#770: The last quarter-zip at the end of the world
Plus: Living randomly, eating Biblically, etc.
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).
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