What is late-staged, middle-aged, white male environmental activism but ending up in a ridiculous shouting match about native plants? That's how it worked out for me, at least. But long before I found myself screaming, "What if this were your front yard?!" at a guy operating heavy machinery, I was just a writer forging a path into the environmental movement—by way of the popularity of a novel I wrote with the cheery title of Annihilation. The novel couldn't cure climate change, but it had unexpected agency, and the cynic in me panicked. If this fiction actually infiltrated the real . . . then what was I doing in my real life? Two years later, Trump was elected president. I put up five bird feeders in my yard and took comfort in watching blue jays be happy. I bought native-seed packets and tossed the seeds all over with no plan or pattern. I was distraught, bereft, and the thought of growing something comforted me. I was someone else again, living in a different world. |
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| I Hate Tablets, Love Paper, and Want Digital Notes—This Smart Notebook Is the Answer |
How much innovation does the notebook really need? Writing is humanity's single most important invention, and aside from printing, it hasn't really changed for millennia. Does my pen and paper need to be tech-enhanced, or is that just for TED talk productivity nerds? That was where my head was at before testing this Moleskine Smart Set. After a few months, though... I'm all in. It's changed my life. Besides journaling (which I'm still not sending to the cloud), all my notes have gone digital. I'm reorganizing my notes, color coding them, adding audio to them, and exporting them to my computer. Never in my life have I been this organized. The Moleskine Smart Set took me from a scatterbrained notes-in-the-margins type and turned me into a digitized Note Taker—all without making me use a tablet. My life, career, and mind are a lot more organized because of it, and your's should be as well. |
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Todd Howard Is Lost In Space |
"I've only done something like this one other time in my career," Todd Howard tells me. We're in his office—located in Rockville, Maryland, home of Bethesda Game Studios—to discuss Starfield, his blockbuster creation that could revolutionize video games as we know it. "If I sound a little awkward, it's because I don't like talking about myself." So he excitedly shows me around his MacGuffin-filled office instead. There's a miniature Space X rocket signed by Elon Musk, an Atari joystick controller, a video game map he hand-drew in 1998, and an Apple II computer. On his arm? The same model of a watch that NASA gave Neil Armstrong for his mission to the moon. But nothing compares to Starfield, a game eight years in the making. The sci-fi epic, out now, boasts an entire universe of fictional stars, galaxies, and planets that players can travel to via spacecraft. Along the way, they shoot lasers, fight space pirates, and enjoy pure freedom, unlike anything we've ever seen in the medium. |
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Ghosting Has Gone Way Too Far |
First, a confession: I'm an incessant communicator. I'm that friend that immediately responds to texts; the pesky coworker who Slacks you paragraphs back; the psycho who still attempts to reply to emails in a timely fashion. In a world where it's acceptable to never reply to a person's message, I'm barreling into your DMs and asking in all-caps IF YOU GOT MY TEXT. I know the world views me as a monster, but I refuse to chill, because of a belief held deep in my bones. Ghosting has gone way too far. According to the people who study this stuff, one of the reasons my close friends and loved ones never text me back is because society is yet to agree upon a new set of rules for communicating in an era of 24/7 digital availability. In other words, technology has developed faster than etiquette, leaving people to wonder how long is too long to sit on an email, and if it's more rude to ignore a text or expect a reply. |
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Now We Got to Worry About AI Cops? |
In March, a group of more than 1,100 technologists and researchers that included the oft- irascible Elon Musk signed a letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of the most powerful AI models. In May, more than 350 AI industry leaders, including top brass from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, signed an open letter that warned that AI poses a "risk of extinction" that should be considered on par with pandemics and nuclear wars. In June, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer proclaimed that Congress "must join the AI revolution" and laid out a framework for regulating the technology. Schumer's plan didn't introduce legislation but did propose "insight forums" in which his colleagues could learn more about the technology from experts and other stakeholders. There have been other interventions over the years: conferences focused on responsible data science; AI Fairness 360, an open-source software tool kit that can help detect and remove bias in machine-learning models; the Data & Trust Alliance, a collective that includes some of the largest corporations in America, which developed a questionnaire to detect bias in AI software; initiatives to recruit people of color into STEM fields; etc. But be that as it may, problems of racial bias persist in AI. |
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'A Plague on the Industry': Book Publishing's Broken Blurb System |
When an author I'd worked with a decade ago at Simon & Schuster emailed me asking if she could send over an advance copy of her new novel, I of course said yes. But what really got me to read her book over all of the many unread books in my apartment was this quote from mystery writer S.A. Cosby on the cover: "Polly Stewart's The Good Ones is a fantastic achievement. A classic Southern Gothic tale told through the prism of modern-day sensibilities. Not to be missed." That quote from Cosby is what's known as a book blurb, or more commonly, just a blurb. These endorsements from other authors or relevant notables are included on book covers, press releases, bookseller letters, and other promotional materials both before and after publication. On their surface, book blurbs seem fairly innocuous, but in reality, they're a small piece of the puzzle with a big impact—one that represents so much of what's broken within the traditional publishing establishment. Blurbs expose this ecosystem for what it really is: a nepotism-filled system that everyone endures for a chance of "making it" in an impossible industry for most. To borrow a phrase from Shakespeare enthusiast Cher Horowitz, "Blurbs are a full-on Monet. From far away, they're okay, but up close, they're a big old mess." |
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