I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today about my extreme distaste for Sora, the new social video app from OpenAI that was built to create and share fake videos. “At a time when we are surrounded by fakes and fabrications, Sora seems precisely designed to further erode the idea of objective truth. It is a jackhammer that demolishes the barrier between the real and the unreal. No new product has ever […]
Change Agents is a podcast about terrorism, crime, intelligence, warfare and all manner of gnarly stuff, hosted by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf. Let’s just say it’s not my normal audience! But I joined Andy recently for a conversation about the North Korean pretender scam. (See my recent story in Wired or read the background post for more context.) I haven’t watch the whole thing back, but I think I did a pretty good job […]
For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then. The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve […]
Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic. On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined. It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in […]
If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you cold. You know about the […]
The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November. The news meant landed a little different for […]
Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal. You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret. The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. You know them in a […]
Highly recommend Rose Eveleth’s Tested, a six-part podcast about gender verification in sport—and detailing the various ways in which sporting bodies have exerted their desire to categorize and control human bodies. It’s well told, extremely relevant, historically fascinating, and full of twists and turns. But maybe the most impressive thing is how Rose makes the headlines personal by actually talking to the athletes who are affected by gender rules that treat them like freaks. Women […]
We just spent three weeks in the UK and Italy, and it was glorious. Family, mostly, plus a few friends, a little culture, a lot of food, and plenty of pizza and pubs. On the quiet side we visited the Isle of Mull and the Suffolk countryside, and on the busy end we hit up Naples, Rome, Florence and London. We explored Pompeii and the Coliseum, we watched Shakespeare, lots and lots of football, and […]
A few weeks ago I announced a little hobby project that I’ve been working on: Curious Reading Club. I’d love it if you became a member. The idea is pretty simple: I pick a terrific non-fiction book each month, send a copy to you, then we come together and talk with the author and each other. Membership costs $25 each month—that’s cheaper than the cost of buying the book itself—and you get a few little […]
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