Jun 16, 2023 2 min read

You Should Read - June 16

Collected Ephemera

The Decider Gwen Stacy Is Trans, If You Want Her To Be Trans
⇛ Across the Spider-Verse generated a ton of discussion between my kids, specifically on this topic. They got into author's intent, symbolism, interpretation, representation, ally-ship, and on and on...

Fast Company Brands Can’t Sit Out the Culture Wars—Whether They Like It or Not: As shareholder meetings become cultural battlegrounds, companies are forced to consider what their brands stand for.

BBC Sharp Decline in Appetite for News in Recent Years, Reuters Institute Says: The number of people taking a strong interest in the news has dropped by around a quarter in the last six years, a global study suggests.
⇛ No one has an "appetite for news" in the way they have an appetite for food. It's not a life necessity. News either serves a function or it doesn't. As much as I advocate for a free press, mainstream news is largely broken. We dropped cable several years ago and no longer subscribe to any physical newspapers. Anytime I'm confronted with cable news (typically in a hotel lobby), I can't understand how anyone is able to watch more than a few seconds of it.

The Conversation What Are the Long-Term Effects of Quitting Social Media? Almost Nobody Can Log Off Long Enough to Find Out

50 Watts Books Hoogspanning!: More Dutch Safety Posters
⇛ "Graphic" posters, in every sense of the word, from the 1920s and 1930s.

The Washington Post There Might Be No Such Thing as a Legal American Crypto Exchange: ...if Coinbase can’t operate a legal crypto exchange in the United States — and the SEC is pretty much suggesting it can’t — then it’s hard to imagine anyone else can either.

Vanity Fair Why The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico Didn’t Publish a Seemingly Bombshell Report About UFOs: The reporters behind the eye-popping 2017 UFO Times report had a new chapter to their story. The Gray Lady turned it down, while The Washington Post was working to hammer down the facts. Then the authors took it elsewhere.
⇛ blah blah blah Reddit

Los Angeles Review of Books A World Beyond Us: On Adam Kirsch’s “The Revolt Against Humanity”

The Guardian Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘These are the people who could actually pause AI if they wanted to’: The president of the not-for-profit messaging app on how she believes existential warnings about AI allow big tech to entrench their power, and why the online safety bill may be unworkable.

The Guardian Fantasy Fears About AI Are Obscuring How We Already Abuse Machine Intelligence: We blame technology for decisions really made by governments and corporations.
⇛ Actually, decisions are made by people. And we've stopped holding people to account for their actions, even when their decisions harm large numbers of other people. See: gun manufacturing and oil company executives, senior religious officials, corrupt politicians, etc.

The Drum Ad of the Day: Burger King Responds to McDonald’s ChatGPT Taunt

The Wabbit Hole