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
It's been absolutely fascinating to watch the narrative about AI shift over the last few weeks – from very boisterous claims that "AGI (artificial general intelligence) is just around the corner" to a rather big "maybe not." According to some researchers, the current approach isn&
I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles Indulge me briefly here while I return to Second Breakfast's origins: a few words on cultural narratives, technology, and aging athletes. Because tonight at 8pm Eastern (after I get home from ballet class), I'll probably tune