — using, say, the fancy-sounding Insights Generator Engine on which Peloton has staked its entire fate — recommend an easy 20-minute ride based on my class history.

Alas: Even in this simple task, the great AI was foiled. It suggested I might like to “get back into routine” by taking a class with three of my least favorite instructors.1 The most cursory of Google searches confirms, moreover, that I’m not the only one flummoxed by this “cutting-edge AI.”

Maybe we should count our blessings, though. It’s honestly a marvel that company’s still alive.

If you read anything this week

I’m not entirely sure how to describe Anna Wiener’s probing longform exploration of the AI companion industry, except to say that it ultimately (and kinda … beautifully?) affirms and celebrates the depths of human imagination. [The New Yorker]

How to speak to family or friends who have gone off the deep end with their AI companion. [404 Media]

“Sync” music — sometimes called library or production music — is a generic, utilitarian genre that exists purely to soundtrack videos, from movies and TV shows to corporate training modules. As all media becomes video … all music becomes sync. (Just click through the embedded samples; once you hear it, you’ll hear it in everything.) [New York Times]

I am dying to know the identity of the reformed pundit featured so prominently (and so anonymously) in this piece on the regretful women of the “New Right.” Maybe one of you know! She’s a former anti-feminist writer for several “popular right-wing outlets”; she is married and has several children, AND — like many of her ilk, allegedly — she now regrets casting her lots with a movement that vocally and transparently hates women. [New York]

“The largest harvesting of human expertise ever attempted”: On the rise of the AI data industry, which tenuously employs tens of thousands of highly educated white-collar workers — from teachers, lawyers and doctors to management consultants and conservation scientists — to train the AI systems that may one day replace them. [The Verge]

“The idea of an AI company ventriloquizing the living and the dead to sell a product that is largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT is perhaps most sickening for its sheer predictability.” On the Grammerly debacle. [Defector]

A sobering collection of first-person accounts from university professors, tutors and librarians on their experience with AI on campus. []

“Living online becomes a vehicle of moral trivialization, where tangible consequences of stakes of policy become secondary to the more immediately accessible world of likes and reposts. They are doing war for the chat.” [Vox]

I am a sucker for stunt journalism in all its forms, as long-time readers of this newsletter know well, so: Here’s your obligatory link to the 13,000-word April cover story in which The Atlantic gave Mitt Romney biographer and devout Mormon McKay Coppins $10,000 to slide into something that sounds ever so slightly like a sports-gambling addiction. I would’ve loved to read more on the particulars of that arrangement (media lawyers are famously cautious; who would have covered rehab, had he needed it?) but alas, we’ll have to wait for the CJR follow-up. [The Atlantic]

Lindy West’s new memoir feels like one of those things that might best be consumed through second-hand reviews and interviews, rather than through engagement with the source material. [Slate / NYT]

More Substackers are writing books. Or more writers are publishing Substacks. Either way — both ways? — we now get to consider: What defines “the Substack book,” if such a thing exists? [/ ]

The weirdly practical afterlife of Pokémon Go. [MIT Technology Review]

How normies ruined Feeld. [Wired]

A wry and deeply researched dispatch from the 2025 North American School Scrabble Championship, where “jaker” is a word but “vlogger” isn’t. []

A free tool that turns your handwriting into a font. [FontCrafter]

A game in which you list animals until you run out of ideas. I could see this being potentially very fun with kids. [Animalist]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned a very vindicating Cornell study that found “employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak … may struggle with practical decision-making.”

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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This is an appreciation post for libraries. Have you been to your local library this week? I switched to reading ebooks during the pandemic, and essentially forgot that these physical spaces full of books and dust and rowdy toddlers and frazzle-haired old men watching YouTube without headphones were a thing.

But they are a thing — that best, rarest thing: a fully functional, accessible third space. A place that isn’t home, and isn’t work, where people can gather and hang out without paying admission or buying anything.

The books are secondary to the hang-out, in fact. You get every kind of person at an urban library, and the one characteristic that everyone shares is that they needed some place to go that day. Glowering teens on the shared computers. Seniors reading day-old news. Unhoused folks asking after the bathroom keycard. And now, at least once a week: me and my almost-one-year-old.

I’ve started hauling Sprout to baby playtime at a library near us. The kids gnaw on battered communal toys, each block shellacked with the dried spit of older generations. The parents talk.

I’ve met more people in a month of library playtime than I probably did the whole year prior: Abuelas visiting from Mexico. PhD math students. In one case, another editor who works in national media. (Truly, in Buffalo: What are the chances?!) I found a babysitter at library playtime and it turns out she lives in our neighborhood. Now I seem to see her everywhere — on walks, at the coffee shop — and those encounters feel like the fulfillment of a naive dream I had when I left a bigger, more anonymous city for this one.

I am reading more books, too: Physical books1 that I grab off the new release shelf at random before lugging Sprout back into the cold. This is a highly inefficient way to borrow a book, of course. The fastest and most frictionless method would be to download an ebook to my Kindle through the Libby app, as I’ve been doing for the past five years or so.

But this is so much richer, going to the library. Some things you can’t really optimize for. And where else am I supposed to pick up new parent-friends?? Don’t say Bumble BFF — I’ve tried that circus before.

If you read anything this week

• On the many ways that prediction markets distort the news, from creating self-reinforcing rumor cycles (last discussed in Links #760) to discouraging would-be whistleblowers from leaking misdeeds. [The Verge]

• Related: Prediction markets “encourage anyone with an informational edge to use their knowledge for personal financial gain. In this way, prediction markets are the perfect technology for a low-trust society.” [The Atlantic]

• 78-year-old James Patterson, the best-selling author of nearly 400 books and a one-time fixture of check-out lanes everywhere, is hard at work on both a collab with MrBeast and a mermaid romantasy novel. [Businessweek]

• Quittr is a (surprisingly popular, somewhat alarming) manosphere-adjacent app for young men who fear their porn habit isolates and emasculates them. [New York]

• On the urge to be seen and liked online: “The desperation for approval is the frothy top layer: ‘I hope people like it.’ Beneath that is a deep desire for communication, community, and understanding. If I were the last person on Earth, maybe I’d still make art, but it wouldn’t be the same. There’s an essential ingredient: expressing something and having it be witnessed by others, having people say, ‘I see that too.’” []

• The members of r/SingleMothersbyChoice are getting younger over time, one moderator said, as more women in their 20s plan to have kids without a partner or husband. [The Cut]

• “Will Bailey, a British travel influencer with nearly 500,000 followers, witnessed the missiles fall from his perch at a beach club.” Pity Dubai’s luxury influencers, of whom there are quite a few: The United Arab Emirates has handed out tens of millions of dollars, and many thousands of golden visas, in a bid to become the influencer capital of the world. [The Guardian / ]

• On messaging family in Tehran: “The first thing I look at each morning is not the headlines; it’s two check marks on my phone. …When they turn blue, it means someone I love is still alive.” [Rest of World]

• The rise of surveillance culture — by the state, by Ring doorbells, by reprobate YouTubers with smart glasses — means that we’re all increasingly characters in someone else’s narrative. []

• “Conspiracy without the theory” is a newish form of popular conspiracism — popularized during and after the pandemic — that claims appearances are false, or that people are lying, but never claims to know (or attempts to discover) what the actual, hidden truth is. [NYT]

• People who have lived their whole lives online experience “cultural time” differently, because all of history is available to them. []

• The Epstein files have become a gigantic participatory circus on TikTok, rather like the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp case and last year’s Diddy trial. [Vanity Fair]

• How journalists spot deepfakes. [The Verge]

• The definitive feminist history of the wine mom. [ ]

• New York’s fanciest five-year-olds. [New York]

• People who can’t make their own decisions are the ones most impressed by garbage language. [Cornell Chronicle / Vulture]

• The “most uplifting corner of the internet” is a kindly subreddit for balding men. []

• How different versions of Wikipedia illustrate happiness (... and crying, and love, and human.) I could honestly spend a lot of time clicking through this. [Walzr]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned Ballerina Farm’s latest pregnancy, which has since produced the ninth (!) child in the infamous (?) trad influencer family.

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 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

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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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Upgrade your subscription

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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