Newsletter 46: Curiosity beats animosity, OpenAI trains ChatGPT-5, Google spreads fakery, plus three people to follow and three books to read. The value of principled argument When I was a media analyst, companies often brought me in to hear my perspective. Many of the companies who hired me also intensely (and sometimes very publicly) disagreed…
AI tools like Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Perplexity generate text intended to mimic human writing. They’re pretty good writers. But they write with telltale signs that they’re not human; you might say they write with an “accent.” Any native speaker can tell when another speaker’s first language doesn’t match the one he’s speaking. If you’re speaking…
Caitlyn Clark, the college basketball record-breaker who shoots and scores at will from nearly anywhere on the court, just played her first WNBA game. She looked terrible. The Indiana Fever picked her first in the WNBA draft and, last night, played a sold-out game against the Connecticut Sun in Connecticut. To say Clark had a…
Newsletter 44: Getting old means not giving a damn about stuff that doesn’t matter. Also, why you shouldn’t buy at Amazon’s book sale, Google and OpenAI announce great steps forward, why Joe Mazzulla is a profound philosopher, plus three people to follow and three books to read. On not giving a damn If you’ve had…
I love words. Language is so particular, so personal, so versatile; there are all these word rules we need to follow, but so many reasons to break them. The fact that my life’s work is deeply connected with words is a constant source of joy. So it’s no surprise that I’m addicted to the New…
Three new people contacted me for the first time last week. I set up a meeting with the first one about his book idea. He failed to show up for the meeting, then asked to reschedule. I rescheduled. He failed to show up again. The second one asked for my opinion on a topic by…
Each of us has made mistakes. How we own up to such mistakes makes a great deal of difference in our lives. I was reminded of this yesterday as I watched South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem attempt not to talk about her imaginary meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, as documented in her…
I’ve changed the way I approach meeting people. Accomplishing my stated objectives is secondary. My primary goal is to answer this question: What can I learn? I’ve always been curious. But it took a long time to get to this point. It has made me a different kind of person. Better, I think. The smartest…
Newsletter 41: When you subtract AI from writing, what’s left is creativity; ending garbage books; remembering Daniel Dennett; surprising truths about book sales; plus three people to follow and three books to read. Soon, only creative writers will remain. Huzzah! There are things AI excels at. Summarizing long documents. Finding patterns. Turning formulaic content into…