Elon Musk says he is sorry he amplified an antisemitic post on X. But at a New York Times event, here’s what he said about advertisers like Disney, who have since left the platform (the “Bob” in this quote is Disney Chairman Bob Iger): If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me…
Newsletter 20. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year; suing Microsoft and OpenAI; stop checking your grades; plus three people to follow, three books to read, and the perfect gift for the author in your life. Inauthentic I always thought the advice and books on how to be authentic were a little silly. Who wants to be…
I’d never use ChatGPT to write for me: it’s both boring and unreliable. But that said, it’s still quite useful, especially as a replacement for search (I’m using ChatGPT-4, which integrates with Microsoft Bing including up-to-date content.) The research method is simple: ask ChatGPT to find things, then check the source it finds to see…
Newsletter 19. How viewership evolves, media conforms, and finance destroys. Plus a survey finds AI all over publishing, an agent pokes the industry in the eye, an ugly electric truck, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Three painful lessons from David Zaslav’s Warner Odyssey I was fascinated to read Jonathan Mahler,…
Why I love text more than other medium, how Amazon prices, a machine reads your book pitch, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and witty link. Why text is good and books are best There’s an explosion in content. Blogs, Substacks, Medium posts, Threads, Podcasts, vlogs, you name it. Which format is…
The Times and the Journal have weighed in: people posting “commenting for reach” or CFBR (commenting for better reach) on layoff posts is now officially a phenomenon on LinkedIn. Seriously: For convenience, you can bookmark this post and reread it each time any social network experiences a “phenomenon.” Just change the specifics and it will…
Many of us love “The Great British Baking Show.” But it’s also full of lessons for a moral education: And finally . . . There sure are a lot of ways to speak “English” . . .
If you are creating a draft of a book chapter, essay, blog post, or other content that others must review, it’s tempting to just assemble something quickly and fling it out there. After all, people are just going to criticize it anyway. Alternatively, you may be tempted to make your draft as complete and polished…
Gannett’s USA Today runs a product review site called Reviewed. It makes money when you click to buy things. And, at least according to the union talent that writes a lot of the reviews, it recently started filling up with some pretty crappy, possibly AI-generated reviews that they didn’t write. That’s the story from Washington…