Light week here for writing and links, although it looks like I’ll have two columns at the Athletic this upcoming week.
Over at Paste, I reviewed The Vale of Eternity, a card-drafting game that’s a lot harder than it looks, especially because of its quirky mechanism of handling coins when you buy and sell cards.
I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday. You can sign up here.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Ted Chiang, author of the short story that became the film Arrival, wrote about the false promise of AI for creating art in the New Yorker.
- Magnetic “therapy” is not backed by any evidence, but parents of autistic children are turning to it anyway out of desperation and denial.
- States are using flawed drug test results as the justification for taking children away from their parents, according to this investigative report from the Marshall Project.
- Cloud storage and AI are driving massive increases in energy usage, but the tech firms behind them are fighting efforts to make them pay their fair share. Large language model algorithms are very energy intensive; they shouldn’t be so freely available when they have such high hidden costs.
- Idaho’s abortion ban is putting the lives of women at risk and forcing doctors to ignore their training, similar to what we’ve already seen in other states that couldn’t wait to put a giant foot down on women’s necks after Dobbs.
- Texas AG Ken Paxton is suing to ensure the state can access medical records of Texans who go out of state for abortions, gender-affirming care, or other medical treatment that is none of the state’s business.
- Two Florida voters who signed a petition to get abortion access on the ballot found themselves visited by Gov. DeSantis’s voter intimidation unit.
- A town council member in Jefferson County, Colorado, shot a 17-year-old teen in the face, through the windshield of the victim’s car, as the boy and his friend were looking for a place to take homecoming pictures. The victim is hospitalized in serious condition and Brent Metz is facing multiple charges.
- I enjoyed Will Bunch’s evisceration of Donald Trump’s performance at the debate on Tuesday against VP Kamala Harris.
- A fishing village in Kenya that has also become a popular tourist destination is disappearing as sea levels rise due to climate change.
- The Times reports on the efforts to rebuild the Libyan city of Derna a year after two dams failed and the city flooded, killing over 4000 people. Libya has two rival governments in place, and the one funding the $2 billion effort has given power to run the program to the son of a powerful warlord, raising fears of corruption and more shoddy work.
- “Debate in nuclear-armed former colony fails to reassure global community.” Hat tip to Craig Calcaterra and his essential Cup of Coffee newsletter for alerting me to this satirical gem.
- The most recent edition of the Times’ Modern Love column is a gut-punch.
- The Kickstarter for Pantheum: Demigods of Olympia, an intriguing game from a new publisher, is about to clear $100K as I write this on Friday night.
Thanks for posting the Ted Chiang link. I’ll read literally anything he writes. Really hoping he releases another short story collection sometime soon, although I haven’t heard anything to indicate that’s what’s next for him.
I know you enjoyed it, but the reason that Al Jazeera satire failed for me as parody and as comedy is that it is premised on the idea that Harris and Trump (and Democrats and Republicans) are two sides of the same coin, equally corrupt and equally detached from reality. That’s just obviously not the case. I mean, Cornel West and Jill Stein are “moderates”? Come on. The piece goes too far and it ends up detracting from the parts of it that are smartly observed.