A list of good reads
- Ever worry about sounding like ChatGPT? The Verge examines how AI is changing the ways we speak and interact with others.
- It’s been 50 years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’—New York Times (splainer gift link) has an interactive look at how the film made a template for the modern blockbuster.
- Also in New York Times: The 14 days that doomed USAID, featuring missteps, confusion and ‘viral waste’.
- Australian journalist Alistair Kitchen writes in The New Yorker (login required) about how his reporting on the Columbia University pro-Palestine protests led to his deportation.
- Adorable or just weird? BBC News profiles Labubu, the Chinese-made dolls that have conquered the world.
- Also in BBC News: the people who are ‘allergic’ to other humans.
- Annie Joy Williams in The Atlantic (splainer gift link) declares that the online body-positivity moment is dead and gone—replaced by SkinnyTok.
- CNN looks at the recent reopening of a 688-year-old murder case—which reveals a tangled web of adultery and extortion in medieval England.
- Aeon does a deep dive into ‘merveilleux-scientifique’—a French subgenre of sci-fi that explored science’s darkest possibilities in the early twentieth century.
- In light of ‘28 Years Later’ releasing over the weekend, The Conversation offers an old, rich and varied history of the undead.
