Tag: Pocket

It has been a quarter century since the political scientist and Harvard professor Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone,” a diagnosis of a nation — and a collective national identity — being torn apart at the seams. Putnam used data to show a decades-long drift away from civic institutions and tracked the decline of “social capital,” that amorphous bond of shared interests, values and goals between people.

The retreat from civic life began in the 1960s, a decade of assassinations, the Vietnam War and distrust of government, followed by the “Me Decade” of individualism in the 1970s. Just as urban and industrial movements had done a century before, subsequent suburban sprawl and lives dominated by cars also contributed to a sense of disconnection. More recently, the culprits include the 2008 economic crash, the Covid pandemic, the opioid epidemic and a profusion of low-wage, dead-end jobs in the gig economy.

Now, Putnam says, things are even worse.

“What most matters is face-to-face connection,” he said in an interview. “And that has almost certainly never been as low in American history as it is right now.”

America Is Atomizing – The New York Times

“I work for a company that produces luxury items”, one worker tells me. “Any time I get prompted that my ‘token spend’ is too low (0), I go in and ask ChatGPT random gardening questions. So far it has failed to adequately build a rain garden, but I’ve gotten it to describe a sweet potato once.”

Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer’s AI Mandates

AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content.

We only have one documented example so far, and that’s Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI crawlers, as spotted by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach. In a Wednesday blog post, Schmalbach detailed how he found sponsored content embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages that are served to AI crawlers but not ordinary browsers.

— Read on www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640

“What is this place?” Steve Crenshaw recalled asking his friend in the 1970s, when he first visited. Now he was there again, lured by nostalgia.

Indeed, South of the Border in Dillon, S.C., is a relic of American road travel, echoing midcentury highway oddities like Wall Drug in South Dakota and the world’s largest of just about anything across the Midwest. It harks back to a different time in the South, before the region diversified and exploded in growth.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/us/south-of-the-border-carolina.html

Yes, $430M is more than $402M in 2026. But the problem is that only the $430M number is from 2026. The $402M number is from 2019. Thanks to said inflation, $402M earned in 2019 is actually closer to $525M in 2026 if you simply adjust using the consumer pricing index numbers. The reality is slightly more nuanced because movie ticket prices don’t track exactly to this number, and actually overall inflation has caused the CPI to rise faster than ticket prices. Still, the 2019 number is almost certainly closer to $500M when adjusting for 2026 movie ticket prices.$525M – or even just $500M – is still more than $430M. So what we’re really celebrating here is that things are more expensive with time. That includes milk. That includes movie tickets. Congrats, everyone.

– Hollywood’s Brand New Day?

It’s crazy to think how seemingly unrelated things came together and led to the creation of the world’s most-read history publication with millions of monthly readers. Civilization was one of the last gifts my father ever bought me, and it was a true gift for my path in life. No item that I own from my past has had more impact on my trajectory.

— Read on civfanatics.com/2026/08/04/diskettes-that-made-world-history-encyclopedia/

In 2005, when the studies began, the average number of words that each participant spoke in a day was 16,632; in 2019, when the research concluded, the average was 11,900. Each year, the participants spoke about 338 fewer words a day than they did in the previous year, amounting to a decline of about 28 percent over the entire time period.

— Read on www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/07/talking-less-reasons/688074/

How magnificent
the funeral song our children or contemporaries
will write for us, a song they will make by
taking our obituary and Facebook posts,
plus random quotes from our algorithm,
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.
The tears that will fall in the face of such
sanitary sweetness!

Be sure to use AI

— Read on shawnsmucker.substack.com/p/please-use-ai

“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.

Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.

Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open-web.html