A list of good reads
- New York Magazine has a deep dive on how the current situation for AI firms is now conventionally competitive—a contrast to the immediate post-ChatGPT era in which OpenAI was king.
- Aeon has an essay on AI-generated ‘chatbots with the dead’—asking whether the user experience is ghoulish, therapeutic or something else entirely.
- From Scotland to California, golf courses are being restored to their natural, uncultivated state. BBC News looks at these rewilded courses teeming with life.
- Also in BBC News: the psychology behind travel souvenirs. Is it time to change how we buy them?
- Anjana Ahuja in Financial Times (splainer gift link) uses new studies to suggest that we should stop using ‘bird brain’ as a barb.
- With some lovely photography, CNN traces the bounceback of Australia’s endangered northern hairy-nosed wombat—from 35 in the 1980s to over 400 today.
- Also in CNN: how airlines have started showing the ‘middle finger’ to frequent flyers, by making it harder to accrue ‘elite’ status.
- Snoring, exercising, declarations of love and more—New York Times (splainer gift link) breaks down the various boundary violations that make for a bad therapist.
- Hollywood Reporter India examines the unbearable weight of being seen, and other themes of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Nayak’—in light of its re-release in cinemas this past weekend.
- The Atlantic (splainer gift link) asks why everyone online is talking about being ‘oneshotted’—gamer slang that refers to being killed in a single blow.
- Wall Street Journal (splainer gift link) peers inside the $7 million project underway to plug the many leaks in architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous house museum—Fallingwater.
- The New Yorker is 100 years old!!! To mark the centenary, Washington Post (splainer gift link) has picked ten of the magazine’s most wry and controversial viral covers—with comments from longtime art editor Françoise Mouly.
- The Conversation has a history lesson on Pharaoh Thutmose II, whose tomb was discovered by a team of archaeologists in Egypt last week. It’s the biggest such finding in over a century.
