Tag: Pocket

In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique.

— Read on www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-social-media-campaign-life-of-a-showgirl-1235480646/

Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.

Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.

— Read on www.astralcodexten.com/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted

Newer evidence suggests that ditching tough-to-attain goals can actually be good for us. According to a review of more than 230 studies recently published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, adjusting our goals in response to stress or challenges, rather than grinding on, is often “a more appropriate and beneficial response.”

— Read on nautil.us/the-surprising-benefits-of-giving-up-1248362/

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