Mar 21, 2025 3 min read

You Should Read - March 21

Not Five, but Six, Things

What’s the Matter with Abundance? (The Baffler)

...though they promise they’re more curious about what we can build than what we can buy, Klein and Thompson suffer from the telltale symptoms of commodity fetishism. To maintain an interest in production means investigating the conditions and relations of production—not just the policy mechanics. A turn-of-the-century New Yorker might be thrilled with his new rubber goods and the innovation embodied therein. But we can’t forget the enslaved rubber workers of the Belgian Congo from whom the industry tortured its material. Life did not simply get better and easier with innovation, not even for white people: the violence of the imperial scramble rebounded on the European Metropole and the continent’s scientists turned their attention from fun new electronic doohickeys to killing machines.

Vanity Fair’s Heyday: I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what? (Yale Review)

When I started in 1992, Vanity Fair had only been on newsstands for eight years. It was far more popular in Los Angeles and New York than the spaces in between, and working there was a rarefied gig. I started out telling friends the magazine was for the jet set and those who aspired to it; later I took to calling it a guilty pleasure for the intelligentsia. To the bicoastal, to ladies with tiny dogs, to those who clinked glasses in the Hamptons or Hydra or Beverly Hills or Gstaad, it was already all but required reading. These people were fascinated by my world. They usually knew my name, or at least my articles. They always asked what Dominick Dunne—Vanity Fair’s marquee writer—was like.

AI Search Engines Cite Incorrect News Sources at an Alarming 60% Rate, Study Says (Ars Technica)

Citation error rates varied notably among the tested platforms. Perplexity provided incorrect information in 37 percent of the queries tested, whereas ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 67 percent (134 out of 200) of articles queried. Grok 3 demonstrated the highest error rate, at 94 percent. In total, researchers ran 1,600 queries across the eight different generative search tools.

Wikipedia’s Reluctant Resisters: As shots flew from the right wing, editors gathered for consultation and cookies. (Columbia Journalism Review)

“When you choose to become an editor, it’s because you’re passionate about an issue or you’re passionate about making sure that knowledge exists and it’s free for people to use,” Rudder said. “You don’t get paid to do this, and you didn’t sign up to be attacked.”

How Bill Burr Became a Voice of the People (GQ)

In conversation, as often as on [his podcast], Burr veers into topical cul-de-sacs about the ills of society, venting his myriad of beliefs about the damaging impacts of the American health insurance system, tobacco companies, two-party politics, and the kind of cable news that Burr deems “treasonous,” because their “moneymaking is dividing us” to the point where Burr fears civil war. “We've been there, done that,” Burr says. “A lot of people died. I mean, it was necessary, I guess, but I don't know why it always comes to that. You couldn't just have a discussion? ‘Slavery, it kind of seems like it's a bad thing to do.’ All of a sudden it's like, ‘Well, all right, let's start killing each other, and whoever kills the most, that's the direction we're going to go in.’”

YouTube's algorithm for me has gotten pretty unimaginative (it indulges my hyperfixations), but occasionally it throws something fun like this at me:

The Wabbit Hole

Selections from my Wikipedia searches in the past week: