Category: essays

This investigation by Rachel Handler is a depressing look into late-stage capitalism, a deep dive into a single subject, and a source of incredible sentences: “The Chocolate Conspiracy.” (Subhead: “Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why.”)

Some incredible sentences:

It was a classic American story about men and the things they will do to cheat death (betray their fathers) and how, with enough drugs, you could lose the ability to taste or feel things.

Perhaps for Hershey—or anyone—it’s easier to smile and pretend nothing has changed and nothing will change, that we were experiencing endless moments of goodness. That everything was the same balance of chocolate and peanut butter it had always been. I understood and empathized with this reality; it was one I visited whenever I ate a combo THC-CBD gummy and watched Emily in Paris.

Eating [faux chocolate] evoked in me powerful dystopian fantasies. I imagined Sam Altman’s grandson’s buxom AI servant handing it to me to tide me over as I waited on a line thousands of people long, flames licking my face from a nearby data-center fire, to bid on a bed in his Tesla-sponsored underground-bunker pop-up.

This is a longer read but a take I can get behind 100% : Deskilling the body, by Melanie Challenger. Essentially, she argues that modern thinking and tech that encourage us to treat the body as a container for the brain are doing us a disservice, and that our thought processes and very selves are a result of how our bodies move through the world. (Now I want to read an essay about what LIFTING WEIGHTS does for us in this holistic context but I guess I have to write that one myself.)

Some selections:

Once we decide that the mind is the real human and the rest of the body only hardware, it becomes easier to disregard the physical work, including the neurocognitive work of a biological brain, through which we move, find our way, put thoughts into words, and recognise our own needs.

[…] From balance to sensing what is happening inside us, our bodies are continuously perceiving and, crucially, remembering in the flesh. Our thoughts can emerge as much from bodily intelligence and our awareness of the wider world as from abstract symbols on a screen.

[…] I have come to believe that our bodily deskilling is, in many ways, a loss of faith in what it is to be alive. A life of physical effort and friction is not only unavoidable if we want to be as resilient and capable as possible, but it is, in a nontrivial sense, the source of our intelligence.

Here’s a short piece by Alex Sujong Laughlin in Defector, writing about preparing for the end times–honestly, something that’s not far from everyone’s minds at this point. It doesn’t go the way you expect though (emphasis mine):

Here’s a loving little piece from Danny Lavery about working in a senior care center and driving people to their appointments: “Getting in and out of cars.”

It’s possible to take the “Don’t get old” injunction too seriously, to take someone else’s aging as proof of failure, to decide that if one just does enough balance and mobility exercises, lifts enough weights, they will never experience physical frailty or loss of control, remain in perfect rude bursting sheer vigor right up until the moment they drop dead, still as healthy as an ox. But I am inclined to take it seriously, that little automatic annual deduction of muscle that one scarcely notices until the stairs and the bathroom become newly dangerous; there is a balance to be struck between living as if there were no tomorrow and behaving like that billionaire who’s always drinking his son’s blood.

A friend pointed me to novelist Chuck Wendig’s newsletter a few weeks ago and I keep thinking of that last bit (you’ll see). He’s responding to a member of the Horror Writers Association board defending her use of AI for writing. His style can be chaotic but his points are flawless:

It’s very serious to us [writers]—a theoretically-existential threat!—to have our work taken without our permission and used to feed gluttonous software designed by techbros who literally say the quiet parts out loud when they talk about how it’ll destroy jobs, how we’re all gonna have to move to the fucking moon or instead live in a bunker beneath a data center somewhere, how if they actually had to pay creators for licensing rights they’d be bankrupt. They steal our work, they throw it into the machine like so much coal, and then use it to enrich themselves while simultaneously harming the environment and poisoning the fidelity of all our information systems. It is very clear that they want to treat information and knowledge as a resource to be mined—a utility to control, one that can be leveraged to extract payment from us. We and our work are all just material—Capital-C Content—to be melted down into slag.

So yeah! We’re kinda fucking mad about it! And when we see someone we like using it, we kinda want to kick some sand onto your shoes. You look like a sell-out. Like someone who just sold his buddy to the Cannibal Farm down the road.

Here’s the part that stuck with me:

If you wanna use AI, I can’t stop you.

But I can definitely give you a look like you just giddily shit your pants on a crowded train. That’s not me bullying you. That’s me acknowledging you shat yourself willfully and with joy and now we’re all having to deal with it.

You make your choices.

This is disturbing and infuriating but wow does it make an excellent larger point: These assholes expect no pushback. It’s part two of The Ink’s look into Epstein, so be prepared for your stomach to churn, but Anand Giridharadas methodically connects the dots between “rich and powerful” and “predator.”

It is a different experience of life never to have to wait for your turn on the ski lift. Never to have to contend for space in the overhead locker with another person. Never to have to be charming to get into a restaurant. After a time, one imagines, all the not-having-to-dos will change you. You will become less capable of exerting yourself in ways you once did without a care. And one can even dig deep and muster the empathy to appreciate that, the smoother and easier and more frictionless many parts of your life become, the more intolerable is whatever continues to resist you. It may be no accident that the time of gaining access to this more resistance-free ecosystem often correlates with the time of second and third wives. (When no one talks back to you but your wife, you upgrade — although these “upgrades” are never complimentary.)

And later, in an interview with former FTC chair Lina Khan:

…there does seem to be a class of people in this country that have for too long enjoyed a level of elite impunity. And no matter what the domain of their wrongdoing, they have enjoyed protection. They have protected one another.

[…] For a lot of these individuals, they have come to occupy positions of power that really do surround them with people who are constantly enabling every whim and desire, be it in their personal lives, be it in their businesses. And so to actually have to reckon with law enforcement or people holding them accountable—it’s a very foreign and offensive experience for them.

Seems like the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor…

What Science Knows About Grief, by music writer Amanda Petrusich, is a long piece in the New Yorker about, well, what science knows about grief.

Petrusich lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly so there are passages talking about dealing with the aftermath, from finances to well-meaning friends:

I got very good at sensing when the heft and finality of the loss was making someone uncomfortable. I found this both relatable (I surely wouldn’t have known what to say, either) and alienating. Grief can’t be “fixed”—death is famously irreversible—so conversations about it require both parties to abandon problem-solving and accept a kind of unpleasant stasis. When well-intentioned friends or colleagues asked me how I was doing, I felt dread. What I wanted to say was This feels exactly as bad as you think it feels. What I usually said was Yeah, I’m O.K. 

There’s also the science promised in the title, which is fascinating–covering everything from giving grief a clinical diagnosis to experimental drugs to EMDR therapy–but the concept that interested me most was “two-person neuroscience”:

When I asked [Katherine] Shear [founder and director of the Columbia Center for Prolonged Grief] about the biological aftermath of grief, she brought up two-person neuroscience, an emerging discipline that studies how our brains affect other brains. “Our closest relationships, especially when we’re living together—in particular, when we’re living together—have an impact on our immune system, our cardiovascular system, our sleep, our eating, probably the whole body,” she said. “I think we have to understand what happens, neurologically, when we’re with someone to really understand what happens when we lose them.”

There was another 1.5 hour meeting at work yesterday about using AI “because other agencies will be.” I am not a CEO but I have worked in advertising for 20 years and surely there’s a way we could brand ourselves as a “human-first” agency and go the other direction? No, we’re going all-in on AI instead?

Too bad AI is a loser machine, as posited in this essay is by Garrett Bucks–“You will never win at AI.”

We should say it loudly and proudly and at every possibly opportunity: Generative AI is loser technology and it doesn’t deserve you. The more you use it the more we all lose. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. You will give more of your data, trust, money, water and critical thinking skills to the consumption robots, and what you’ll get in return won’t ever belong to you.

AI is a loser machine. And I hope you don’t use it, not because you need to prove your morality to me, but because I don’t want you to lose. I think you deserve better than a resource-guzzling, death-causing, random word generator.

I saw this essay by John Paul Brammer, “How I Learned to Read Way, Way, More” making the rounds in my different newsletters. When I read it last week, I realized he was the same author who wrote the piece about applying for Global Entry and the urge to conform I posted last summer. This one is wonderful–talking about attention and curiosity and developing a reading habit.

I had a long dry spell of reading in my late 20s/early 30s when I was still reading what was on my shelves but I just didn’t seek out anything new. Then I started walking to the library from my office job, and then I finally got a Kindle and discovered library e-books. Now I’m reading about a book a week. And no, they’re not all capital-L Literature, but as Brammer says in his essay:

I don’t need to go on about the benefits of reading, but here’s a brief paean: it has dramatically improved my quality of life. I’m less anxious. My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better. Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.

So work is really going all-in on AI “tools” at the moment, including paying for a training  that lets you feed your job role into it and then get ideas on using AI in your job, all powered by AI. Then there was an AI-written presentation in a meeting Monday that said a department’s role was to “hold the context” and listed part of their jobs as “invisible thinking–what’s happening mentally.” As opposed to visible thinking, I guess? And the kind of thing thinking doesn’t happen mentally?? What is this slop?!

That’s why I read this essay by Sam Kriss with particular glee: If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you.

Kriss and I have the same reaction when we see AI writing:

…the main thing the incipient superintelligence seems to be doing is replacing all meaningful language with reams and reams of genuinely meaningless drivel.  I hate it. I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck.

And while I might not go as far as hunting down people using AI to write, I too can always tell. Always.

However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.