Month: November 2025

Todd Snider, the folk singer and songwriter whose wry wit coursed through big-hearted ballads rallying for the underdog, and whose charming onstage stories of mishap and skulduggery often lasted longer than the songs they introduced, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 59.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/arts/music/todd-snider-dead.html

Lundy’s hands, accustomed to managing air-conditioning systems, had to learn a new language — to feel the difference between correct tension and too loose or too tight. When he thought a repair was perfect, he brought it to Mr. Montgomery, who tested it with quick fingers dancing across the keys and, invariably, pronounced: “That is not what I would have done.”

He showed Lundy the right way. No anger. No frustration. Just quiet insistence that good enough was not good enough.

Sometimes Mr. Montgomery would partly disassemble a machine and leave it on Lundy’s bench — a test, a puzzle, a method of teaching as old as apprenticeship itself.

“It’s like Zen,” Lundy says about those hours at the bench. “There are times when it is just very relaxing to be standing in front of the machine and slowly cleaning it, tweaking the adjustment so visually things start to really line up.”

— Read on www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/20/us/typewriter-repair-seattle-bremerton.html

“How much of our work exists because we ‘think’ we have to do it?

Arbitrary conditions hypnotize us into believing content for our pears is worth the investment.”

…

We’re not solving real problems; we’re searching for validation.

As marketer and author Rory Sutherland puts it, many of the problems we face today are open ended. Yet we aren’t actually looking to solve these problems.

Instead, we’re looking to win arguments. Or as I put it, we’re looking to maintain our employer’s health insurance. Don’t rock the boat.

As a result, we treat open ended problems as if the single answer exists.

And the “best answers” are unfortunately those with the most examples and data.

That’s how the cycle repeats itself. Hype begets hype.

— Read on zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/self-sabotaging-innovation

There are two different ways to describe a family tree. You can start with an individual and trace their ancestry through parents and grandparents and beyond to produce a picture of the variety of human beings it takes to make up any one of us. That’s genealogy. The other version is to pick someone from an earlier generation – king or commoner – and count their direct descendants. That’s heredity. But the choice between the two approaches – one spreading out backwards and one spreading out forwards – is only possible because earlier generations tended to have multiple offspring. Once that ceases to be true, family trees start to look the same from both directions. That has never happened before and it is hard to know what it will mean. But it is going to feel oppressive.

— Read on www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n21/david-runciman/are-we-doomed

Here’s the strangest part: there was no evidence that social media companies actually suppressed news of the protest, according to linguist Adam Aleksic, author of the book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. “Sure, TikTok will prevent clusters of overly political content from clumping together, but they generally do allow protest coverage,” Aleksik said in a video on the subject. “Instead, the ‘music festival’ thing mostly started with people hypercorrecting because they weren’t sure what the algorithm was and was not going to censor.”

Ironically, using the term “music festival” drove people to engage with these videos because they wanted to feel like part of the in-group, which made the videos even more viral, according to Aleksik – and because the “music festival” videos were more popular than regular videos about the protest, it convinced people the censorship was real.

Researchers call this phenomenon the “algorithmic imaginary”. People change their behaviour in response to beliefs about how social media algorithms work. Whether or not these beliefs are correct, this user behaviour ends up moulding the algorithm itself.

The words you can’t say on the internet

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.

— Read on deadline.com/2025/11/pope-leo-xiv-cinema-speech-a-list-crowd-read-his-speech-1236618389/

The issue is that generative AI systems don’t want messy perspective jumps. They want the median, the average, the most widely-approved of viewpoint on an issue, a kind of soft-focus perspective that is the exact opposite of how a good historian should be thinking.

To be in an archive is to be confronted with the contradictions, controversies, secrets, and unspoken facts of a person’s life or of a time and place.
— Read on resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-legibility-archives-future-of-research

“It is with a great appreciation and heartfelt emotions that we write to share some sad news,” editor Sandi Duncan and editor emeritus Peter Geiger wrote. “After more than 200 years of sharing a unique blend of weather, wit and wisdom, we’ve made the very difficult decision to write the final chapter of this historical publication.”

The almanac’s staff attributed the decision to the “growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.”

The Maine-based publication is sometimes confused with the Old Farmer’s Almanac, its longer-established and more widely recognized competitor that first published in 1792. The Old Farmer’s Almanac said in a statement this week that it “isn’t going anywhere.”
— Read on dcalrv8rg95znm.archive.is/

Amazon cut 14,000 jobs this week, citing, in part, efficiency gains from AI. But blaming AI for layoffs is like blaming the thermometer for the fever.

…

You can’t innovate in a climate of fear. And more than half of workers now fear losing their jobs in the next year. People stop taking risks. They comply. They play it safe. Ironically, at the dawn of the AI era, we’re engineering the conditions least conducive to innovation. At its highest and best use, AI could help us cure cancer, rebuild infrastructure, even reverse climate damage. But we may throw that future away. Not because machines failed us, but because we did.

— Read on www.forbes.com/sites/annkowalsmith/2025/10/31/ai-didnt-layoff-14000-people-amazon-did/