I will read pretty much anything Andrew O’Hagan writes in the London Review of Books (which is a subset of “I’ll read pretty much anything in the London Review of Books” also a true statement) but I particularly enjoyed his demolition of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew of The Epstein Files, the Duke of Pizza Express, or the more prosaic Detainee A. The piece—headlined “Stay Classy”—is a good look at the entire illbegotten […]
A few weeks back I had a really stimulating conversation with Craig Mod, the bookmaker, writer, photographer and author of Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, which was February’s book of the month at Curious Reading Club. One thing I mentioned in our chat was that Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into […]
Not quite 18 months ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT was definitely certainly probably not a good idea. “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” he said at a Harvard event in October 2024. “I kind of think of ads as, like, a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody on the […]
What fun to talk with Jennie Erin Smith, the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families And The Search For A Cure, which was Curious Reading Club’s book of the month for January. It’s a really fascinating book about a major research trial in Colombia which focused on a huge group of people who carry a particular gene linked to early-onset Alzheimer’s. We chatted about all manner of things, including the complexity (or not!) of […]
For Dweb Digest I wrote a short profile of the archivist Rick Prelinger, and his work to create decentralized copies of vast tranches of archival data alongside his friends and partners at the Internet Archive. It was a lot of fun driving over to their East Bay warehouse and sitting down to talk to him and his team about how they find, clean, capture and share vast amounts of video taken from almost anywhere you […]
December’s Curious Reading Club book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by former NPR science editor David Baron—a rollicking read about the gilded age’s obsession with aliens, and the space-obsessed Boston brahmin Percival Lowell who made it happen. David’s book looks at how the craze took hold, what it meant, and how it fell apart… and why we’re still obsessed anyway. I was particularly taken by the […]
This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do. Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired […]
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 […]
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