1. It Still Smells Like Teen Spirit
Hua Hsu offers a sentimental recollection about discovering Nirvana’s Nevermind 35 years ago. His piece in The New Yorker is a multi-media time capsule. Read with your headphones on:
I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that fall, on the local modern-rock station. I soon decided I needed to be able to hear to it whenever I wanted, so I bought the cassette of “Nevermind” as soon as it came out. I remember staring at my tape deck as I listened to it for the first time, overwhelmed by how many good songs there were. Nirvana would soon be the biggest band in America, but, in that moment, to a teen-ager casting about for something new, it still felt like a secret.
2. Against Convenience
Gabe Bullard offers a long, cranky, wonderful excerpt of his upcoming book, Against Convenience. While his ultimate target is fast food and home delivery, his screed hits many targets: electric scooters, Door Dash, AI, and, in this passage, doorbell cameras:
For private homes, the doorbell camera offers convenient, instant notification that a package has arrived and security footage if the package is stolen. It’s an inelegant, antisocial solution. The old-style doorbell was already a notification a package had arrived. The new gadget moved the chime and the peephole to the pocket (and gave users another reason to stay glued to their phones). Package theft is a crime of convenience created by constant online shopping and delivery, and it’s not clear the cameras are stopping it.
3. Doom Town
AI destruction is scary. But it is hard not to chuckle while reading The Wall Street Journal’s superb, insider look at the Bay Area’s AI doom culture – and a conference where its people gather:
Existential dread was among the concerns. One Anthropic engineer wrote in his event bio that he was a “recovering AI doomer,” as well as a voracious fiction reader fond of sharing cat pictures. A Lightcone team member wrote that he had been an AI doom thinker since 2007. And another attendee said she wrote a Substack focused on “nukes, catastrophe, and the aesthetics of risk.”
4. Buildings People Want – and Architects Don’t
City planners and architects have conducted exhaustive surveys and consistently found that, when given a choice between a modernist building and a traditional one, people prefer the older style. They rarely get what they want. Robert Kwolek explores:
For now, the provisional conclusion is that 70 to 90 percent of the population has a clear preference for traditional architecture. This preference is surprisingly unchanged by other demographic features…If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s.
5. The Dominican Republic of Baseball
The Dominican Republic is one of MLB’s most reliable farm systems. A ProPublica investigation finds that the recruiting and development process in the DR is rife with abuse and corruption, and middlemen who siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars from players. The scope of the corruption matches the country’s influence on baseball:
For the past four decades, no country outside the United States has sent more players to the majors than the Dominican Republic. With a population under 12 million, it is roughly the size of Ohio, a state that last year claimed two dozen major league players. The Dominican Republic had 144, roughly 10% of the league. The country is a baseball factory. Talented players are sent to practice full time at one of hundreds of academies when they are as young as 10 years old.
6. AI Makes Writing Bland
Two researchers tested 22 different LLMs and more than 100 humans on a series of creative tasks. The LLMs were faster, but they all produced nearly identical results. The humans had different ideas. Aaron Horwath believes we are headed for more blandness:
Like the coffee shops of 2016, widespread AI adoption is generating a massive amount of content and products that share an eerie sameness. Newsletters, websites and ads across competitors and industries are converging on the same Claude-aesthetic, the same tone of voice and the same way of articulating ideas. Most notably missing are the idiosyncratic markers of a human author; LLMs have processed them out to create a generic bleh, with one company’s output increasingly indistinguishable from another.
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