4 weeks ago
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The internet is filled with awesome stuff to read, and there’s new awesome stuff to read being published every day! That’s the good news. The bad news is that finding the good stuff feels harder than ever. You either find your favorite writers or sources and check them religiously or just hope that the algorithm gods deliver you something you’ll like. It’s all a lot more work than just tapping the TikTok icon, you know?
Allow The Verge to help a little. This is an endless, often-updated stream of the stuff we’re reading and think you should read, too. Whether it’s a great piece of longform journalism, a sharp take on the news, interesting new studies or lawsuits or whitepapers, a new sci-fi book that will inevitably convince a bunch of founders to build new kinds of robots a decade from now, or something else entirely, it’s all here. So scroll through, click on some stuff, let us know what you think in the comments, and get your read-later queue ready to rumble.
The surprisingly deep history of a ubiquitous font.
Marcin Wichary, the author of Shift Happens — an exhaustively researched, beautifully designed and photographed history of the keyboard — is back with a deep dive into Gorton, a font found on keyboards, intercoms, camera lenses, and engraved signs across the world, with a special focus on Manhattan. The article is classic Wichary: it goes very deep and is full of beautiful photographs and interactive elements. It’s a real delight after the week we’ve had.
Warner Bros. Games suffered $300 million in losses last year.
That’s according to a report from Jason Schreier in Bloomberg that highlights the struggles WB’s games division has had trying to turn out another hit. Though the company had success with Hogwarts Legacy in 2023, it’s since suffered multiple failures with the twin flops of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Multiversus, while its forthcoming Wonder Woman game struggles to coalesce.
The Supreme Court case that “could eliminate longstanding free speech protections for sexual content.”
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton will be heard on January 15th. Vox explains what’s at stake in this battle over a Texas law requiring age verification to access sites with pornography
“From the means of production to a meme in production: It’s one kind of American dream.”
If the phrase “Hawk Tuah girl” means nothing to you, I urge you to continue in blissful ignorance. If “Hawk Tuah shitcoin scam” resonates, you’ll enjoy Katie Baker’s rundown of what, exactly, happened.
An 1891 recording is country music history.
A recently discovered performance of “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule” is now the oldest country recording in existence. The performer is Louis Vasnier, a Black artist from New Orleans.
The recording highlights how Black musicians have shaped the genre, despite the erasure of their contributions:
“Black artists by and large, who were the ones who performed and recorded, get wiped out of the picture because they say, ‘Well, it’s not really country,’” Martin says. “So ours is partly a project of reclamation.”
Pedometers tracked philandering spouses and sleepy employees back in the 1800s.
If you thought step counting and activity tracking was a new-ish thing, apparently not! This excerpt from Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media goes into how wealthy people in the 1800s used pedometers as a form of surveillance — tracking naughty spouses, and checking to see if soldiers were properly patrolling... or just taking a nap during the night shift.
Amazon just axed a secret fertility tracker project.
The goal was a product that could predict a user’s fertility by collecting saliva. Users would’ve then been able to log period symptoms, sexual activity, and other fertility data via a mobile app. CNBC says Amazon has laid off the entire team behind the project. Initially, it was set to launch later this year before technical issues resulted in delays.
The whitewashing of the National Archives.
Top US archivist Colleen Shogan has quietly been changing educational material and exhibits at the Archives museum — including removing references to dark periods in US history, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Current and former staff say Shogan engaged in censorship by removing mention of events like Japanese American incarceration, displacement of indigenous peoples, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Go read how the US government’s big bet on Intel is in jeopardy.
How many people are donating to Trump in your neighborhood?
Or Harris, for that matter. It’s not easy to make campaign finance data interesting, but The Washington Post has created this very cool interactive map showing the number of donors and total amount raised for either candidate by zip code.
Snapchat to the Trump campaign: We’ll take your money but not your posts.
An interesting look at how Snap has diverted from other platforms in its handling of former President Trump:
Unlike other major tech platforms, Snap has not lifted the ban on Mr. Trump’s personal account, which has drawn angry pushback from his campaign. Despite not allowing Mr. Trump to post personally, the company has said it would sell his campaign political advertisements, which must all go through an internal fact-check.
The problem with custom AI chatbots.
While it might be fun to interact with Character.AI’s user-created chatbots, a report from Wired shows the challenges of taking down chatbots that impersonate people without their consent, including a teen who was murdered in 2006:
Given that Character.AI can sometimes take a week to investigate and remove a persona that violates the platform’s terms, a bot can still operate for long enough to upset someone whose likeness is being used. But it might not be enough for a person to claim real “harm” from a legal perspective, experts say.
Anthropic’s CEO has many, many, many thoughts about AGI.
In a long blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei considers the upside of artificial general intelligence (AGI, or as he prefers to call it, “powerful AI”). He pushed back on the idea that he’s a “pessimist” or “doomer” by outlining some grandiose claims for the future of AI:
I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.
I’d like to point out that the company is reportedly in talks to raise money at a $40 billion valuation.
Uber and Lyft blocked drivers from working to save money.
Ride share drivers in New York are guaranteed a minimum wage — but Uber and Lyft gamed the law by locking drivers out of the app, making it impossible for them to earn more, a Bloomberg investigation found.
Bloomberg collected more than 7,000 screenshots of lockouts and estimated how much the companies could save using the lockout tactic.
Here’s the scoop on why the Annapurna Interactive staff resigned.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who broke the original story, just published a detailed account of what went down. Settle in with some popcorn — it’s pretty wild.
KitchenAid’s new walnut stand mixer is indeed as impractical as it is beautiful.
“Both are expensive status symbols generally acquired in the spring of one’s life; both are of limited use and enduring popularity; both are signifiers of domestic attainment; both are things people excitedly post to Instagram.”
A reminder about marketing.
PetaPixel today confirmed that the iPhone can technically shoot 4K at 30 frames per second (FPS) in ProRes Log to a UHS-II SD card, but attempting to choose a higher frame rate would guarantee dropped frames.
Microsoft pitches generative AI to oil and gas companies.
The extraordinary Prince documentary we might never see.
Ezra Edelman, who directed the Oscar-winning masterpiece O.J.: Made in America, has been working on an expansive nine-hour film about Prince. But as the New York Times Magazine reports, the artist’s estate is attempting to block its release, which they worry will tarnish the reputation of Paisley Park.
We might not have a doc to watch, but in the meantime, Sasha Weiss’s story has many details from the film and incredible material about Edelman’s editing process.
The battle of the Bobs.
The New York Times meticulously pieced together the bitter power struggle inside Disney between CEO Bob Iger and his successor, Bob Chapek, who was fired in 2022. The piece, which follows up a 2023 report from CNBC, chronicles Chapek’s rise and fall, and Iger’s quest to return to power.
Why is comedy TikTok seemingly all crowd work clips?
I’ve always wondered, and Lucas Zelnik has a shockingly simple and good answer:
I think the biggest thing is to stay in front of people’s faces. You just have to put out so much content. Jokes take so long to write. I will put out chunks of material but very selectively, and, frankly, I probably won’t put out any more material until I’m ready to release an hourlong special, which I think I want to give that a few more years.
AI search “shouldn’t be this easy to manipulate.”
Kevin Roose, whose New York Times story about horny Bing chats went viral last year, writes that chatbots are at times very negative about him since, having seemingly picked up on criticism of his piece.
Now, he writes about how he used techniques that could be considered an AI-focused version of SEO to influence how they respond when asked about him — and what that portends.
“The Titanic was an insurance scam” is my new favorite conspiracy theory.
The claim that the Titanic was swapped with a sister ship and intentionally sunk for an insurance payout is, according to Reuters, a long-running and meritless rumor.
But it’s entirely new to me! And extremely hilarious! You should treat this (and anything else on that cursed site) with the gravity and weight of fanfiction, but let’s be real, fanfiction is fun.
The people who worry about killer AI are still worried about killer AI.
And they’re worried that everybody else got really worried for a minute, too, and then just kind of moved on. And so maybe the worriers missed their only chance:
“There was almost a dog-that-caught-the-car effect,” she said. “This community had been trying so long to get people to take these ideas seriously, and suddenly people took them seriously, and it was like, ‘Okay, now what?’”
Whistleblowin’ from 9 to 5.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say US whistleblower laws weren’t intended to be used by people like “Richard Overum,” who has turned himself into a super spy one whistleblower reward at a time. But he’s making it work! And he’s recruiting.
I can’t decide if this is a Robin Hood story or kind of scammy or both, but I can’t get enough.
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