life

The more these systems anticipate and deliver what we want, the less we notice what’s missing—or remember that we ever had a choice in the first place. But remember: If you’re not choosing, someone else is. And that person is responding to incentives that might not align with your values or best interest.

If a Democratic lawmaker and her husband are gunned down, it’s an isolated incident carried out by a lone wolf.

If a right-wing activist is gunned down, it’s part of a coordinated effort by the radical left to incite violence.

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

We’re drowning in this nothingness.

When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

This case-control study found the greatest risk of PD within 1 to 3 miles of a golf course, and that this risk generally decreased with distance. Effect sizes were largest in water service areas with a golf course in vulnerable groundwater regions.

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”