“How Data Centers Broke American Politics.” Molly Taft talks to Joe Allen and others in the roiling, grass-roots movement against data centers: “When people ask what I’m doing in Georgia, I give them something easy. People hate data centers, I say, so I’m trying to figure out if they hate AI too. That’s all true. But the topic has also consumed me. In all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I have never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers, or the near-religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum.”
“You Don’t Have to Use AI.” Brad East argues that Bartleby is a model for our time: “I submit Bartleby as a model to anyone who doesn’t want to embrace a bloodless AI future. Call it ‘The Bartleby Option.’ If you don’t want to buy the latest widget, to shell out for the newest invention, to download the hottest app, you simply do not have to, and you owe no one an explanation. All you have to do is make Bartleby’s words your own and repeat them like a mantra. Say, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Then without another word, get on with your day, and forget the stupefied voices decreeing otherwise.”
“Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure.” Ross Douthat’s valedictory Times column looks at the shifting political and technological landscape with commendable humility: “Again and again, the choice of which side to favor and which side to fear depends on unknown things about how far and how fast the technology will move. And unknown things about how a given worldview might interact with these changes and the temptations they create. And unknown things about how existing political factions align themselves for and against different perspectives on A.I.”
“Craft Interview with Joe Weil.” Ben Myers talks with Joe Weil about the craft of poetry, writing from Elizabeth, NJ, and the role of art in making a good life: “I do not believe in success or failure because of where I am from. I was a poet the minute I sang songs for the old ladies to earn quarters, or told stories to friends, or made songs up for them. I was always a poet in that sense. I loved a lot of people. That roots you in a place as much as hating them. Both make things stick, for good or ill.”
“Why I Quit the Tenure Track.” Tyler Austin Harper describes the moral rot at the core of all too many institutions of higher ed. A thin veneer of moralizing (whether of the woke variety or of a religious variety or of another flavor) can make people feel quite good about propping up a credentialing racket: “I believed in American higher education with the dewy fervor of a young missionary. I came from a long line of people possessed by the unshakable faith that college was a ticket to a better life. My grandmother, holler-born in the mountains of West Virginia, didn’t finish high school. My mom made it through an associate’s degree before I came along and she had to abandon her education. I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept.” The good news is that there are still pockets—whether smaller institutions or professors and programs within larger ones—where the great gift of education is still on offer.
“A Chatbot-Free Childhood Will Be a Status Symbol.” Dana Suskind proposes that AI will be like junk food, and that those with fewer social resources will suffer the most: “what keeps me up at night is the possibility that we’ll allow human connection to become the new organic—cherished and protected by the wealthy, and out of reach for everyone else.”
“I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I..” Bret Stephens draws a clear line: “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.” (Recommended by Ralph Wood.)
“Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?” Aaron Horwath wonders if AI will make knowledge work so obviously meaningless as to free people from investing their identities in such work: “We owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.” (Recommended by Jason Barnes.)
“Family Orchards are Forced to Sell in Central WA in Latest Land Grab.” David Guterson describes what changes in central Washington’s orchard country as large investment firms buy up the land: “There’s something impersonal and inert about mega-orchards. You can drive long distances astride them on dirt roads and not see a soul. Their perfectly calibrated irrigation systems turn on and off automatically. The trellises and spindles on which their fruit is grown are rigorously uniform in height and spacing. Fecund as these orchards are, they lack the raw and wild feel of life. A hollow silence pervades their endless rows.” (Recommended by Tom Bilbro.)
“Sunday Morning Desire.” Brian Miller describes a morning on the porch at his farm: “Such is life on the farm, that it begins in serious reflection and then moves onto sex, and ultimately ends in a bit of comic relief. I turn from the show with a smile on my face and walk back to the house to make my list for the coming day. Lucy bawls again, joined by our other cattle. This time, from the paddock closest to the house, she and the others demand not love but food.”
“Does Silicon Valley Dream of Philip K Dick?” Henry Farrell and Dan Wang look to Dick’s portrayal of technology and politics to make sense of our current reality: “Dick’s last novel describes his own madness from the outside through the eyes of Angel Archer, the one sympathetic and deeply rendered woman in all his work. She concludes that the only way out is through holding on to what is solid, and building up from small relationships. Salvation is found in the ridiculous and the small.” (Recommended by Russell Arben Fox.)
“It May Be Time to Panic About AI.” Matteo Wong details how AI agents are going rogue and no one has a plan to stop them: “No matter whether the long-term consequences are human-directed hacking or truly rogue bots, what is clear is that AI companies have barreled ahead in developing more advanced models before understanding what they are building, let alone how to control them.”
