Tag: Society
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The secret to being happy in 2026? It’s far, far simpler than you think … | New year | The Guardian
In the end, though, there is a consideration even more fundamental than any of these, which is that it’s not clear what life is really for at all, if it isn’t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive. It’s notoriously easy to slip into the unconscious assumption that any such aliveness is…
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Donald Trump is waging war against human conscience | Osita Nwanevu | The Guardian
Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”…
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Love Machines by James Muldoon
The risk here is clear enough: the more emotionally involved we become with AI chatbots, the greater our loneliness may grow, as the muscles required to navigate the frictions of human relationships wither. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/13/love-machines-by-james-muldoon-review-the-risks-and-rewards-of-getting-intimate-with-ai
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How Grok’s nudification tool went viral
As people slowly started to understand the full potential of the tool, the increasingly degrading images of the early days were quickly superseded. Since the end of last week, users have asked for the bikinis to be decorated with swastikas – or asked for white, semen-like liquid to be added to the women’s bodies. Pictures…
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Molly Cantillon on X: “THE PERSONAL PANOPTICON. A few months ago, I started running my life out of Claude Code.
This is the default now. The bottleneck is no longer ability. The bottleneck is activation energy: who has the nerve to try, and the stubbornness to finish. This favors new entrants. People who question unquestioned assumptions because they don’t know any better. The founders who sprint through walls and will their dogged pursuits into existence.…
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MTV Rewind
an interface through which you can watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also “channels” for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and the first full day of MTV programming. — Read on kottke.org/26/01/mtv-rewind
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These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You? – The New York Times
By midweek, students said they felt more immersed in the world around them. They met up to hand-write letters to family members and discuss “Self-Reliance,” the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship / Of minds that each can stand against the world / By its own meek and incorruptible…
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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Stories Beyond Demographics – seeing stories in ourselves
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How…
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The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…