“How do I Kill my Microsoft Copilot?” Sam Leith is not particularly fond of Microsoft’s new AI helper: “As far as Big Tech is concerned, no crap idea is so crap that it can’t be tried again, and learning from your mistakes is for losers, Clippy is back. He’s now called Copilot. And not only is he just as repulsively irritating as his predecessor, he’s also costing you a lot of money without you, probably, even realising. But, of course, this time he’s better. He’s not just a shit algorithm: he’s a shit algorithm with the magic fairy dust of AI.”
“The Healing Soil: Detroit’s Urban Farms.” Outlier Media talks with three different gardeners in Detroit about why and how they grow food: “Their stories are unique, but all use urban gardening to connect with their communities and understand what’s going in their bodies.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“Dreaming About Going Back to the Land? I Did It.” Larissa Phillips describes the challenges of farm life, but she also extols the way it forces her to grapple with real life: “I’m not about to issue a call to the masses to return to the land. As we barrel toward an increasingly urban existence, my intention is simply to plant a flag in the age-old place where death and sex and birth are potent forces that don’t go away just because we believe we’re too modern for those things now. You can plant a flag too, wherever you are. Use your hands. Plant seeds on your windowsill. Guard your thoughts like a cranky homesteader who’s seen a thing or two and can’t be bought. Let’s resist! You don’t have to go back to the land to grasp hold of reality.” (Recommended by Ralph Wood.)
“Good Things in this Country.” Sarah Reardon corrects some false views of hospitality and offers ideas for practicing it well: “I recall with some chagrin my attempts to play the part of a resplendent homemaker in those early months, a perfect hostess who would serve exquisite entrees, perfectly paired side-dishes, and stunning desserts, while also curating stellar conversation that would stick with our guests. . . . I desired not only to welcome and please my guests but to do so in a way that spotlighted my own spirit and skill. While I convinced myself that I was working from generosity, I was also working from prideful perfectionism, and prideful perfectionism naturally produces stress.”
“A River Runs Through It: The Tragic Vision of Norman Maclean.” Ralph Wood turns to Rebecca McCarthy’s new biography of Maclean for insight into the complex professor and author and fly-fisher himself, but also for wisdom about how to live well: “Maclean’s spiritual toughness became evident in his lifelong struggle with what he regarded as the tragic character of human existence. ‘A good teacher,’ he explained to students in his final course on Wordsworth at the University of Chicago, ‘is a tough guy who cares very deeply about something that is hard to understand.’ ‘Tough guy’ is his phrase for a person possessing not only the resilience to withstand life’s hard-to-understand tragedies but also the willingness to endure those that cannot be overcome.”
“Reflecting on the AI Crisis in Higher Education.” Philip Bunn reflects on the temptations posed by AI and the need for teachers and students to still find ways to learn: “generative AI, if it is to be used well, requires a user with knowledge and skill. That is, I do not doubt that generative AI tools can produce useful, robust, ‘correct’ outputs depending on the use case. I would argue, however, that it will always be true that those who are most capable of utilizing these tools will be those most skilled and knowledgeable in the underlying material.”
“OpenAI Says it Has Evidence China’s DeepSeek Used its Model to Train Competitor.” Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott report on an hilariously ironic complaint from OpenAI: “OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. . . . OpenAI is battling allegations of its own copyright infringement from newspapers and content creators, including lawsuits from The New York Times and prominent authors, who accuse the company of training its models on their articles and books without permission.”
“MAGA’s Free-Range Food Fight.” Mary Harrington considers who is likely to win the debate within Trump’s coalition between, say, Marc Andresseen and Joel Salatin: “This organic/Promethean dichotomy runs through the whole of the Western civilisational order dominated by America, at least as Berry sees it — but with the dice always loaded in favour of the metal spreadsheet and the “progress” it encodes. In Unsettling, he identified the conflict between organic and Promethean instincts as one that that has animated the American project since settler days: a fidgety and always-lopsided standoff between the urge to embrace a bounded, organic order, and the urge to keep pushing the frontier.”
“A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right.” First Things has published a list of principles to guide technological development and policies: “A new era of technological change is upon us. It threatens to supplant the human person and make the family functionally and biologically unnecessary. But this anti-human outcome is not inevitable. Conservatives must welcome dynamic innovation, but they should oppose the deployment of technologies that undermine human goods. We must enact policies that elevate the family to a primary constituency of technological advancement. Our aim should be a newly re-functionalized household for the twenty-first century.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
