The things we take for granted

Dear Friends,

Usually, I start this newsletter with a long narrative, but today I want to start with a shockingly simple but beautiful piece from a website called Ordinary Abundance, which I had never heard of before. It reminds us that the things we take for granted now once seemed impossible or awe-inspiring. I suggest scrolling to, at least, “pineapple.”

Back to my normal selections, this Trace feature from Mike Spies, co-published in The New Yorker, will knock you backwards. It tells the story of Stormy Morse, a woman who lost two husbands to suicide by firearm and then ended up in a fight with the NRA over the second husband’s estate. Most suicides in America involve guns and, in this case, the gun rights organization was there shortly after the funeral to collect.

If you haven’t read Tyler Austin Harper’s article about his departure from Bates College, after suffering through the political fevers that overtook academia in the past decade, please do. It will go down as one of the defining stories of a very strange era. And, speaking of madness, this article about the history of Vice is truly one of the most bonkers pieces I’ve ever read about journalism. It begins with a bullet-point list of selected memories from the author. I can promise that none of this was going on at the much tamer media outlets where I worked, on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge, at the time. 

Henry Blodget has a terrific podcast with Anil Seth, debating whether AI could ever be conscious, which opens up a series of other questions. Are insects conscious? Are embryos conscious and are they embodied? What about human cells grown in a petri dish? And what about a future AI that has a structure much closer to that of a human brain? Henry has also just written a thriller that involves these questions.

Speaking of podcasts, I loved talking to one of my favorite authors, Steven Johnson, about where he draws the lines on using AI in his work. His career has crossed domains—from writing fabulous magazine articles to fabulous books to fabulous meta essays about his process. He’s now running Gemini Notebook at Google, where he’s built a creative system based on what he has learned through the years. 

Lastly, this 1973 article from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Atlantic popped up recently. It includes this truly remarkable and prescient paragraph: “Corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” How true.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is shifting back to making open-source AI models after leading in that and then flipping around. Meta already has a large distribution network, which means it doesn’t have to produce the best model to succeed. It just needs the gap between its own AI and the industry leader to be narrow. Meanwhile, the current leader, Anthropic, says it figured out a way to watermark text produced by its models. The methodology is secret, but it appears they’re embedding subtle patterns within the text that the model can recognize. It’s an imperfect solution—What if you write something and Claude edits it? What if Claude writes something and you edit it?—and there are some questions about how effective it will be. But I’m in favor of every effort to draw clean lines between humans and AI. 

Speaking of that, researchers in France took a group of 12,000 people and had half increase their interactions with AI. The AI users reported higher rates of loneliness and depression. Some began eating meals alone. The effect was strongest among people with partners, which suggests they may have been talking more to the chatbot and less with their loved ones. Don’t do that! 

We are heading into a strange world, with blurring lines between humans and machines. Be careful out there. And remember, as the Ordinary Abundance essay shows, just how wonderful so much of what we have in this world is—even pineapples.

Cheers * N

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