Joe Mathews at the San Francisco Chronicle
“Ban everyone age 18 and older from social media,” says Joe Mathews. Adults are “having the wrong conversation about digital safety.” Every “week, more grave-faced politicians declare that we must protect kids by banning them from social media, even though most unhinged people online are old enough to vote.” If any “demographic has proved it cannot handle an unmoderated feed, it is fully grown adults.” If “adults ban ourselves from social media tomorrow, what do we really lose?”
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‘The unique horrors of AI food slop’
Brady Brickner-Wood at The New Yorker
The “next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was,” says Brady Brickner-Wood. Restaurants are “plastering menus and promotional materials with AI-generated” food. A “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon.” These “renderings of food — genuinely, slop — offend the materiality of the living in a way that AI’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not.”
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‘The price of Russian paranoia’
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan at Foreign Affairs
As “Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes increasingly costly with no end in sight, the Kremlin has kept tightening its grip over Russian society,” say Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Less “apparent, though, is the dramatic shift in domestic security doctrine that undergirds these efforts.” Rule by “spy hunting and paranoia has also come with significant costs,” as “proliferating social controls and prosecutions for treason have created a pervasive climate of mistrust and fueled a sense of paralysis.”
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‘Trump’s ‘Golden Age’? Well, yes — for dollar stores.’
Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect
Americans are “not experiencing the Trump Boom in quite the same way that Trump is,” says Harold Meyerson. The economy has “positive metrics to be found, so long as they don’t concern the experience of the American people as such.” Most “revealingly, because this is a metric that does reflect the experience of the American people, business at dollar stores is up and rising.” These stores are the “canary in the coal mine when the economy is going to hell.”
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