Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Will History Write Itself?

Veteran New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook experiments with OpenAI, an AI writing engine:

Perhaps because writing is my vocation, I am inclined to consider my sentences, even in a humble e-mail, in some way a personal expression of my original thought. It was therefore disconcerting how frequently the A.I. was able to accurately predict my intentions, often when I was in midsentence, or even earlier. Sometimes the machine seemed to have a better idea than I did.

Each section of the article ends with a paragraph generated by OpenAI, after it analyzed what Seabrook had written. One sample:

A long time ago, the whole world could have said that it lived in a golden age of machines that created wealth and kept peace. But then the world was bound to pass from the golden age to the gilded age, to the world of machine superpowers and capitalism, to the one of savage inequality and corporatism. The more machines rely on language, the more power they have to distort the discourse, and the more that ordinary people are at risk of being put in a dehumanized social category.

Back in the early days of email, Seabrook wrote about his online correspondence with Bill Gates. Still a classic worth re-reading.

2. Michael Jordan Explains Mentoring

Michael Jordan’s eulogy of Kobe Bryant was more than a stirring set of recollections about a friendship. Better than anyone, Jordan describes what it means to be a professional mentor:

He used to call me, text me, 11:30, 2:30, 3 o'clock in the morning, talking about post-up moves, footwork, and sometimes, the triangle. At first, it was an aggravation. But then it turned into a certain passion…He wanted to be the best basketball player that he could be. And as I got to know him, I wanted to be the best big brother that I could be. To do that, you have to put up with the aggravation, the late-night calls, or the dumb questions. 

3. Yale’s Artless Decision

Yale’s decision to mothball its legendary art history survey course, taught for 60 years by Vincent Scully, may be merely the most recent evidence that American universities have abandoned their interest in Western Civ content. But in Commentary, Michael J. Lewis reminds us why the general survey course was once an essential component of what it meant to be an educated person: 

The traditional survey course was addressed to the general student, who might be destined for a career in business or medicine, but who felt a duty to acquire a minimum of cultural literacy and to be able to identify Michelangelo and, if pressed, say why he matters. The tragedy is that the new dispensation, by addressing itself to ever more theoretically sophisticated future graduate students, has turned its back on the curious non–art major…It’s as if a minister had decided to aim all his sermons at prospective future ministers and addressed himself exclusively to the minutiae of theological dispute…only to wonder why the pews are empty next Sunday.

4. Decades of Office Jargon

In her review of Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a masterful social critique of the tech world, Molly Young does a “deep dive” on the evolution of corporate jargon:

Garbage language isn’t unique to start-ups; it’s endemic to business itself, and the form it takes tends to reflect the operating economic metaphors of its day…In the 1980s, garbage language smelled strongly of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add. The rise of big tech brought us computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, the concept of talking off-line, the concept of leveling up.

Young’s conclusion: “It has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.”

5. Marathon Man

Don’t stop reading Gordy Megroz’s report on Derek Murphy, the man who lived to expose runners who cheated in marathons. Midway through this engrossing report, it takes a shocking turn. But here is how it starts:

Jane Seo, the second-place female finisher at the Fort Lauderdale A1A Half Marathon, had run the second half of the course nearly two minutes faster than the first, an improbable margin. Murphy looked at race photos and noticed that Seo was wearing a Garmin fitness-tracking watch and that, in a photo of Seo near the finish line, the face of her watch was visible. Murphy bought the race photographer's high-resolution photo and zoomed in on the watch. Amazingly, he could see that Seo had run only 11.65 miles of the 13.1-mile race. On February 21, 2017, Murphy posted a story about Seo. The site blew up.

6. The Newspaper Never Got Digital

The death of local newspapers was apparent in the late 1990s. Yet in one of the colossal blunders in business history, McClatchy Newspapers spent over $4 billion in 2006 to acquire Knight Ridder’s dying papers. Peter Winter explains why McClatchy – and maybe the entire industry – didn’t understand what was happening:

They followed the [San Jose] Mercury News and put their newspapers “up on the Internet” — and that’s all they did. No search, no social, no new relationship with users, not even a user database, no original engineering, no disciplined, marketing-led process of new product development, not a single trace of digital sensibility — just a continuing belief that the best way to deliver journalism, even in the digital world, was via the newspaper bundle. It was an error compounded by the self-important belief that national and international news could be bottled up in one place, and made still worse by the religious belief that their “quality,” “credible” local news made a defining difference. It didn’t. It never did.

Websites Worth Reading

Benedict Evans: Tech commentator’s “big presentation” from Davos

Kobe Photos: The life and career of Kobe

Berkshire Hathaway: Warren Buffett’s must-read annual letter

Feeds We Follow

@philcoffman: Mesmerizing video of highway interchanges

@NicoleNajafi: Going on dates with presidential candidates

@REBELLER: Outlaw cinema