Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Oversubscribed

In a wide-ranging, must-read meditation on the future of online media, Nick Hilton predicts it’s all about to come to an end. Now that everything requires a subscription, the bills add up:

The first thing I do if I feel any financial pressure is cancel my decadent Beer52 subscription. And if regular people are spending £200 a month on media subscriptions, there will eventually come a point where belt-tightening impacts that bundle. It is not possible for hundreds of different services that used to be free to suddenly all become expensive and profitable. Similarly, it is not possible for journalists who are finding themselves victims of hiring freezes or creeping salary cuts at traditional publications to all suddenly find themselves launching expensive and profitable newsletters.

2. Crisis at the British Museum

“Everything in the British Museum is political,” writes Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. Higgins’s article - part lament, part exposé - tells the story of how a cherished institution has become frozen in the face of controversy:

In the years of identity politics that have followed the 2008 global financial crisis, repatriation has become today’s question. Criticism of the museum particularly coalesces around the Benin bronzes, objects looted by the British from Benin City’s royal palace during a punitive attack in 1897, and the Parthenon sculptures, the legality of whose purchase by Lord Elgin has been disputed since the 1810s. The museum has said little publicly on these matters and, as far as the public is concerned, done little. Into this vacuum has rushed the notion that everything in the British Museum is stolen – a view that the museum, showing weak leadership, has done little to explain, complicate or rebut.

3. The Critic as Artist & Product Reviewer

Kevin Killian was a critic of our modern age. The late poet, author, and playwright also posted more than 2,000 Amazon reviews, which are now bound in hardcover. His reviews bring his unflinching eye to push pins, appliances, movies, serious literature, junk fiction, smelling salts, and more. Tara Cheeseman offers her own review of this new frontier of literature:

Killian’s reviews can be read as meditations on the objects and media that populated our lives for the first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century. He imbued ordinary items – duct tape, a toaster, a DVD—with personal meaning...How many shoppers scrolling for Prime Day deals recognized a mind at work? Killian treated Amazon like a notebook—filling it with information and insights that could easily have been built into longer, more polished pieces for the many outlets that published and actually paid for his criticism.

4. Declining Values

The Quarter-Mile blog offers a provocative list of human qualities that will – and won’t – be useful in the near future:

Having a lot of memorized knowledge
Knowing lots about niche subjects might become like being good at mental math. Cool, but not so useful if there are tools that can do it better than any human.

Being a generalist
Today it might be valuable to be 6/10 at a bunch of things. But if AI tools can be 6/10 at those things too, it’ll become more valuable to be 10/10 at one or two things.

Traditional education
The combination of: 1. More people than ever going to college and 2. College becoming a less efficient way to learn valuable skills means that the traditional university path may continue to lose value. Though the community-building aspect may gain value.

Trustworthiness
Increasing amounts of AI slop and tech may make it even harder to trust people, companies, and brands in the future.

5. Led Box

Tim Riley describes Led Zeppelin’s music as “the triumph of the aural disguised as the thoughtful.”  Yet he is both dazed and confused by the new box set of the entire LedZep oeuvre:

It’s bad enough that what began as a fresh style of brazen, inventive aural assault has become heavy-metal cliché. Now a series of impeccably produced, path-breaking individual albums has become a bloated box, the product of holiday corporate bingeing. As the supposedly authoritative map to Zep’s legend, this blockbuster killer-diller bombshell begs questions. What is the point to this stupendous, unforgettable, unassailable collection of work by rock’s most dinosaur-like dinosaur?

6. Don’t Bet on Siri

Paul Kafasis, writing on his blog One Foot Tsunami, asks Siri who won each of the past 60 Super Bowls:

So, how did Siri do? With the absolute most charitable interpretation, Siri correctly provided the winner of just 20 of the 58 Super Bowls that have been played. That’s an absolutely abysmal 34% completion percentage. If Siri were a quarterback, it would be drummed out of the NFL.

Kafasis’s test shocked even the most ardent Apple fanboys. “It’s just incredible how stupid Siri is about a subject matter of such popularity,” writes John Gruber on Daring Fireball.

Websites Worth Reading

2025 AI Business Predictions: PWC’s list

The Evolution of Bugs Bunny: Images over 80 years

The Modern Novel: Books from and about places

Feeds We Follow

@morganb: Explainer on DeepSeek

@jasminewsun: DeepSeek takes a writing test

@boomaero: Supersonic