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.
The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.
Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer. Both the psalm-writer and I experience the same joy, after all, and other bird-lovers report being delighted by ornithological lyricism; by books like J. A. Baker’s “The Peregrine.” Many people I respect have urged “The Peregrine” on me. But every time I try to read it, I get mired in Baker’s survey of the landscape in which he studied peregrine falcons. Baker himself acknowledges the impediment—“Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious”—while offering page after page of tediously detailed description. The book later becomes more readable, as Baker extolls the capabilities of peregrines and tries to understand what it’s like to be one. Even then, though, the main effect of his observations is to make me impatient to be outdoors myself, seeing falcons.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
There are very few axioms of human life. One is that everybody dies; a second that everybody ages. But depending on your circle and social-media bubble, you wouldn’t be blamed for believing that both will soon become optional.
Especially in Silicon Valley milieus, modern science and technology—gene editing, cryonics, AI—have led many to believe that living forever, or at least for much longer, is a plausible and laudable goal. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and other billionaires have poured small fortunes into anti-aging ventures, and “biohacking” has been in vogue for years. Perhaps most prominent among today’s immortality evangelists is Bryan Johnson, a tech centimillionaire in his 40s who claims to, through diet, exercise, and experimental medicine, have reduced his age by several years. Johnson’s goal, as I learned when I spent a day with him earlier this year, is to reorient all of society around the one thing he believes everybody can agree on: “not dying.”
That might all sound ridiculous, but anxiety about death is ancient. Perhaps a third axiom is that humans obsess over our only common fate. The Atlantic’s writers have been doing so since December 1857, when the magazine published a review in its second-ever issue lampooning a book of supposedly homeopathic medicines, noting that “quackery is immortal.” More than a decade later, the magazine printed a three-part essay documenting how the human life span had increased and asserting that it would continue doing so. What happened to the soul after the body perishes was a frequently visited topic. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in these pages, in 1862, that “the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous.”
At first glance, it might appear that Emerson, the towering transcendentalist, and Johnson, a contemporary transhumanist, are in some sort of bizarre alliance. But none of these 19th- and early 20th-century authors thought death was escapable, and they likely would not choose to not die. Even if old age is detrimental “from the point of sensuous experience,” the eve of life brings wisdom and serenity, Emerson wrote. A “capital advantage of age [is] that a success more or less signifies nothing.” Accomplishments from youth and society’s reverence for the elderly free them of the need to prove anything—a need that caused “a load of anxieties that once degraded” life. Old age should conjure Socrates, Archimedes, Galileo, he went on: “the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand.”
So begins a lineage of Atlantic writers who did not treat aging as a tragedy, instead celebrating the body’s decay as an essential aspect of its growth and dynamism. “I begin by considering the common assumption that one would prefer to be young rather than old,” wrote Vida D. Scudder in February 1933. “And, for myself, I deny it.” To Scudder, then 71 years old, age provided escape from the “fetish of Efficiency.” Above all, she explained, old age makes the remaining years more vibrant, as the “thought of the glories I can no longer hope to see surrounds the modest loveliness still mine to behold, like an aura, a halo of reflected light.” A life is a finite moment in a world of infinite wonder. Even the accumulation that those limited years bring—of beauty and hardships alike—can be generative. Some of the finest art and writing are products of age, Rollo Walter Brown wrote in December 1950: “The graying man is a crucified person, for he has known ridicule, he has known failure, he has known suffering. He is quite certain to express himself with less fanfare, with deeper humility, with an elemental kind of refining.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
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A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” according to the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
Judge Amit Mehta’s decision represents a major victory for the Department of Justice, which accused Google of illegally monopolizing the online search market. Still, Mehta did not agree with all of the government’s arguments. For example, he rejected the claim that Google has monopoly power in one specific part of the ads market. He agreed with the government, however, that Google has a monopoly in “general search services” and “general search text advertising.”
It’s not yet clear what this ruling will mean for the future of Google’s business, as this initial finding is only about the company’s liability, not about remedies. Google’s fate will be determined in the next phase of proceedings, which could result in anything from a mandate to stop certain business practices to a breakup of Google’s search business.
Read the rest of this article at: The Verge
South of Tampa Bay, Florida, wedged between a quiet neighborhood and a mangrove forest, custom-designed aquariums are home to thousands of sea urchin larvae that tumble and drift through the water. Scientists with The Florida Aquarium and the University of Florida care for the little urchins, checking them daily under microscopes for signs that they’re maturing into juveniles, which look like miniature versions of the adults. Few will make it. For every one million embryos conceived in the lab, only about 100,000 become larvae. Of those, only up to 2,000 become adults.
And at this particular moment, coral reefs in the Caribbean need all the urchins they can get.
Long-spined sea urchins (Diadema antillarum) play a vital role in Caribbean coral ecosystems. While overpopulated urchins elsewhere are treated as villains—in California, for instance, divers smash purple urchins with hammers to keep them from mowing down kelp forests—Diadema are the Caribbean’s unsung heroes. Dark and rotund with spines radiating in all directions, some as long as knitting needles, the urchins eat massive amounts of algae that would otherwise smother corals or prevent coral larvae from affixing to rocks and growing into colonies.
“They’re very simple animals, but they’re very effective at what they do,” says Alex Petrosino, a biologist at The Florida Aquarium and a member of the urchin lab team. Where their radiating spines converge, urchins have delicate, bulbous skeletons with holes for wriggly tube feet and bumps where spines attach. Their mouths—equipped with limestone plates for scraping algae off hard surfaces—are in the middle of that skeleton, on the animal’s underside. Petrosino calls Diadema the janitor of the reef because it’s so efficient at cleaning reef surfaces.
Disease has killed roughly 97 percent of long-spined sea urchins across the Caribbean and as far north as Bermuda, endangering the corals that depend on urchins to rid them of harmful algae. Photo courtesy of The Florida Aquarium
In the 1980s, however, an unknown ailment killed about 97 percent of Diadema urchins across the Caribbean and as far north as Bermuda. A later outbreak caused by a single-celled organism known as a ciliate further decimated urchins.
As a result, algae have taken over spaces that were once home to coral; the amount of live coral cover in the Caribbean has altogether plummeted by more than 80 percent since the 1970s. Disease, declining water quality, climate change, and overfishing all play a role, but the lack of urchins has worsened the problem, particularly in Florida where nutrient runoff—from sewage, fertilizers, and soil—feed algae, and increasingly warm summers encourage them to grow. While fish and other animals also typically eat algae, overfishing has left many reefs without enough grazers. Urchins have returned to some spots, but most reefs simply don’t have enough janitors left to keep them clean.
Read the rest of this article at: Hakai
Will it be easier to retreat to a replicant of a deceased partner than to navigate the confusing and painful realities of human relationships? Indeed, the AI companionship provider Replika was born from an attempt to resurrect a deceased best friend and now provides companions to millions of users. Even the CTO of OpenAI warns that AI has the potential to be “extremely addictive.”
We’re seeing a giant, real-world experiment unfold, uncertain what impact these AI companions will have either on us individually or on society as a whole. Will Grandma spend her final neglected days chatting with her grandson’s digital double, while her real grandson is mentored by an edgy simulated elder? AI wields the collective charm of all human history and culture with infinite seductive mimicry. These systems are simultaneously superior and submissive, with a new form of allure that may make consent to these interactions illusory. In the face of this power imbalance, can we meaningfully consent to engaging in an AI relationship, especially when for many the alternative is nothing at all?
As AI researchers working closely with policymakers, we are struck by the lack of interest lawmakers have shown in the harms arising from this future. We are still unprepared to respond to these risks because we do not fully understand them. What’s needed is a new scientific inquiry at the intersection of technology, psychology, and law—and perhaps new approaches to AI regulation.
As addictive as platforms powered by recommender systems may seem today, TikTok and its rivals are still bottlenecked by human content. While alarms have been raised in the past about “addiction” to novels, television, internet, smartphones, and social media, all these forms of media are similarly limited by human capacity. Generative AI is different. It can endlessly generate realistic content on the fly, optimized to suit the precise preferences of whoever it’s interacting with.
The allure of AI lies in its ability to identify our desires and serve them up to us whenever and however we wish. AI has no preferences or personality of its own, instead reflecting whatever users believe it to be—a phenomenon known by researchers as “sycophancy.” Our research has shown that those who perceive or desire an AI to have caring motives will use language that elicits precisely this behavior. This creates an echo chamber of affection that threatens to be extremely addictive. Why engage in the give and take of being with another person when we can simply take? Repeated interactions with sycophantic companions may ultimately atrophy the part of us capable of engaging fully with other humans who have real desires and dreams of their own, leading to what we might call “digital attachment disorder.”
Read the rest of this article at: MIT Technology Review
