If you live in the continental United States and get bitten by a bat, or a raccoon, or a fox, your doctor will probably advise you to go and get rabies shots. Rabies isn t common, but it s common enough that about 100,000 people go through the preventative protocol every year. This process is no joke. [ ]
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 [ ]
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 [ ]
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 [ ]
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 [ ]
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 [ ]
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, [ ]
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 [ ]
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 [ ]
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 [ ]