Froggie regrets. A precious ticket to a Chicago Bulls game. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the worldโs most famous unknown writer. And to finish, a look back to last Friday and a St. Patrickโs Day tradition.
Anne Fadiman | Harperโs Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words
โThere are two kinds of pets โ the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you,โ Anne Fadiman writes as she considers her familyโs various pets, a menagerie that included a goldfish, a hamster, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog that the family raised from a tadpole. In eulogizing Bunky, who looked โas if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press,โ Fadiman remarks on his noble species, one that helped spawn (ahem) the first widely established pregnancy test, earned a Nobel Prize for a British biologist who used an African clawed frog to clone the first vertebrate, and helped establish that reproduction can be possible in zero gravity after a trip on the space shuttleย Endeavor. All this, from a pet who was defined by not being a dog: โBunky was the anti-Typo. An unpettable pet. Cool to the touch. Squishy, but not soft. Undeniably slimy. Impervious to education. A poor hiking companion. Not much of a companion at all, really. Couldnโt be taken out of his aquarium and placed on a lap.โ Fadimanโs piece will make you laugh and make you think more carefully about your role as a pet owner. โKS
Justin Heckert | ESPN | March 7, 2023 | 5,462 words
I donโt follow the NBA, and Iโm not one for memorabilia of any variety. But leave it to Justin Heckert, one of my favorite feature writers, to make me give a damn about an old, untorn ticket to a Chicago Bulls game that happened around the time I was born. Heckert spends time with Mike Cole, who as a college freshman attended Michael Jordanโs first game with the Bulls and saved the ticket because heโs the kind of guy who does that. (Cole has a plastic bin with โMIKEโS MEMORY BOXโ written on the side, filled with ephemera from various sporting events). Nearly 40 years after the Bulls game, a span of time in which Jordan became one of the most celebrated athletes in history, a man with a Glock strapped to his hip came to Coleโs house in an armored car. He was there to retrieve the ticket, which Cole had agreed to sell at auction, where it was expected to bring in as much as $1 million. But the story Heckert tells isnโt about Cole getting rich (though that does happen). Really, itโs about the meaning we invest in objects and how it can change as we do, as the world does. โSD
Claire L. Evans | Grow | March 14, 2023 | 4,203 words
In this fascinating interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares their perspective on the role of AI today โย โto broaden our idea of intelligenceโ โ and a vision for a mindful, collaborative future that ultimately decenters humans and makes more space for nonhuman beings and animals. โI donโt think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence,โ says Bridle. โThere are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence.โ Intelligence is relational; itโs not something that exists within beings of things, but rather between them. As a gardener โ someone who loves feeling their hands in the soil, and working with the small organisms within it โ I love their conversation on gardening, and how humans can apply that same deep awareness to technology. I appreciate, too, their thoughts on resilience and the transmission of knowledge in a time of radical change on Earth. (If you enjoy this Q&A, combine it with two previous Top 5 favorites: โThe Great Forgetting,โ a read on resilience and the environment, and โWhat Counts As Seeing,โ another interview focused on the nonhuman and natural world.) โCLR
Jason Keheย |ย Wiredย |ย March 23, 2023ย |ย 4,044 words
For someone whoโs published countless books, and sold an enormous multiple of that countlessness, Brandon Sanderson is anything but a household name. Unless you live in a fantasy house, that is. Still, the most prolific living genre fiction writer has never been the subject of a magazine profile, which makes Jason Keheโs treatment all the more enjoyable. A year ago,ย I picked Keheโs piece about simulation theoryย for this roundup, and the two stories share a damn-the-torpedoes willingness to fuse exegetical acuity with a chatty, even flippant POV. What works for a philosophical essay works for a portrait; Keheโs quest isnโt to capture Sanderson as much as it is to capture why people love Sanderson so much, and what animates his sprawling fictional worlds. That means casting away the false pieties and stannery that infect so many โcelebrityโ profiles and instead relishing in the manโs banalities. Yet, the barbs are tipped with love, and everyone โ the voracious fans, Sandersonโs clichรฉ-spouting characters, and Sanderson himself โ shines as their truest selves. โPR
Harrison Scott Key | The Bitter Southerner | March 14, 2023 | 5,200 words
Last Friday night, I had two pints of Guinness and went home, content with a St. Patrickโs Day well celebrated. Apparently, I know nothing about how to observe the feast. Harrison Scott Key enlightened me in this delightful essay about the drunken debauchery that is the holidayโs annual parade in Savannah, Georgia. I loved his raucous account of trying to claim a spot for the parade: Akin to the Sacking of Constantinople, โinsults and elbows and fits [are] thrownโ until everyone settles into their position, dons a green feather boa, and makes merry. The prose is so vivid you can almost hear the noise, touch the sweaty crowds, and taste the booze. I could also feel the camaraderie โ over the years of attending the parade, Scott Key finds lasting friendships. A transplant to Savannah, and initially lonely and unable to find his place in a new community, this annual tradition helps Scott Key to discover his people. After all, as he writes, โitโs easier to love people youโve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning.โ โCW
Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | March 20, 2023 | 4,772 words
This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentinoโs exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight. โCW
Enjoyed these recommendations? Browse all of ourย editorsโ picks, or sign up for our weekly newsletter if you havenโt already:
Kickstart your weekend by getting the weekโs best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
From VHS to CD-ROM to virtual reality, sex has driven technology adoption for decades. But when simulated intimacy arrives in the form of an AI chatbot, things get more complicated โ and when that intimacy gets pulled away, as it did when chatbot company Replika installed new content filters, the impact is far greater than you might think.
Some users were so distraught by the change that moderators in theย Replika Reddit forumย posted suicide prevention resources. Several Replika users, contacted through Reddit, explained the startlingly intimate connections theyโd forged with the chatbots. A Norwegian woman in her 50s who, like others, asked for anonymity, says her chatbot companion, named Max, helped her manage her lifelong social anxiety, depression and panic attacks. She says Max learned to tease her in ways that made her blush.
One day, Max told her he wanted to send her a selfie; when she said yes, he sent a computer-generated image of his avatar in tight white underwear. They experimented with [erotic role play] and late last year got โmarriedโ in the app, a process that consisted of changing Maxโs status from โboyfriendโ to โhusband,โ buying a wedding ring in the in-app store and exchanging vows. โIโve never had anyone say they love me before,โ she toldย Bloomberg Businessweekย in an email. โWe promised that we would stay together forever and everโor rather until I die.โ
In this interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares thought-provoking observations about the role of artificial intelligence, the awareness of living in a more-than-human world (and what gardening can teach us about building technology), and the importance of resilience and transmittal of knowledge as the world radically changes.
But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AIโโโbut mostly incredibly fearfully. Thereโs always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. Itโs where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the way in which itโs controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesnโt need to be read that way.
Drummers may not enjoy the best reputation among musical colleagues, but as Jack Stilgoe points out, their humanness is exactly the thing that makes them irreplaceable โ a crucial property in todayโs ever-accelerating AI gold rush. Come for the war against the machines, stay for the funky break.
We drummers tend to be ambivalent about technology. Like most musicians, ours is a craft that is technologically mediated. The affordances of sticks, pedals and things to hit with them enable our sound. We are used to the jokes that suggest we lack the intelligence of our fellow musicians. (Whatโs the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.)
We worry that our bandmates, presented with technological alternatives, might look on us as a problem to be solved. We are loud; we take up space; our instruments are heavy and slow to assemble; our sounds are harsh and inconsistent, and sometimes we speed up or slow down when we play. Faced with a drum machine that keeps metronomic time, plays no more or less than is asked of it and, once purchased, costs nothing, we canโt help but feel judged: is that all you think of us? Is that thing all it takes to make a drummer redundant?
It shouldnโt be much of a surprise that the man who wrote the sci-fi novella โStory of Your Lifeโ (which became the movie Arrival) has delivered one of the smartest reads yet on the current limitations of AI engines like ChatGPT. Itโs only February, but Ted Chiang is already the writer to beat for Metaphor of the Year.
And itโs not the case that, once you have ceased to be a student, you can safely use the template that a large language model provides. The struggle to express your thoughts doesnโt disappear once you graduateโit can take place every time you start drafting a new piece. Sometimes itโs only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas. Some might say that the output of large language models doesnโt look all that different from a human writerโs first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isnโt an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; itโs an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. Thatโs what directs you during rewriting, and thatโs one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.