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IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
At a time when Google’s algorithm is making its search results less useful and social media feels like it’s overrun with bots, bigots and bad AI, people are flocking to Reddit. Adrienne LaFrance explains why.
(The Atlantic, approx 9 mins reading time)
Google, once the unsurpassed King of Search, has become hostile to its users, surfacing hilariously unhelpful AI responses (including telling people to eat rocks and glue) and making it woefully difficult to retrieve credible information, even when you know exactly what source you’re looking for. Reddit, by contrast, offers truly specialized knowledge for every need. It provides travel tips to every conceivable destination and practical advice for every imaginable home-improvement project. One friend told me about using Reddit to find the right tension for his tennis-racket strings and the best embroiderer for a custom hockey jersey.
And although the wisdom of the crowd is not fact-checked, Reddit’s culture tends to be equal parts generous and skeptical—meaning that good, or at least helpful, information often rises to the top. Recently, on the r/creepy subreddit, someone posted about having found a tiny skeleton under the floorboards in their house. “Am I cursed for eternity now?” they wanted to know. The top reply came from someone who explained that they were a zooarchaeologist and could therefore be “95% certain this is a mouse skeleton,” and offered to send their own photo of a mouse skeleton for reference. “Hell yeah,” someone else chimed in. “Ask a random question and get an answer from someone who specializes in the exact niche. Amazing.”
Barry Joule has claimed for years that a trove of paintings and papers that he has were given to him by his friend Francis Bacon before his death.
Were they really created by the late Irish-born painter, or is he trying to pass them off as the real thing? An interesting, art world mystery from Alex Marshall.
(The New York Times, approx 13 mins reading time)
According to Joule, Bacon, then 82, handed over some bundles that included hundreds of newspaper and magazine cuttings, some of them with added brush strokes and paint splotches. Joule says Bacon also gave him an album of sketches, with drawings that look like the artist’s famous “screaming pope” paintings, and some canvases in the style of artists like Picasso or Dalí. All those works, Joule insisted in hours of interviews, were by Bacon’s hand and are important historical documents. “It’s my rock-solid belief,” he said. Some in the art world appear to agree with Joule, like staff from the Tate museum group in London who accepted his donation of the trove in 2004 and then, almost two decades later, quietly gave everything back. Now, the Pompidou Center in Paris is considering taking them — though Bacon’s own estate has urged it not to.
The nerdy roleplaying board game has a huge following of fans, and now it’s a stadium event. The biggest live game ever played happened in a sold out show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Eric Francisco goes inside the resurgence.
(Rolling Stone, approx 14 mins reading time)
During Covid-19, Dungeons & Dragons saw a prodigious surge in interest as isolated friends reconnected by playing the game remotely, which is possible over online platforms like Roll20 and communication tools like Discord. Actual plays also found a sizable audience in 2020. For Dimension 20, its existing library of pre-pandemic games attracted people who maybe craved togetherness and lighthearted escapism. “I’ve heard from people that during those lonely times, we were there to keep you company,” says Beardsley. In the green room of MSG before the show, Beardsley says the live events Dimension 20 is embarking on “is completely about people fighting back against isolation.” “Covid pushed us into a deep loneliness being separated from people,” they say. “This is a moment that could never have happened during that time.”
Noah Musingku made a fortune through a pyramid scheme he created called U-Vistract in the late 1990s. Facing prosecution from Papua New Guinean authorities, he fled to a remote armed compound and declared himself a king. Sean Williams went to find him.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
We left Kokopau by means of a shoreside highway cradled by coconut palms. It was around two o’clock. By early evening, we would reach Arawa, Bougainville’s former capital, which was built by the Australians to service Panguna. Not coincidentally, it was also the gateway to a sprawling “no-go zone” established by Bougainville’s great, bushy-bearded war hero, Francis Ona, at the tail end of the conflict, in 1998. Tonu and its elusive leader, Musingku, were nestled in the centre of this zone. With any luck I would be shaking the king’s hand in a day or two. If I really believed that at the time – and I think I did – I was no more deluded than most outsiders who have visited Bougainville.
An American author and professor of philosophy offers a pretty grim firsthand account of what ChatGPT has done to his students, and the damage it may cause for their careers in the future.
(Walrus, approx 15 mins reading time)
It turns out that if there is anything more implausible than the idea that they might need to write as part of their jobs, it is the idea that they might have to write, or want to write, in some part of their lives other than their jobs. Or, more generally, the idea that education might be valuable not because it gets you a bigger paycheque but because, in a fundamental way, it gives you access to a more rewarding life. My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself—and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age.
Before the US election, Scaachi Koul followed three women who had tried to persuade their problematic husbands not to vote for Donald Trump. They were even thinking about divorce, saying politics had “infested” their marriages. With Trump now back in the White House, did any of them leave?
(Slate, approx 22 mins reading time)
For 30-year-old Annie, a veterinarian from the U.K. who had a baby earlier in the year with her 37-year-old husband, their conflicts were less about his politics and more about how much disregard he had for half the country. Not the half that votes for Democrats, but rather: women. Her husband’s views were often pretty liberal; the two of them agreed that the U.S. needed to stop giving Israel arms to bomb Palestinians—they were both hoping for an immediate ceasefire—and he also believed in accessible health care for all. But they kept having arguments about gender, and he just couldn’t get his head around voting for a woman. “I’m not sure I really picked up on the misogyny when we first met,” she said.
“He wouldn’t think of himself as someone who doesn’t like women or thinks women are less than.” But Annie is an immigrant, living stateside in California as an immigrant, with paperwork tied to her husband. To leave him is to also leave the country, where her baby is a citizen. When Annie tried to make sense of her husband’s distaste for marginalized groups in power, she came back to his first union. Her husband was married once before, and Annie said he’s still angry at how his ex treated him during their marriage. “That’s probably some of the root cause; he almost expects women to hurt him in some way,” she said.
The Carter G. Woodson Houses was a peaceful public housing development for seniors in New York City. Then the residents started dying mysteriously.
(Intelligencer, approx 30 mins reading time)
After giving up her search, Goodman called 911 and was soon joined in the hallway by two officers from PSA 2, the NYPD Housing Authority division responsible for more than 40 developments across northeastern Brooklyn. “Why are you assuming something’s wrong?” one of the officers asked as the superintendent unlocked McKinney’s door. There was no need to answer. In the small kitchen alcove just beyond the living room, McKinney lay on her back under a table, purple bruises circling her eyes, splotches of dried blood caked to her face and the floor.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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