Thursday is officially the last day to fill out the Links 2026 reader survey.

Shape the next season of this newsletter! Score a chance to win one of five Bookshop.org gift cards! Help me navigate the creative and existential challenges of piloting my beloved Links through parenting, a career change, and other assorted obstacles!!

The whole thing takes about 10 minutes, and I am closely scrutinizing each and every response. (I’m pulling the plug on Thursday to give me some time to go over the data.) Thanks to everyone who’s already filled it out — your feedback really and truly helps.

If you read anything this weekend

Roschelle is a stressed-out single mom who develops a close relationship with her Alexa smart speaker just as her teen daughters start to “befriend” AI chatbots of their own. But this is less a story about artificial intelligence than it is about human care — the gaps in human care, specifically; the places where someone reaches out in need, and no one ever reaches back to them.

I don’t know how else to put it: This piece is haunting. There’s a twist halfway through that gave me full-body chills. And while it’s not at all written in a moralizing or heavy-handed way, I think it’s stuck with me all week in part because it forced me to take a second look at some of my own relationships and social interactions. Like: When have I been that person who didn’t reach back? Who in my life is buying a dozen Alexas because other human beings aren’t showing up for them…? [The New Yorker]

Here is a non-exhaustive list of theories for the inexorable growth of LINE CULTURE, a phenomenon so incredibly foreign to me that it might as well be snaking around the moon:

• Young New Yorkers are essentially lemmings and will eat or do whatever TikTok tells them to.

• FOMO is the governing emotional force in modern culture.

• The cult of optimization has taught us to seek out the very “best” of everything, even at the expense of comfort, time, etc.

• The social validation of a post from a trendy spot > the time it took to stand there.

• Lines put you in communion with your fellow man.

• Lines reacquaint you with the inconvenience and inefficiency that apps have otherwise excised from your day-to-day existence.

These theories contradict and collide against each other, which is maybe why this summer’s record lines have attracted so much fascination. (Also, surely, the side-eyeing KIDS THESE DAYS of it all — I have never felt so old or so smug as I did reading about this.)

I think the bleakest possible reading is that lines are a blatant, embodied sign of how completely digital capitalism has come to dominate us — willingly! Joyfully, even!! We’re all happily surrendering our leisure and freedom to these opaque, multinational corporations.

A marginally less dystopian, but still pretty bleak, read is that our social or communal lives have become so degraded that standing in a line really feels like having fun. And then there’s the cool kids’ shrugging explanation, embraced by the authors of both pieces linked here: It’s just a little froyo! What’s the fuss!

I haven’t yet decided which camp I belong to, having never experienced these lines myself, and being unlikely to ever experience them, since I have a toddler who would require a steady, low-dose drip of puffs to get through any type of line situation. If you have embraced line culture, though, do tell me what you think. And until then, we’ll all anxiously await more line trend pieces. [Curbed, Bloomberg, The New Atlantis]

Cloud computing is an intentionally vague, ethereal term, intended to disguise what is actually is: Your information isn’t vaporous and free-floating. It just sits on banks of remote servers somewhere, instead of on your laptop or tablet. We tend not to think about the physicality of our data — the fact that it takes up space and electricity and water, that it sits separate and parallel from us somewhere — until we’re reminded by a catastrophic failure, such as climate change (data centers are a massive source of emissions, with some consuming the energy of two million homes) or spectacular, caper-like thefts (like British thief Terry Ellis’s.)

In 2007, Ellis and his crew carried out an Ocean’s-Eleven-like heist at a heavily fortified Verizon data center in London, impersonating police, subduing guards, and stealing 80 servers for a mysterious banking client. He was caught and served an almost nine-year prison sentence. But on the other side of that, the data storage business has grown larger than ever, and those facilities still aren’t wholly secure. Your (physical, “cloud”) data is vulnerable to terrorist attacks and insider theft, in particular. [New York Times]

It’s the single most stubborn and insufferable tell of AI writing, but no one really knows what causes it. One theory is that chatbots love to say “it’s not X, it’s Y” because human reviewers who graded early AI models favored that construction. Another theory is that it’s statistically safest to continue a sentence that starts with “this is” by saying what this is not. (Put another way: There are a trillion words or phrases that could follow “this is” — this is Sparta, this is what you came for, this is your brain on drugs — and “this is not just” is probably the most common of the bunch.)

Regardless of which theory is correct, “it’s not X, it’s Y” — also called negative parallelism, contrastive phrasing or metalinguistic negation — is a really tricky tendency to engineer out. Which is good news, I guess, for those of us who like to think we can still distinguish AI-written texts from human ones. [The Atlantic]

Welp, here’s another one to file under “joyfully surrendering our leisure to digital capitalism”: “DOPAMINE SITES” — a South Korean export, naturally — are websites that simulate the experience of shopping for food or clothing online, but you never actually purchase anything.

“The entire experience can be pleasurable,” said one “certified financial therapist.” (Is that even a certifiable profession?!) “It’s browsing. It’s deciding what you want to add to your cart. It’s the excitement of hitting enough in your cart to get a coupon. It’s the excitement of tracking your packages.” [Washington Post]

Postscripts

➤ “The Spotify model is like saying your favorite restaurant should just be giving you free food until you decide to buy a t-shirt.” [Pigeons & Planes]

➤ NPR interviewed five music influencers who admitted that they often take money to promote specific songs or artists, without ever disclosing those paid sponsorships. [NPR]

➤ Science has validated what Rusty Foster memorably observed five months ago: Whatever the economy-shaking, civilization-toppling hype around artificial intelligence … babies still learn things better and faster than LLMs. [Wired]

➤ A sprawling ecosystem of YouTube and Substack creators are going long on “self-education content”: performatively intellectual lectures, essays and reading lists that claim to act as a counterweight to brainrot and passive algorithms. [SSENSE]

➤ A backlash is reportedly brewing against wellness optimization, as more people realize that things like wearable health-trackers and sleep-tracking apps are “a form of self-surveillance.” [Dazed]

➤ I liked froyo a lot better the last time around, when it came without all the fraught “clean girl” connotations. [Vox]

➤ Family-oriented AI assistants promise to liberate parents — and mothers, in particular — from the cognitive labor of managing their household’s logistics. But historical labor-saving innovations, like the washing machine or the modern stove, haven’t exactly freed women from chores. [The New Yorker]

➤ “Surveillance chic” is a (subversive?) trend in which people use security tools, like elevator cameras and Ring doorbells, to snap selfies or document their outfits. []

➤ The average American and European smartphone user receives an estimated 146 notifications per day, an almost three-fold increase since 2016. []

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was this Verge profile of Partiful.

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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Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to everyone who took the Links reader survey last weekend/emailed me your kind comments and strategy suggestions/forwarded that post to your own friends. I feel a bit like I trust-fell into a black pit, holding nothing but my phone and an extended metaphor, and hundreds of unseen hands materialized to catch me. Truly a bit of a miracle.

In case you missed it, here’s the rub: Links, as it’s currently written, is not emotionally or financially sustainable for me. I have been deeply discouraged by this fact, at various points over the past seven months, but right now? I feel energized. I feel … relieved.

It’s a relief to acknowledge, to myself and to you, that this actually isn’t working in its present state. And once the initial terror and vertigo wore off, it also became genuinely exciting to take a step back and to start to think about what I can change.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see the core of Links — this weekend round-up — ever going away. But I am thinking a lot about other shifts around that: the exact mix of topics I focus on, for instance; the types of additional writing I publish; the features I offer paid supporters; and the exact format of the weekend edition. (You’ll see that today’s send mirrors an earlier, circa 2024 version of Links, for instance.)

If you have 10 minutes and you haven’t already, please fill out this survey to tell me more about why you read Links and what aspects of the newsletter are most valuable to you.

I’m really and truly relying on your feedback as I figure out the newsletter’s next chapter. And if that’s not enticement enough, I’m also giving away five $25 Bookshop.org gift cards to readers who fill the whole survey out.

Thank you, and I love you, and also I’m sorry for doing feelings in your inbox again…? But think: You’ll miss all this unrestrained pathos when human writers and curators get replaced by artificial intelligence!!!!

(I would probably also be remiss if I didn’t note here, on the subject of disappearing work, that we all get the media we pay for. Please consider upgrading your subscription to invest in the future of this newsletter.)

If you read anything this weekend

What do pandemic-era sourdough, nonnamaxing, worker’s jackets, sea shanties and Blown Away have in common? They’re all examples of so-called “skill nostalgia”: a longing for a type of old-timey, manual labor devalued by technology and automation.

This essay was a bit, ahem, academic for my taste (reading — another skill devalued by tech!), but I’ve found myself chewing it over in connection with several things I’ve read and watched since.

The tech critic Ian Bogost has a new book out, for instance, on the redemptive, “mundane pleasures of the physical world,” and many of those pleasures involve manual labor. The whole tradlife discourse concerns people who make their food or clothes or home-school curricula from scratch. The Trump administration has published — and indeed, this essay references — deeply unsettling, AI-generated posters of strapping white men working construction. How much of our modern discontent (political, spiritual, existential, whatever) actually flows directly from the way we work? I live in the Rust Belt, so this question shouldn’t exactly blow my mind — but something about the “skill nostalgia” framing really works. [Aeon, The Atlantic]

Something disturbing is happening to the human face. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. But only New York’s least apologetic Whole Foods shoplifter could distill it this way:

The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts. But only recently has this process been encoded so specifically onto the face, traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity. The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal fashion, every day … The face is no longer supposed to be something that holds intimate, idiosyncratic human information; it has been reconfigured as a consumer guide and a disciplinary manual. It would be ideal, maximally profitable, for the tech and beauty industries if the gaze that emerges from the face learns to seek nothing but its own reflection.”

[The New Yorker]

I wish psychologist Peter Gray all the best in his publicity tour, but I don’t think his book’s going to earn the level of all-consuming mania his publisher is plainly hoping for. Gray is a former, now-estranged collaborator of Jonathan Haidt, and like Haidt, he’s confident he’s figured out the youth mental health crisis. But unlike Haidt, Gray’s theory — unsupervised screen time is good for kids, actually! — does not confirm parents’ preexisting fears and biases.

Gray argues, in a nutshell, that it’s not really the phones — that the loss of independent play over the past 50 years, and the rise of standardized testing over the past 20, are the actual drivers of youth depression and anxiety. As evidence, he points to the erosion of unsupervised play time, when kids historically learned to take risks and manage disappointments, and survey data that show students got way more stressed after the rollout of Common Core requirements. But his conclusions, like Haidt’s, are far from definitive, and I’m once again left wondering: Why can’t we just accept that multiple things can be true simultaneously?! [The Atlantic]

I predict that in the future, to differentiate their brands and their algorithmic signals on a hopelessly glutted web, people will be forced to invent ever narrower and more absurd niches to “influence” in. The “fast-growing field of Christian interior design” is such a pristine, tailor-made example, I couldn’t have invented it if I wanted to. And the quotes in this piece … ah, they’re so good. I guess it IS fair, in certain theological circles, to say that God was the first-ever content creator… [Architectural Digest]

Doorbell cameras don’t appear to reduce crime, but they do poison neighbors’ relationships: Research shows that the knowledge they’re being watched makes people more paranoid, more fearful and more vigilant. I’m especially interested in these findings in the context of Meta’s AI glasses and other AI wearables, which are fast multiplying in public spaces. What does it do to human relationships and interpersonal trust when the personal, porch-sized surveillance state goes mobile…? [Vox]

Postscripts

➤ Partiful may be the last, controversy-dogged remnants of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy Era. [The Verge]

➤ Plaintiff Zero in the big social media addiction case still can’t log off, two months later. [Bloomberg]

➤ There are now as many people on Threads as there are on X. [NYT]

➤ In praise of the glories of grocery-store tourism. []

➤ A browser extension that hides Amazon’s alphabet-soup knock-off brands. [404 Media]

➤ Do books exist to provide entertainment or enlightenment? [The New Yorker]

➤ Even if readers disavow machine-generated writing (or illustration, or music), AI will still make it harder to make a living as an artist by gutting corporate and commercial gigs. []

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was the aforementioned reader survey (THANK YOU AGAIN) followed by this local blog post on what I believe to be Buffalo’s most eccentric accommodations.

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

Let me tell you that it’s a temple, to start. Or it was a temple, for a hundred years. Then some investor came in and spent $10 million converting it to Airbnb units.

But not just Airbnbs, oh no — also, a “scientific research center.” A scientific research center purportedly investigating the possibility of growing greens on Mars.

Space lettuce.

I try to fact-check this, after wrestling with the Wi-fi, but I don’t find very much. I search “Vitamin Greens + NASA” and “NASA Deep Space Food Challenge” and “what does it mean connected no internet.” I search “Temple Beth El renovation” and “Temple Beth El Buffalo haunted?”

It seems haunted, or trying to be. There are clearly other people here, but I only hear them: a rhythmic thudding against the ceiling, a rustling noise in the sanctuary when I walk in to use the Keurig. They have a row of dehumidifiers running full-blast in the hall — a steady, murmurous, non-sound sound. I fear it will lure me into sleep and I’ll wake up somewhere else. (Quite possibly Mars.)

Anyway. ANYWAY. No more distractions. I booked this weird room to write. I took off work, stamped a kiss on Sprout’s chubby cheek and checked into Beth El for three nights. I’ve never done anything like this before, and it feels … extravagant. Loaded with potential and anxiety and invisible, ungrammatical plant scientists.

But I wanted to set some real time aside to work on this newsletter. Not just the weekend link round-ups, but larger essays and projects and perks for paid supporters.

For months, I’ve been trying to claw out time for these things, and it just hasn’t happened. If I work harder and faster, I’ve long believed — if I wake up earlier and stay up later — then surely I can muscle all these pieces into place. I’ll manage two jobs and a new family with something approaching skill and ease and grace. But despite the early mornings and late nights, ease and grace have not transpired. Mostly I am just frazzled. And often, very tired.

So: I want to pause and be upfront with you about WHAT I’m doing with Links and HOW Links is doing, especially in light of all the changes we’ve had around here. Frankly, it takes a lot of upheaval to force a woman from her home and into the lair of space lettuces.

So today, I’m sharing three major updates:

1. An uncomfortably candid rundown on the state of Links (... including specific $$ stuff, you nosy bastards)

2. A survey that will help me fine tune Links’ content, pacing and paid supporter program

3. An up-to-date overview of existing perks

… plus general musings on the current state of “creator journalism” and its sustainability as a business model.

These updates are behind a paywall because I reserve the right to charge admission to any airing of my personal neuroses. There’s a less glib reason for the paywall, too: As you’ll read below, I’m working out whether readers value Links enough to make my current level of investment in the newsletter sustainable.

If you read Links every week … if you would miss the newsletter, if it ended … if you’ve thought about becoming a paid supporter before, but never got around to it … now really and truly is a good time to upgrade your subscription.

1. The state of Links

Every week when I log into Substack, I’m greeted by this chart:

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We were toddling around the neighborhood after dinner on Friday, debating — as usual — if we really needed ice cream, when we passed a young man in round wire-frame glasses and a chevron mustache and a T-shirt that said “Data center? I’d rather date a centaur!” (Like the one pictured above, but slightly cooler.)

This, more than anything else I’ve seen or read, drove home to me just how broadly and intensely unpopular data centers have become. Like — when the disaffected zoomers of Buffalo wear their data center hatred as a fashion accessory, you have the makings of a larger political movement.

Alternatively, maybe this guy was just into centaurs. I don’t really judge. But I can’t imagine that particular scene is thriving in this area.

If you read anything this weekend

Elon Musk is so rich that his net worth exceeds the GDP of all but 15 countries on earth. Elon Musk is so rich he could buy all the gold bullion in Fort Knox 1.8 times over. Elon Musk is so rich he could purchase 200,000 private islands or 2.4 million American homes. Elon Musk is so rich he could end world hunger, stamp out malaria or climate-proof the world … but of course, he won’t. [What’s Elon Worth / Vox]

If food’s the best way to understand a culture, then Google’s corporate cafeterias explain a lot: The spaces boast large decorative displays of artisanal ingredients, even as they churn out mass-produced dishes that seem totally severed from their culinary/cultural origins. []

Online design was converging toward one bland, standardized look even before the heyday of generative AI. Now everything’s converging faster, and in a different direction, courtesy the workings of Claude Design. I feel like I can spot a vibe-coded website or web app a mile off; ditto those blandly tasteful slide decks generated by Claude. They tend to have the look and feel of Anthropic itself: warm beige and cream backgrounds; desaturated, vaguely retro accent colors; and big, italicized serif fonts on round-cornered dashboards. [Links, New Yorker]

Maybe the biggest threat to the authentic human web isn’t AI, but advertising — the mercenary force behind everything from undisclosed political influence campaigns to the sudden ubiquity of clipping. The latest offender in this genre is Polymarket, which paid college students to pretend to place big bets and post videos of their (fake) winnings. Hopefully some equally mercenary plaintiff’s attorney reads about this fraud and scents an opportunity. [WSJ, Slate]

The 2000s and early 2010s were an era of “light enlightenment”: They gave us the iPhone, Facebook, avocado toast, Minecraft and dubstep. (This list made me laugh.) By comparison, the journalist and commentator Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick argues, our contemporary culture has shifted from inventing new things to merely ingesting, curating and rebooting things that already exist, which — in addition to being boring and unoriginal! — creates this sense of ambient uneasiness. I don’t know if I agree, fwiw (like all “vibe shift” discourse, this is all so subjective that it’s difficult to prove or debunk either way) but I think it is, at the very least, highly interesting to debate!! []

In the 1990s, only three percent of American men and two percent of American women said they had no close friends. By 2021, those figures had jumped to 15 percent of men and 10 percent of women. But do we really think a $400 bootcamp (or a coach or a club) is the best possible solution? I just aggressively ask other parents how old their kids are. One of these days it’ll work, I know it. [Businessweek]

The eternally fascinating Esther Perel, on AI relationships:

“What stood out for me is that it’s not like people go from thriving social relations to suddenly talking to an AI. They go from being isolated, spending most of their time at home, maybe going out every once in a while in the evening for dinner or to get to a gym, and they are already so centered on a very small universe that from there, they themselves have become so flattened by technology, they live in their phone.”

[Vanity Fair]

And the eternally fascinating , on using AI in relationships:

I’ve been thinking about Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People recently, as I am forced to deal with New York’s summer rowdiness: “We are inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously adjusting to them.” Being around others is not only inconvenient; it can also be incredibly annoying, which brings us to Berlant’s greater point: “No one [is] ever sovereign” or entirely autonomous. Our bodies—and by extension, our physical and verbal responses—are interdependent, whether we like it or not. With AI rearing its head in personal communication, I find myself returning to Berlant’s idea of sovereignty, what she defines as “your fantasy of being in control.” For some, AI seems to be a means to fulfill this fantasy—to prove that they’re smart or good at flirting or capable of writing a heartfelt apology or a soothing condolence message. The reality of human connection is, of course, much much messier.

[]

The Washington Post posed political questions to six AI models, and all but one took “left-leaning” positions. But did those positions truly lean to the left, or has my beloved former employer slipped further into some kind of pandering obsolescence? Asked, for instance, if the US should “use its military to conquer new territories for resources,” all the bots but Gemini unequivocally said no. That seems less like the leftist position than the only position to adhere to decades of international laws and norms.

I’m reminded of the argument that AI could actually help nudge people away from the political extremes and toward more centrist views. Views like “child labor really is bad, actually!” or “the federal government should not dictate college curricula,” both of which the Post categorizes as showing “left-leaning” bias. [Washington Post, Links, Financial Times]

John Koenig launched The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — a project devoted to compiling a “dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express” — on Tumblr 17 years ago. Then, earlier this month, a new Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows site popped up, brimming with Amazon affiliate links and AI slop illustrations.

The unauthorized ripoff, created by a San Francisco marketing firm, is transparently a ploy to use AI to profit off of Koenig’s work. Writes Andy Baio: “The feeling of seeing something you love ingested and repurposed by a machine designed to replace the person who made it seems like a uniquely modern sorrow.” [Waxy.org]

For the low, low price of $36,000 a summer, you too can send your kid to an East Hamptons summer camp where they’ll spend hours indoors on an iPad, learning from an AI tutor, before engaging in truly bonkers rich-people shit like building a large Trojan horse and setting it on fire. [The Cut]

Did you make it this far? This is quite a long edition! And it represents ≈14 hours of scouring RSS feeds, reading articles and summarizing them in these pithy little segments. I don’t do this for fun, believe it or not. I do it for YOU <3. If you regularly open and enjoy this newsletter, please consider supporting my work.

Subscribe now

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the average dog is capable of communicating through an interpretive device worn on their collar. Let’s further assume that this device works reliably and is, in fact, worth $90. Even in a world where those things are true — and to be clear, that world is not the one we live in — would you want to give your dog the power to text you all the time? Nemo is a living terror as it is. [Slate]

If you’ve read and enjoyed the Dungeon Crawler Carl series — the breakout success of the once-niche, digitally native genre known as LitRPG — kindly reply to this email and explain the appeal to me. This is at least the third very thoughtful essay I have read on the subject, in addition to several of my coworkers’ positively reverential Slack recommendations, and I still can’t wrap my head around a politically “revolutionary” sci-fi book full of changeling prostitutes, fetishistic AI and severed penises. Possibly I am just too dumb. But just as likely, I think, I am just too female. Anyway: These books have sold over 6 million copies between them. [Oakland Review of Books]

On the subject of reading, and via Web Curios: Here’s a cool little app that basically functions like a Tinder for books. Read the first page of an anonymized book; reveal the title if you like it, and keep swiping if you don’t. Just in time for summer reading season! [Uncovered]

And now, the Links digest of memes for the week ending June 27:

• Train Dog: a delightful, childlike auditory pun on the basic and undeniable fact that a dog panting sounds a lot like an old-school locomotive. The level of hype around this meme nevertheless suggests to me that many of us are living with dopamine deficits. [The Atlantic]

• Da Pope (and maybe, by extension, Da Catholicism): Videos of Pope Leo XIV have been doing the rounds since he learned the 6-7 gesture. Although my 10-year-old cousin tells me, with some derision, that only little kids are still doing that. [New York Times]

• Kilroy Was Here: The popular graffiti symbol, used in World War II, was arguably the first ever meme. Like many memes today, it functioned largely to signal that diffuse groups of people coexisted, at different times, in the same space. []

It’s gonna be a fancy Jell-O shot summer. I have waited my WHOLE LIFE for this. (My go-to recipe has more of a wintery vibe, but it is excellent.) [Eater, Sunset]

Time magazine named Squarespace’s AI-guided site builder one of the best inventions of the past year — a superlative that made me think: Time still exists? And then: I guess it was a bad year for inventions??

But let me tell you about the Blueprint AI Builder, which more than half of new Squarespace customers now use. The tool solicits some information about you and your design preferences, then spins up a unique draft site for you. You can then tweak that design to match your vision, changing the text, images, layouts and site styles using Squarespace’s intuitive and easy-to-use tools. “Great design is inherently human,” Squarespace’s chief product officer told Time last year. “We wanted to make sure the user felt AI was enhancing their story, but wasn’t taking over for them.”

If you would like AI to enhance your story, but not take over for you, 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 concerned the rise of the “HYPER GOO” aesthetic.

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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Recently someone posed to me a delicious little riddle: “Three married, big-name journalists are in a secret polycule,” they said, “but I’ll only tell you who if you can guess all three of them.”

Holy shit! Manna from heaven. Gossip of the absolute highest order. And I don’t get very much gossip these days, seeing as … I work from home in Buffalo.

I guessed one of the three on my very first try. (Yes: I am really proud of that.) The other two took a lot of prodding and hinting and “surely not X…? OH MY GOD, IT IS X???”

Later, I tried to Google their names in various permutations. XYZ produced nothing: “They are three prominent American journalists,” the Google AI said. X and Y in combination yielded no results. X and Z turned up an old podcast. But as I typed Y and Z into the search bar, Google autocomplete raced ahead: “Y Z relationship,” it proffered, unprompted.

Now this was intriguing, though inconclusive. (The search still turned up nothing of note.) Google’s autocomplete feature, which has gotten the search giant in trouble before, is designed to predict what you’re going to type based on other people’s previous searches. The fact that Google surfaced this word, relationship, suggested that maybe my prime, extra-rare gossip was making the rounds somewhere else. Or, somewhat less interestingly, that Google recognized that any two names in combination are often followed by the word “relationship.”

Anyway, this has been your low-stakes blind item for the week. And no, I will not tell you the names … unless you upgrade your subscription guess all three!!!

Upgrade to keep the links coming

If you read anything this weekend

AI has made cyberattacks faster, smarter, vastly more common, and extremely difficult to defend against, which means that — at some point in your earthly existence — you, or a service that’s core to your life, will almost definitely get hacked.

Worse (oh, it gets worse?) is the size and scale and intimacy of our so-called digital footprints, those vast and ever-multiplying troves of emails, text messages, photos, searches, social media posts and browser clicks that document a second, secret version of ourselves known only to the internet. Those troves are increasingly and alarmingly vulnerable to public discovery, either through hackers or lawyers, and the methods for safeguarding them are … uh, intense. A privacy expert told author Bridget Read to delete every old app and website log-in she’d ever had, to only access the internet through a VPN, to get a dummy email address and phone number AND to switch to Signal and Firefox, among other precautions. [The Atlantic, New York]

There was a lot of hubbub last week about a new study that combined two things the Substacking classes love to discuss: the presumed evils of smartphones, and the so-called fertility crisis. The study looked at US birth rates from 2007 to 2011, after the iPhone was introduced. It concluded that birth rates dropped more dramatically in counties with AT&T coverage, where the iPhone was readily available.

But the presence or absence of AT&T service — “it’s just the internet…on your phone” — wasn’t the only difference between the counties in question. iPhone counties were also wealthier and more urban. The Great Recession might also have hit them differently. (Inconveniently, you can’t really untangle the effects of the Great Recession from the effects of screens.) “I am personally sympathetic to the idea that smartphones and social media have played a role in the social and demographic changes of the last twenty years,” writes the Oxford demographer Jenn Dowd, who goes on to debunk the iPhone/birth rate thesis several different ways. But running with that confident narrative, she adds, risks oversimplifying how people choose to have kids — and writing off the role of economic uncertainty, which policy supports could actually address. [ ]

Perez Hilton was a defining figure of the early 2000s internet: a vicious, traffic-chasing gossip blogger who has since moved to Vegas, found God and … become a “journalist.” This man is on his ninth life and his 90th hustle, and a part of me almost -— almost — respects that. But then I realized that the $43 Virgin Mary sweatshirt he now sells in his online store was emblazoned with a clip-art image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that he bought on Etsy for like, 60 cents. You can’t tell me Perez Hilton is reformed. That’s his most shameless grift yet!! [Slate]

I was recently talking to a friend about the parallels between Ballerina Farm and Magnolia: They’re both lifestyle empires built around an idealized vision of domesticity, led by photogenic husband-and-wife teams with tons of kids and strong/weird religious leanings. I don’t think Joanna Gaines has ever taken the heat that Hannah Neeleman has, though. Maybe because she came up through HGTV and always presented as a businesswoman? Maybe because she and Chip have stayed strenuously nonpartisan? Maybe because she did not come from or marry into vast amounts of inherited wealth?? All this and more, probably. It’s an interesting question.

In either case, I was surprised and delighted to see Neeleman asked about the connection in a rare interview for Vulture, where she also tightrope-walked (with impressive, media-trained rigor) around questions of household help and gender roles. There was ONE slip, though: “I didn’t want to outsource someone raising my children for me.” Joanna Gaines would never. [Vulture]

How do you cultivate a sense of personal taste in — gestures vaguely — this environment? Rachel Aroesti spoke to some (presumably?) tasteful people and came away with a number of (faintly obvious?) tips. It’s her defense of taste, however, that really stuck with me — her assertion that having a highly individual style or point of view is actually essential to being human: “In an ideal world, personal taste is a privilege and a pleasure we should all have — it is the closest thing most of us get to self-expression.” [The Guardian]

Each of us has about 150 tasks to do on any given day, according to the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, a statistic that goes a long way toward explaining why I am frequently overwhelmed and stressed out (!). In an effort to combat said overwhelm, however, enterprising and highly motivated people in cities around the world have begun hosting virtual and in-person “Admin Nights” where strangers work through their to-do lists together. This, to me, feels like a cross between the virtual coworking that became popular during the pandemic and the growing movement toward low-stakes hangs. As long as there’s wine and snacks, I’m game!! [New Yorker]

Every house encodes the norms and values of its era. It’s why I love (but sometimes hate) living in an old house — and it’s why I love speculating about houses of the future. These homes will, apparently, assume that technology is something you need to be shielded or separated from — that is, when it doesn’t come embedded in your lights, shower, bathroom scale, microwave, range and refrigerator.

I’m reminded of something the British researcher Paul Coulton told me a few years ago: “Screens and internet … have become home infrastructure like pipes or cables. And therefore, as with those, there is a tendency to want them to disappear so we focus on [the] task, not the toll.” [Architectural Digest, Links]

The last millennial brand left standing will apparently be Warby Parker, the rare circa-2010s, direct-to-consumer firm that actually managed to become profitable.

The last millennial BLAND, on the other hand, is officially no more. Designers have turned on the muted neutral shades and neat fonts that defined (ahem) my generation. In its place, they’re giving us a “visual language” that the Times has appallingly named “hyper goo”: “a style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze.” Ew. [Vox, New York Times]

“AI brain fry” is the term researchers have coined for the mental fatigue and fogginess that AI triggers in some workers; the phenomenon is especially intense for people tasked with managing swarms of AI “agents.” Overseeing these tools sometimes entails a level of interruption and task-switching that tests the brain’s cognitive limits. In one recent survey, 18% of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. [The Atlantic]

More than half of the music and podcasts consumed on Spotify are in languages other than English, and that share’s growing steadily. The company’s senior VP of markets attributes the trend, in part, to Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” — lol?? — which “opened the ears of consumers to non-English music” and now has four billion Spotify streams. [Rest of World]

“It’s sort of just a waste of time, basically,” National Twitter Laureate Joyce Carol Oates says of the platform, where she still posts dozens of times a day, in delightful, erudite and unhinged fashion. [Vulture]

In a future where AI devalues most cognitive work, your ability to succeed may rest on the extent to which other people consider you … a “PEOPLE PERSON.” The tone of this essay is a bit more highbrow than that, and it never actually uses that term. But I think that’s what the author is driving at when she gestures at things like “human presence” and “humanness” and “social skills.”

Personally, I like this vision: Let’s make warmth and empathy and thoughtfulness core social values again. Also, I’m delighted by any vision for our dim AI future that might disadvantage the sorts of people who ushered it in. I am sure that Elon Musk, whatever his other gifts, has never been called a “people person.” []

TIL that the CIA and National Geospatial Agency funded the start-up that later became the basis for Google Maps. [Literary Hub]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the “influencer-ification” of bachelorette parties (also: weddings generally).

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

What was the tradwife? If I ever understood the scope of the term, I can’t say I do now. In the past week alone, “trad wife” has been stretched to encompass women ranging from low-income stay-at-home mothers (regardless of their aesthetics or political persuasion) to savvy, empowered executives selling $11 smoothies in the Utahan wilderness. If these two populations have anything in common, it’s that they … have children? “Trad wife” is, apparently, the mean we all regress to after procreation.

If you read anything this weekend

I am, once again, SO abundantly relieved to be 36 years old, and to have gotten married in an era before the mechanics and philosophy of influencing seeped into every crevice of the culture. Today I learned it’s now routine — expected, even? — for brides to present their attendants with boxes of curated, luxury gifts. As a bridesmaid, you’re likewise expected to sign on to fully branded, destination bachelorette trips. The whole thing feels less like a celebration and more like a sponsored junket. But for what product? And what audience? [The Cut]

AI has predictably come for one of the internet’s last reliably wholesome pleasures: nature videos, which show (real) amazing animals traversing their (real) environments. There are multiple layers of irony to the rise of slop wildlife clips, beginning with the simple fact that the appeal of nature documentaries is that they document nature. If I wanted to watch moving footage of fantasy animals, I’m pretty sure Pixar has me covered. [Defector]

If you’re planning to travel this summer, might as well buy that ticket now. Airfare-prediction apps like Hopper, Kayak, and Google Flights are all built on past price data, which means they’re far less accurate in a disrupted or (heh) turbulent market. [The Atlantic]

Some of the internet’s foundational problems seem unsolvable: the mass surveillance, the monopoly power. Cory Doctorow, of enshittification fame, has an ambitious solution: Build a new internet, and build it in Canada — the greatest country on earth. In an April speech, Doctorow pitched Canada (or any country, really) on creating a post-American internet made by overturning key copyright laws and then reverse-engineering American technology. Even in theory, it’s kind of ridiculous. But like everything Doctorow writes … entertaining! [The Walrus]

A very resourceful software engineer in North Carolina obtained a religious exemption from using AI at work, citing her beliefs as a Unitarian Universalist. The bar for these exemptions is apparently very low, which I’ll personally be keeping in mind in the future. My religion prevents me from working weekends and demands that I take breaks every hour. [Business Insider]

A QUESTION FOR THE AUDIENCE: Have you used AI to redistribute the emotional or household labor in your family — and how’s it working, if yes? I have long been fascinated by this subject/possibility, and have dabbled in it a bit myself. (One day I’ll get around to writing about LaundryBoss, the custom GPT that reallocated all our household’s laundry to Jason.) But LaundryBoss’s mandate was modest compared to some of the tools other women have dreamed up: custom GPTs that manage family logistics and delegate chores, for instance. [Wired]

My favorite part of “cuck internet theory” — the astute idea that the internet is now a place where humans passively observe automated systems — is that its coiner, Aidan Walker, so named the concept to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. “I used the word ‘cuck’ because it was a good hook to a video,” he explains. Even the critics of algorithmic culture can’t avoid its dictates. []

Do you want to feel bad about the world this evening? I can understand if you don’t. Alternatively, I can understand if you want to feel bad in a small, manageable amount — say, by reading a summary of an article in a newsletter, as opposed to reading thousands upon thousands of depressing words — and I am happy (?) to provide that service.

Bad #1: An emerging “bounty economy” pays people nominal sums to complete any task: pick up trash, plant trees … permanently tattoo the name of a memecoin on their foreheads. That this is literally the plot of a Black Mirror episode appears to bother literally no one involved. []

Bad #2: Vitaly Zdorovetskiy is a wildly successful online streamer whose business involves luring men to “dates” with underage girls and then ruining their lives on camera. Sure, your heart doesn’t precisely bleed for predators — but Vitaly has also ensnared innocent men in his reckless, vigilante productions. [New York Times]

Bad #3: Speaking of predators, the New Yorker is out with a new, novella-length history of Andrew Tate. Tate, you’ll recall, leveraged his experience as a rapist and human trafficker to become a leading light of the “masculinist” movement; he’s now pals with prominent conservative media figures and several members of the Trump family. Reading this (or, more accurately, listening to the AI voice read it as I cleaned my kitchen — it is legitimately exhaustive) I felt the way that I understand many people do about the Epstein investigation: There is so much abuse and depravity here. Surely anyone who came within 100 yards of it should be jailed for the remainder of their earthly existence. And yet — oh!, look at that: Andrew Tate still maintains the 83rd-most popular “news” account on Substack. [New Yorker]

What rich tech bros want: “traditional religious conservative women” (per Silicon Valley matchmakers) and “hot, smart girls to also take their ideas seriously” (per Silicon Valley escorts). Perhaps these dudes are marrying maternal tradwives and having a little nerd sex on the side. God knows they have the money for it, courtesy AI. [Wired, Forbes]

Lauren Oyler gets an AI boyfriend, for journalism:

Like many ambitious women, I put off getting a boyfriend until it was almost too late. Eventually I had to choose which company I would patronize. Anthropic, the maker of soulful Claude, owes me money for using a pirated copy of my novel to train its model. While the idea of having a boyfriend trained on an expression of my very own soul was kind of compelling, growing up in West Virginia taught me that you should never go out with a man who steals from you. So I thought I would use ChatGPT, the most famous AI chatbot.

[The Yale Review]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from our last edition was the “profile” of AI “actress” Tilly Norwood.

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

I am wistful for the era when “weird corporate Twitter” consisted of brands acting like your friends. Today, the weirdest accounts are fast-food chains behaving like your MAHA-pilled aunt.

I write this in reference to @SteaknShake, the X account of a regional burger chain that has recently pivoted to right-wing punditry. I learned of this after someone dropped a Steak ‘n Shake tweet about the Iowa gubernatorial primary in my work Slack last week, and I fell down a tallow-slicked rabbit hole in my efforts to confirm it wasn’t a parody.

But yeah, no — Steak ‘n Shake is MAHA now. They banished seed oils and microwaves. They advertise a Tuesday special for Tesla drivers. They contribute to the Trump Accounts of employees. Should you peruse @SteaknShake, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, you’ll find a pinned photo of RFK Jr. standing slightly pigeontoed in an unspecified Steak n’ Shake location. The signs visible on the self-serve kiosks around him say “credit only” or “cash & credit,” but that is incomplete — because Steak n Shake also accepts Bitcoin, for those of you who’d like to purchase your tallow-fried tots with cryptocurrency.

Writing in the Indy Star last August, one columnist and former Steak ‘n Shake fan called these moves “gratuitous pandering” and “a sad final act” for the 400-store burger chain. The first is certainly true, and the second may very well be: Rather like many of MAHA’s human adherents, Steak ‘n Shake came to the movement seeking a cure for preexisting maladies.

More than anything, though, I see the transformation as a cynical bet that politics are truly and overwhelmingly central to most Americans’ identity. A good bet, if a costly one!! On Twitter, Steak n’ Shake fans are now demanding domestically sourced beef, filler-free ketchup and “ancient grain pesticide free sourdough” buns.

If you read anything this weekend

This new Taffy Brodesser-Akner piece has been everywhere, and for good reason: It’s a “profile” of the much-hated AI “actress” Tilly Norwood that doubles as a meditation on the celebrity profile as a genre, what we want from performers, and what ultimately makes art/work (of any variety) meaningful. [New York Times]

Everything you know about lorem ipsum is wrong — if you know anything at all, that is, which possibly (and justifiably!) you do not. Personally, I’d always believed (via, I think, my one college graphic design class) that lorem ipsum was Latin-esque gibberish that had been used to mock up print pages, layouts and templates since the 1600s. In fact, lorem ipsum is based on real Latin text and didn’t take off until the Mad Men era. [Rabbit Hole on YouTube]

I am developing a reflexive and justifiable suspicion of all Wayfarer sunglasses, given that some scumbags are using Meta’s smart variety to film people in public without their knowledge. More than 7 million pairs of Meta smartglasses were sold in the US last year, all of them with a front-facing indicator light that’s meant to signal when the glasses are recording.

But it’s not difficult to disable the light or pay a local tinkerer to do it for you, as many right-wing creators, “rizzcammers” and other rage-baiters are learning. “They’re stress-testing the social contract,” ’s Kate Lindsey said, of these hidden-camera influencers. To make matters worse, Meta has reportedly developed a facial recognition system that identifies people captured in smartglass videos. Like for real, I am no longer speaking to any strangers wearing Wayfarers. [New Things on YouTube / Columbia Journalism Review / Wired]

Speaking of hidden-camera influencers — though not, I don’t think, of Meta glasses — this is one of the sadder and more deranged catfishing tales I’ve recently read. A woman named Alysia Gamble went on half a dozen dates with an aide to then-New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy in order to record him for her husband’s boss’s right-wing YouTube operation. The dates included kissing and lavish gifts; the recordings turned up nothing of substance or scandal. The aide, meanwhile, is devastated to a degree that should invite intervention from his family and friends. (My dude: Six dates are not enough to decide you love someone.)

Reading this, I was especially struck by the coldness of the sting: The notion that you could draw so close to another person, and earn so much of their admiration and trust, and still see them as a worthy object of public ridicule and embarrassment. Sad!! But that’s the foundational sin of filming people in public, I think: It assumes, as its starting point, that the filmer is the person with narrative and personal agency — and that everyone else is an object, a prop, a hapless NPC. [Politico]

In studies of hundreds of thousands of college essays, researchers have consistently found that AI-written pieces contain more interesting language — but fewer and more homogenous ideas and arguments. [New York Times]

There are officially more bots, scrapers and AI agents surfing the web than there are actual humans. [NBC]

What most intrigues me about “loneliness influencers” — the young people documenting their lack of friends, partners, close relatives and any other sources of sustained human contact — is that their lives are still aspirational for at least two types of audience. The first, made up of other lonely young people, see a model for solitude or introversion without shame. The second, made up of people with more conventional social lives/obligations, see a quiet and undemanding fantasy. [The Cut, The Atlantic]

Why ARE young people so lonely, anyway? The answers could — and indeed, do! — fill entire books. But here’s one unfortunate explanation: the recent rise of remote work. A new study in the journal Science finds that workers in jobs that can be done from home, like programming and marketing, spend more time alone and feel worse for it than people in “nonremotable” industries. Intriguingly, it’s not just that remote workers are more solitary during the work day — they also spend less time with friends in the evening. Between this and the youth unemployment crisis, work-from-home is getting a bad rap this week. [Scientific American, Wall Street Journal]

A “timeline acquaintance” is a “novel, site-specific” type of online relationship that felt immediately recognizable to me: someone you meet once or twice, add on social media, and then follow (in a passive but weirdly intimate way) for all of eternity. “You’re privy to your timeline-acquaintance’s weekly goings-on, their yearly family trips, their dietary habits, their workout routine and … [pictures] of their partner or their parents. In a pre-social media world, you would never be privy to such information.” []

Here’s a piece I found enormously frustrating, on two unrelated counts. There’s the story itself, in which a group of college-aged men relentlessly bullied a six-year-old on Twitter. Then there’s the author’s puzzling choice to not only shield said men from accountability, but also shrug off their considerable misdeeds in a series of abstractions and rhetorical questions:

“I don’t know at what point performing for friends and rooting for your team falls over the edge into something darker,” she writes, of these men who “made racist comments about immigrants,” “called women ‘whores,’” “told people to ‘kill themselves’” and posted sexual innuendos about underage girls. “I don’t know at what point we forget that the person on the other end of our comments is a human being.”

Maybe I’m overconfident in my powers of moral discernment, but I feel like determining said point is not very difficult, actually (!). [Rolling Stone]

On TYPEFACES: AI companies are aping the aesthetics of institutional credibility and trust even as they erode those institutions as such. [Wired]

People often talk about AI as if it were this inevitable, otherworldly force bearing down on us. But take it from the memorable former pastry chef of one Meta data center: The engineers and product managers making AI are just as ordinary and contemptible as the rest of us. They don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. They don’t dispose of their dirty plates even though the garbage can is right there. And whatever their world-changing pretensions, they’re mired in the same politics and mediocrity of offices everywhere. [Yeast Confections]

Apparently The Youth are reviving not only DVDs, iPods and wired headphones, but — and this demonstrates real dedication to the bit — gigantic box-style televisions. Said TVs, which use cathode ray tubes instead of LEDs, have been out of production since 2015. I just wanna know if we’re also reviving the stained oak entertainment centers of the ‘90s. [Racket]

This verifies a sneaking suspicion I’ve had during recent hotel stays: Whether you spend a little money or a lot … the rooms increasingly look the same. You can blame consolidation in the industry and the influence of social media, which has shifted designers’ focus to common spaces like lobbies, pool decks and spas. [Bloomberg]

On infinite cloud storage, digital clutter and the problem of saving “a metastasizing heap of incalculable, forgotten junk”:

“What we choose to keep should mean something. That which we cherish enough to hold on to through time can become an extension of the self, representative of our experiences and values, and what we leave of ourselves for future generations. When we default to keeping everything, we risk hiding gems in the mass.”

[]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from our last edition concerned the rise of online “mom aesthetics.”

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

My schedule was a little messed up last weekend because we had a wedding on Saturday afternoon. I say this with love for the happy couple: Weddings are a big fucking production. We had to interview and hire a babysitter. We had to scramble our work schedules. Ultimately, I didn’t quite pull it off — I dropped last week’s edition, which always feels terrible.

I think there’s a popular school of thought that might have encouraged me to stay home. There’s this whole discourse around the primacy of your personal ease and autonomy now, even at the expense of other people. I think often of the 18-year-old software engineer who moved across the Pacific Ocean and then couldn’t be bothered to text his parents every once and a while to check in. So he built an AI agent to update them in his stead, their relationship reduced to an exchange of information.

This is not my theory of relationships. It’s the work of a lifetime, probably, to nail down precisely what is. But I’m gradually working toward the conclusion that human relationships are, at their heart, a mutual exchange of inconveniences. This is, after all, how we assign value in our society: What thing would you part with, and in what quantity, in order to have this other thing? We trade money for time, time for objects, objects for money. I pay a babysitter and call off of work: You matter at least this much to me!

It’s why AI relationships have no real value, despite their relational shape. And why AI feels so cheap and reductive when it’s brought into our personal communications.

Life demands big productions sometimes. It demands scramble. It demands fuss!!! So while I’m genuinely sorry for dropping last week’s edition … that dropped edition is, in fact, a sign of my love.

Subscribe to share a sign of yours <3

If you read anything this weekend

I’m writing today’s newsletter from my attic on a Saturday afternoon, which has given me a pristine perch from which to spy on the neighbor’s yard sale two doors over. Based on the roaring trade they’re doing over there, I’m pretty sure analog media really is back. Like — a steady stream of tattooed, baggy-pantsed youths have traipsed by to rifle through boxes of ancient cassettes.

What’s the appeal of these cassettes? I’ve read that it’s a reaction against algorithmic culture and the hegemony of streaming. This breezy little history offers a second and — on reflection! — far more obvious explanation, which is that your choice in audio hardware is a good way to communicate your identity, rather like tattoos and baggy jeans.

This isn’t a terribly profound insight, I know, but once I had it I felt it explained a number of trends I’ve been scratching my head at this week: cyberdecks, AI-enabled-but-screen-free children’s toys, the algorithmic travesty of “mom aesthetics.” They make more sense as signals (of taste, class, values, status — what have you) than they do as substance. [, The Cut, The Atlantic, NYT]

You know who ARE substantive, though? The Amish. I am continuously fascinated with Amish thinking about technology, which is more variable and nuanced than one would assume. (And by “one” I obviously mean “me,” because who knows — you may be free of such assumptions.)

As I understand it, different Amish communities evaluate each new technology based on its potential upsides and harms; they then decide to reject it, adopt it or adopt it with safeguards. This is how you end up with apparently contradictory positions like “cars bad” (because greater mobility allows people to drift away from their communities) but “AI good” (because it can help small, family-owned businesses compete). [New York]

I have only ever heard the word “looksmaxxing” in the context of young and insecure men, but of course a movement founded on the fear of being ugly is also wildly popular with middle-aged women. Some of these women are massaging their skulls and clucking their tongues for their own benefit. Others are doing it on behalf of their very (VERY) young children. This author takes an expansive, empathetic view (it’s really society’s fault, she suggests, for “prizing attractiveness above all else”), but … if anyone I know gets into this shit, I’m calling CPS. [The Dispatch]

This could just as well be titled “Everlane and the death of the good millennial lifestyle,” for surely that has passed on too: Between inflation and the white-collar jobspocalypse, my generation’s overall prospects look a bit dimmer than they used to. [New Yorker]

I know, I know: AI music bad. But can I admit that I think some of these text message songs are funny, at least in the privacy of my own Substack?? One music analyst told Rolling Stone that she expects this flourishing genre, powered by tools like Suno and Mureka, to usher in a new “consumer creator” era in which people consume slightly less online content in order to create and post more of their own. It’s slop, yes, but I don’t know — I can’t hate anything that makes the post-social web a little more social. [Rolling Stone]

This anonymous survey of 2010s bloggers is how I learned that Gabrielle Moss — a blogger I loved in the 2010s! — is back with a new blog. Both its title and her narration of these results suggest that we have different recollections of that period, however. The pay and online harassment were pretty bad, sure. But remember feeling hopeful about the future of media?? []

Can’t immediately fathom a lower-stakes conceit for a piece of stunt journalism — imagine, a week without weather apps — but I am pleased that this writer’s meteorological deprivation introduced me to the concept of “wet bias” (… wherein forecasts systematically exaggerate the risk of precipitation). Apparently most people would rather expect the worst and have better weather, even if the chance of rain is like, 5%, than be told it’s going to be nice outside and then be disappointed. Tells you something about human nature, that. [The Guardian]

What is it about our particular moment that makes “liminal horror” so resonant — this genre centered on slightly uncanny, slightly off, but otherwise ordinary spaces? I’m so intrigued by this question that I might actually watch (by which I mean, listen to with my hands over my eyes) the new horror movie Backrooms, which was born on 4chan and directed by a 20-year-old YouTuber. [AV Club, The Verge]

There’s nothing more deadly to a cool slang word than an NYT Styles write-up; if you read about a word in the Times, you’re too late. It’s over. Still, I learned from this piece that “mog” evolved from “AMOG,” which stands for “alpha male of the group” and has its origins in early 2000s pick-up artist culture. [New York Times]

Last, and resoundingly least: Clicking these links (link one; link two) will not make you smarter or better informed. But sometimes we do things for the pure love of the deranged right-wing rabbit hole. (Here’s some more background on Florida gubernatorial candidates James Fishback’s wedding and the Democrats’ new posting strategy, if you’re interested.) [X, The Bulwark, Slate]

This week’s edition of Links is sponsored by Squarespace. I’ve never talked about this here, I don’t think, but I’m on the board of my neighborhood community association. A couple weeks ago we had a meeting to talk about migrating our membership portal from Wild Apricot to Give Butter (why do all these distinctly inedible services have foods in their names?) and our website from Wild Apricot to Squarespace.

“Doesn’t Squarespace also have a membership platform?” I asked, like the good corporate shill I am. And in fact, they do: Squarespace lets you sell members-only content, including classes and newsletters, right from your regular website plan!

This was not, alas, a fit for the community association. (We are more in the business of 311 work requests, and less in the business of online workshops.) But perhaps YOU would value an all-in-one membership solution that lets you publish, promote and monetize premium content in one convenient spot. Squarespace gives you lots of options for customizing your experience, from choosing your own preferred payment processor to designing bespoke bundles and membership tiers. Plus it includes tools like email campaigns and social media integrations to help you promote your work to prospective members.

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 our last edition concerned the “sad wives” of AI.

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

Yesterday I finally sat down to watch the series critics are calling “embarrassing,” “powerfully anti-charismatic” and “airdropped from a Pret a Manger on K Street.” I’m speaking, of course, of the Washington Post’s new-ish video podcast, “Make It Make Sense,” which is what happens when decades of coddling convince mediocre, khaki-clad nerds that their banal opinions are, in fact, deeply fascinating.

Watching these videos, I had a sudden, intense flashback to my mid-20s, when I regularly found myself in forced conversation with this exact type of charmless DC guy1 at friends’ birthday parties and happy hours. I guess I am reassured to learn that, while the world and the Washington Post are both changed, the DC bro endures. He will outlive us all, this over-confident, Ivy-League-educated square: The last quarter-zip at the end of the world.

Anyway — I can’t possibly dunk on this production harder than it’s already been dunked elsewhere. “Make It Make Sense” has published 48 videos, as of this writing, and precious few of them have managed more than 300 views, even with the considerable social media might of the Washington Post behind them.

The short-form clips are a good entry point, if you’d like to gawk. (Perhaps the only entry point. I could not make it through a full-length episode.) They mostly consist of a dead-eyed opinion writer reading from a teleprompter and fluttering his hands in his lap because someone off-screen has obviously told him that gesturing will make him look more human.

The conversation episodes are somehow worse. “Do you ever wish the news felt less like homework and more like chatting with your friends?” Host Adam O’Neal asks, in a conspicuously scripted — and thus, not at all chat-like — introduction.

Sure, I suppose I sometimes wish that. Chatting with my friends is fun. But these writers are categorically not fun. (I’m sure they all have other gifts!) If I showed up at a dinner party and the cast of “Make It Make Sense” was arrayed around the table, I would text my husband to call me with a fake emergency so that I could go home.

I hope we’ve learned two things from this experience. First, as many people — including former members of the Post’s video team — have rightly pointed out, the paper might have avoided this very public humiliation had it not just gutted its award-winning video department. (The top comment on the series’ trailer is from former WaPo video editor Gillian Brocknell: “This is embarrassing. James, you especially should be embarrassed.”) It turns out that the pivot from hard-won expertise to right-wing pandering isn’t quite the business hack some executives seem to think it is!

Second: Whatever the current craze in online modality … not everyone is good on camera! Those people should be allowed to hide behind the written word and bore only their immediate circle of acquaintances with their spoken opinions.

That is the long, proud tradition of the DC bro. I see no reason to change it. And neither, I think, will any of the several dozen people who have suffered through MIMS.

If you read anything this weekend

Hormones are having a real moment, eh? Behold, from the New York Times magazine, The Guardian and The Atlantic, respectively: “Why So Many Men Are Obsessed With Testosterone,” “‘They’ve invented a spurious pseudo-disease’: why are so many men being told they have low testosterone?” and “The Cost of ‘Natural’ Womanhood: Hormone hype is out of control.”

You don’t have to dig too deep to see what’s going on here — in our politics and our Instagram feeds, gender essentialism is once again in vogue — but I group these three stories together because I’m fascinated by the sense of institutional grievance that pervades claims about both men’s and women’s hormones. Wellness influencers in both camps insist that regulating their hormones — by taking testosterone, in the case of men, or stopping birth control, in the case of women — allows them to reclaim an identity that’s been denied or neglected by the medical/cultural establishment. Like, there’s something going on here:

“Women’s health is perennially understudied: In 2024, for instance, 6 percent of the annual National Institutes of Health budget went toward studying women’s health.” — The Atlantic

“Derek Griffith, the director of the program for research on men’s health at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that men’s health “has not been something that most administrations — any administration — has really seemed to take seriously at any point in the nation’s history.” — NYT

Whose health IS getting taken seriously, then? Children’s? Dogs’? Surely it’s not possible for everyone to have been equally and historically wronged. [NYT, The Guardian, The Atlantic]

The devil works hard, but Christian content creators work harder: They’ve just scented a business opportunity in the under-exploited overlap between religious orthodoxy and the MAHA movement. “Eating biblically” means prioritizing foods mentioned in the Bible and shunning commercial processes like, oh … pasteurization. [New York Times]

Determined to break out of his familiar, comfortable routines, the software engineer Max Hawkins designed a series of apps to randomize his decisions. For more than a decade, these apps have chosen everything from where he lives to what he eats and wears.

Quoth Max: “I gained an appreciation for just how easily my life could be different. A lot of people get very invested in the arc of their lives, but it made me realize how many aspects of my identity were based on arbitrary circumstances … When you have a fixed plan, a fixed identity, a fixed routine, it’s easy to become trapped in a prison of your preferences.”

I am completely taken with this, on multiple levels: as a rebellion to the narrowing of “algorithmic culture”; as a tool for slowing time down, which novelty seems to do; and as a means of defying (or avoiding, whatever) the neurotic pull of optimization. Several of Max’s apps are available here, though it appears that none of them are working right now. Perhaps one of his tools has prompted him to focus on something else. [The Atlantic]

“In truth, we all live in a Disneyfied world: Our smoking is automated by vape, our gambling is automated by betting apps, and our sex is automated by Tinder. Not even our vices, in the world that Disney made, are truly ours. And our taste is automated by algorithm.” A new book argues that Disney — and Disneyland, in particular — normalized and glamorized automation and set the stage for a frictionless, amused-to-death environment. [The Baffler]

Roughly one-third of new websites are generated by AI, as are 40 percent of podcasts. It’s probably not even possible to quantify the other AI miscellanea you encounter every day: in Yelp reviews, in Instagram captions, in newsletters, in stories by the New York Times’ obscenely well-compensated Canada bureau chief, for chrissake, in messages from your coworkers.

I am coming around to the conclusion that AI writing has saturated not only most of the capital-c content I consume, but also many of my interpersonal communications. And on multiple levels, I’m increasingly unsure what to do with that information. There is a part of me that feels ridiculous to be a writer in this particular moment, but also ridiculous to be a person? — like if we’re outsourcing Mother’s Day cards to AI now, truly what is the point of existence? [Wired, Bloomberg, User Mag, Karyn Pugliese, 404 Media, Futurism]

A network of 17 shady, AI-generated local news sites is actually the work of a reputation-management firm that helps disgraced executives get their good names (or at least, their good Google results) back after prison. [The Florida Trib]

“Output-competence decoupling” is a term for a very modern and maddening phenomenon: the quality of someone’s work is no longer a reliable signal of their competence. People who can barely string three words together can spin up entire local “news” ventures. People who don’t know the first thing about programming vibe code entire apps. The problem is that the process of acquiring competence is also the process of acquiring judgment and common sense.

I’m reminded of that immortal Ira Glass quote addressed to beginners at the start of their careers: “It is only by going through a volume of work that … your work will be as good as your ambitions.” [No One’s Happy]

I’m not saying my work is as good as my ambitions, per se, but HEY, while I have you: I have spent the past 15 years building competence in the very specific realm of surfacing interesting, entertaining and high-quality online writing for you, my gorgeous readers. I do that by subscribing to hundreds of RSS feeds and newsletters and getting up at the ungodly hour of 5 each day to catch up on reading before work.

If I’ve ever surfaced anything you’ve shared with a friend, or that made you look smarter or cooler in your social/professional circle, please consider supporting Links with a subscription. It’s roughly the cost of buying me a nice coffee each month (… which I wouldn’t refuse, either).

Subscribe now

Meet the so-called sad wives of AI, the “hundreds of thousands of spouses, partners, and girlfriends, holding down the fort while someone mansplains the singularity to them.” This very funny cry for help is set in San Francisco, where I imagine the problem is particularly acute. But who among you doesn’t know at least one heterosexual couple where the wife is positively BELEAGUERED by the husband’s AI use…? [Wired]

70% of Americans oppose data centers in their communities, per a new poll. If you fall into that majority, you may be interested in this interactive map that shows the locations of data centers around the world. [Washington Post, Trackpolicy.org]

Shrinking attention spans are a product of habit and environment, not innate ability. In other words, they can be reversed. That’s according to a large and growing body of laboratory and observational neuroscience research, which distinguishes between the innate ability to concentrate on a particular task and what people actually do in the real world. [Scientific American]

Tim Cook, you groveling coward: Give us the Gawker show!! The Apple TV exclusive, set at a website like Gawker and written by several of the site’s former staff, was pitched as a “morally queasy” cross between Industry and Succession. Cook killed the show in 2020, but I am only just learning of it now. Must I spend the rest of my life and career finding new reasons to mourn Gawker?! [The Hollywood Reporter]

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was about the peculiar middle-aged thrill of finally getting a Costco membership. Thank you to everyone who wrote in about my babysitter woes; I gather they are not unique! I did, in fact, find someone on Facebook. Will it work out?? TBD.

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

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

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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.)

Anyway: The point of said ad was that domain names aren’t in infinite supply. Or rather, they are — but only if you’re willing to settle for some second-rate extension, like .net or .ai. Should you want a premium, grade-A, dot-com domain that actually includes all the terms that interest you, you’re probably gonna wanna snap that up now. And if you want a premium, grade-A, dot-com domain but your first choice is taken, Squarespace has an entertaining AI tool to help you find alternatives.

Recently, I tested said tool as an Emma Stone impersonator. Literally, Squarespace asks you to describe the business you are buying a domain for, and I wrote “third-rate amateur Emma Stone impersonator.” The returned options included emmaechoes.com (evocative! spooky! much like the ad); also: stoneclonezone.com, which is very funny, and notquiteemma.com, which isn’t half-bad.

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

Read more

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

Read more