If you’ve been enjoying these curated article summaries that dive into cultural, creative, and technological currents, you may find the discussions and analyses on our Substack page worthwhile as well. There, I explore themes and ideas that often intersect with the subjects covered in the articles I come across during my curation process.
While this curation simply aims to surface compelling pieces, our Substack writings delve deeper into topics that have piqued our curiosity over time. From examining the manifestation of language shaping our reality to unpacking philosophical undercurrents in society, our Substack serves as an outlet to unpack our perspectives on the notable trends and undercurrents reflected in these curated readings.
So if any of the articles here have stoked your intellectual interests, I invite you to carry that engagement over to our Substack, where we discuss related matters in more depth. Consider it an extension of the curation – a space to further engage with the fascinating ideas these pieces have surfaced.
Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands. But the bag didn’t break. That’s because of the magical chemistry of plastic—essentially, oil turned solid, with carbon and hydrogen atoms that line up in repeating units to form long, noodle-like molecules.
These molecules are pliable and strong, which is what makes plastic so widely useful. And so durable: I unpacked the hunks of Camembert and Havarti and shoved the bag into the back of a kitchen drawer. When I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago, it was still pristine. Of course it was. Plastic bags can last, intact and usable, for decades.
Which is … nuts, right? We create a bag rugged enough to span decades and then use it for minutes before shoving it in a drawer or, more likely, sending it off to a landfill, where it might break into fragments that stick around for hundreds of years. Like I said: the most overengineered object in history.
The environmental problem of “single-use plastics” haunts the public imagination like a spectral wolf. And no wonder—the sheer welter of everyday objects we make from plastic is astonishing. There’s plastic in grocery bags, obviously, but also in yoga pants and car tires and building materials and toys and medical products. The transition came on quickly: Plastic use was comparatively small until the 1970s, when it exploded, tripling by the 1990s. Then it went into overdrive, and in the next 20 years we used as much plastic as we had in the previous 40. We now crank out more than 500 million tons of plastic waste a year. Globally, only 9 percent of plastics are recycled. The rest go into landfills or get incinerated, pumping toxic fumes into the air, usually in poor neighborhoods. A significant chunk also ends up in the ocean, which has already amassed as much as 219 million tons of the stuff—wrappers washing up on shorelines, chunks eaten by fish, islands of plastic forming in watery gyres at sea.
It’s a lot. Too much, many of us agree. And if we want to begin unwinding the plastic revolution? One good place to start is all those single-use products—because, according to the UN Environment Programme, they make up fully 36 percent of the plastics we use every year.
They’re not easy to walk away from, in part because we use so many types in so many places. We’ve got “thin films” like bags, thicker plastics in take-out bowls, multi-layered plastic containers for grocery store meat, and see-through polyethylene terephthalate bottles for soda and water. Each has its own chemical properties, molecular makeup, and performance specs. A single replacement for all that packaging? It doesn’t exist.
What does exist, though, is a set of promising developments in the management, as it were, of single-use stuff.
It’s a war on three fronts: Replace some of our single-use plastics with truly compostable materials. Replace another chunk with reusable containers, like metal or glass. And, finally, tweak the economic incentives so plastic recycling actually works. This isn’t my battle plan; it’s a theme I heard over and over as I spent the past year talking to scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy folk.
None of these ploys is a slam dunk. They’ll need not only innovation but also binders full of smart government incentives and regulation—all of which, of course, will be resisted by petroleum firms. But if you add up all these unplastic developments, you’ll find grounds for cautious optimism: We’ve got a path to a world less littered with deathless plastic waste.
Read the rest of this article at: Wired
“I get hung up on the word scraping,” author R.O. Kwon says. “It sounds quite violent.” Last September, when Kwon learned that her first novel, The Incendiaries, was part of the Books3 dataset that some generative AI models were trained on at the time, she felt violated. She and other authors took to social media, lobbing anger, hurt, and frustration at the tech companies that had secretly “scraped” the Internet for data without consent from or compensation for creators. Kwon’s novels and others were poured into machine learning models, teaching them how to make “new” content based on patterns in the ingested text. (It’s this “generating” that makes generative AI distinct from other types of models that may only identify patterns or make calculations.) The years of work on those books added up: 10 years for one novel, 20 for a memoir, multiplied by the nearly 200,000 books found in the dataset.
“It’s potentially the biggest rip-off in creative history,” says Douglas Preston, a best-selling author and one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit filed after the initial outrage. In September 2023, 17 authors partnered with the Authors Guild, the oldest and largest professional organization for writers, to file a lawsuit alleging that Microsoft and ChatGPT creator OpenAI violated copyright law by using books to feed their generative AI models. OpenAI and Microsoft, for their part, deny allegations that they infringed any copyrights. The tech companies claim that training their models on copyrighted content is equivalent to a person reading books to improve their own writing. The future of books—and perhaps of creative industries as a whole in the United States—may come down to one judge’s definition of “fair use.” Words and who gets to use them are serious business.
But an ecosystem around text-based generative AI had evolved well before The Atlantic revealed the contents of key datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have been in development since 2017, and OpenAI’s GPT-3, the model that introduced generative AI to the mainstream, hit the world back in 2020. Now, tools, workflows, companies, industry standards, and, of course, grifts are in full operation, already shifting the way some books are written, published, and read. The technology has clicked right into the publishing industry’s recent trend toward efficiency, consolidation, and reader service—and seemingly away from sustainability of human labor. But some believe that generative AI could offer a path forward for writers at a time when it’s harder than ever to make a living through books. It all depends on the meaning of a few words.
Read the rest of this article at: Esquire
John du pont, heir to the eponymous chemical fortune, lived on an 800-acre estate west of Philadelphia known as Foxcatcher Farm. Du Pont was an eccentric: He collected stuffed birds and mollusk shells and patrolled his property in an armored tank. His great passion was amateur wrestling, and though he was largely cut off from society, he would invite wrestlers to live in guesthouses on the Foxcatcher grounds and pay for their training. One such guest was Dave Schultz, who won a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics. On a January afternoon in 1996, du Pont pulled up to Schultz’s guesthouse in a silver Lincoln Town Car, rolled down his window, and fired a .44-caliber Magnum revolver into Schultz’s chest. Schultz collapsed, bleeding, into the snow. A motive for the murder was never established.
In 2002, the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan bought a farm down the road from Foxcatcher. Shyamalan and his wife, Bhavna, were living with their two young daughters in the Philadelphia suburbs. The new farm was only 30 minutes away, but its rolling hills and wide pastures made it feel like a different world. Shyamalan began going there regularly to write.
On his way, he’d drive past du Pont’s former home, its iron fence now rusted and covered in ivy. When Shyamalan learned of the grisly local history, he became fascinated by it. Foxcatcher seemed to him, he told me recently, like “a mythical land.” He started working on a new script.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
In early March 2022, when his country seemed in danger of falling to the Russians, it occurred to Leonid Marushchak, a historian by training, to call the director of a museum in eastern Ukraine to check that a collection of 20th-century studio pottery was safe.
He had loved the modernist works by artist Natalya Maksymchenko since he had encountered them almost a decade earlier. There were vessels covered with bold abstract glazes in purple, scarlet and yellow; exuberant figurines of musicians and dancers with swirling skirts; dishes painted with birds in flight. The collection was the radiant highlight of the local history museum in Sloviansk, the ceramicist’s home town.
It was remarkable that they were in this small museum at all. Though she was born in Ukraine in 1914 and studied in Kharkiv, Maksymchenko had lived the rest of her life in Russia. But, after her death in 1978, her family, fulfilling her wishes, oversaw the transfer of about 400 works from her studio in Moscow to the city of her birth. It was a deeply resonant act. When the historic traffic of artworks has so often been from Ukraine to Russia, when artists’ national allegiances have been subsumed by the Soviet Union, when works in international museums by Ukrainians (such as Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich) have been routinely labelled “Russian”, Maksymchenko’s final gift to her home town and country seemed like a statement of defiance.
Now, as the Russian army inched nearer and nearer to the museum, Marushchak worried that these works in delicate porcelain could be destroyed by a missile in a moment – or, if Sloviansk were occupied, taken by the invaders back to Moscow. Had the ceramics been prioritised for the first round of evacuations, Marushchak asked the museum director on the phone.
“Lyonya, what round?” came the reply. “We still haven’t got the order to evacuate!”
Marushchak phoned his friend Kateryna Chuyeva, who was then Ukraine’s deputy minister for culture. “Katya,” he asked her, “why have you still not given the order for the Sloviansk museum?” She explained that she couldn’t just authorise it herself – the regional authorities needed to request it first. So he called the region’s culture department. They said that to issue an order, they would first need a full list of items to be evacuated.
Marushchak was furious. The situation was urgent; there was no time for that kind of paperwork. “Let’s just say I have sometimes had to take my time and breathe slowly,” said Chuyeva, in the face of her friend’s sometimes volcanic passion. She found a way to break the bureaucratic impasse. Before the official order had even arrived, Maruschak was on his way to Sloviansk.
Marushchak cannot drive. When I asked him why he hasn’t learned, he joked that if he had a licence, he’d have long ago driven to Russia to try to bring back Ukrainian artworks that have, over the centuries, been taken from his country. Without his own means of getting to Sloviansk, Marushchak had his brother-in-law drive him from Kyiv 300 miles east to the city of Dnipro. From there, friends took him a further 50 miles, to the city of Pavlohrad. Then he walked to the last checkpoint in town and hitched a lift for the last 120 miles – this time, on a Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
In January, 2023, a retired style-magazine editor whom I’ll call Maria was heading to lunch at the National Croquet Club, in West Palm Beach, Florida, when she spotted two men who seemed like fun. The older of the pair introduced himself as Jacob Turner. He was tall, in his fifties, with gleaming white teeth and blondish hair. “A major figure with a major belly,” Maria, an elegant, sharp-eyed widow, told me recently. Turner’s name appeared on the breast pocket of his all-white croquet outfit, and he wore a chunky gold neck chain that she soon urged him to lose. Kevin Alvarez, Turner’s boyfriend, was around thirty and smaller—“a sweet shadow,” Maria said. She invited the men to lunch with her and her friends, and Turner amused them all with stories that emphasized his extravagant generosity—including one about how he’d met Alvarez. “I was buying shoes, and Kevin was my salesman,” she recalls Turner drawlling. “I told him I’d buy shoes for everyone in the store if he went out with me.”
Turner was from Texas and told Maria that he was an oilman. He claimed to own several wells. “Royalties come in all the time,” he told her. Maria was intrigued: she knew famous people, but she’d never met an oilman before. A few weeks after their lunch, Turner came to her birthday dinner, at Bice, a white-tablecloth place downtown. When the bill arrived—likely amounting to around two thousand dollars—Turner pulled out his platinum credit card and paid it, before another man at the table, who appeared to be courting Maria, could contribute. Then he handed Maria a bottle of “spring flower” perfume from Saks Fifth Avenue. “Five hundred dollars,” she told me. “And it’s not even that good.”
Turner quickly made friends at the club. A man I’ll call Jack, a retired book publisher, met him through Maria. “A generous man with a face full of sun,” Jack said, of Turner. “But even with lessons, he couldn’t play croquet.” Turner was a lavish giver. He showed up late to an Easter-weekend dinner with gift bags containing mini bottles of Veuve Clicquot and chocolate bunnies. Jack invited him to brunch a few days later, where Turner gave a young woman a hundred-dollar bill for taking a picture of them. “He always tipped well, unlike a lot of these people,” Jack told me. “And he never asked me for anything.” (Maria and Jack both requested pseudonyms, expressing concern about social repercussions for discussing the private club. Members had heard rumors that someone was once penalized for bringing penis-shaped “party whistles” onto the grounds. When I asked the club about this, they referred me to someone at the National Croquet Center, who said that she couldn’t comment on club matters.)
That March, Turner invited Maria to a boutique hotel where he had booked a suite for the weekend, to have a sumptuous meal of caviar and champagne. “Who buys half a pound of caviar?” Maria asked me. “But it was just heaven.” Next, she visited the couple’s penthouse apartment on South Ocean Boulevard, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. She was surprised to find that the building didn’t have a doorman. In his apartment, surrounded by new furnishings, Turner was grilling steaks he said he’d bought at eighty dollars a pound. “He murdered the meat,” Maria sighed. “But the company was divine.” When she left, she passed by the couple’s twin Mercedes-Benzes. She saw the men at a nineteen-twenties-themed club luncheon, wearing top hats and tailcoats. Turner seemed to especially relish dressing up and mingling with bigwigs. At one fund-raiser, he reportedly bought a table for ten thousand dollars, then raised his paddle at the auction and pledged a hundred thousand more.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
