I regret to inform you that Paul Graham, investor and founder of the startup training program Y Combinator, has published a new essay: "The Origins of Wokeness." You can tell the political bent of his screed by the invocation of "woke," no doubt. But at this
Congestion pricing finally went into effect in New York City last week, over 15 years since the idea was first proposed. The new program charges a toll on vehicles (capped at $9/day for passenger vehicles) that drive in the central business district of Manhattan – that is, everything south of
Apparently there’s been an "incident" at PowerSchool. An incident. A breach. A hack. NBD, just one of the largest ed-tech companies in the world, provider of a student information system for about 16,000 schools (75% of districts in the US), the central piece of digital infrastructure
When Rip Van Winkle awakened and stumbled back to his village, everything was different. His house lay in ruins; most of the people he knew, he quickly discovered, were dead. And yet surprisingly little had changed – surprising, considering he’d slept for twenty years, considering there’d been a rather
Happy New Year! Let's all take a deep breath, because 2025 going to be a weird one. "Do not obey in advance," historian Timothy Snyder cautions. "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a
Folks wrung their hands a lot this year about reading. "No one buys books," Elle Griffin argued this spring, although apparently Bible sales are surging, as – according to The Washington Times at least, "Gen Z is sick and tired of predecessors' self-centered godlike hubris." Joke&
On Thursday, we learned the devastating news: Absolute Bagels had closed. Suddenly and, apparently, for good. A Saturday morning trip up to the bagel shop on the Upper West Side has been a weekly ritual for Kin since we moved here. He'd buy a dozen bagels – a couple
This will be the last Friday you'll receive a Second Breakfast newsletter in 2024. I'm not writing my usual "year-in-review" series either, as easy as it could have been to just copy-and-paste "artificial intelligence" a thousand times over and call it good.
I'm reading four books at the moment: Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology
The Oxford University Press's word of the year is "brain rot." I believe that's two words, but whatever. Let an academic press have its moment in the sun, with headlines that, this time around, don't involve selling off its authors' IP
Robot owls: "The question that remains in my mind," writes Imogen West-Knights in the latest issue of The Dial, "and in the minds of many of even its most dedicated users, is: what is Duolingo actually teaching you?" (Emphasis mine.) What indeed? Duolingo won't
I'd originally planned to take today off from the newsletter – a little post-Thanksgiving respite from my writing (and your having to read it). But the steady drumbeat of AI hype hasn't stopped, so how can I? (You're free, as always, to not-click.) I really