ftav

Attention is all you need

It's always strategic ambiguity, seductive information gaps and negging; a pickup artist's approach to corporate comms.

stratechery.com

2026.34: App Snore

I thought the most remarkable aspect of Ben's coverage on Wednesday was how incidental and boring it all seems in the shadow of the possibilities and concerns that exist everywhere else in tech right now.

wired.com

Meta’s New Feel-Good AI Ad Uses a Song About the World Ending

The clip features the David Bowie track "Five Years," which includes lyrics such as "Earth was really dying (dying)."

honest-broker.com

I Get Duped into Buying an AI Slop Book

In the entire book, there isn't a single thing I found of value—none of the insights and analysis I'd sought.

wired.com

Donald Trump’s White House UFC Event Would Be Embarrassing Anywhere

A Monster Energy–sponsored MMA show on the White House's South Lawn was never going to be the height of dignity. But UFC Freedom 250 is failing to clear even the lowest bar.

3quarksdaily.com

The Use and Abuse of Joan Didion

Authors and their entire bodies of work can be encapsulated in fragments: a few underlined sentences from their books endlessly reposted on Instagram, influencers flaunting book covers on the beach, photographs of authors appearing lost in melancholy—or best of all, smoking—making rounds on the Internet.

3quarksdaily.com

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror. But it isn't a monster lurking in the shadows; it is the manic, unblinking insistence that actually, there are no shadows at all.

longreads.com

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

The real, unsettling mechanism of Fallon's banal horror is its insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, is itself an aggressively political act.

honest-broker.com

Rick Beato Versus the NY Times

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics. There never was a real vote.

platformer.news

How we're shaking up Platformer for the AI era

The need for sense-making is greater than ever, but due to a half-decade of layoffs and shuttered publications, there is less and less journalism to make sense of.

stratechery.com

2026.10: Higher Powers and Lower Macs

I find myself exhausted by the way everyone processes political controversies these days, including warnings about a dire American future that are now a daily occurrence online.

ai-supremacy.com

Citadel's 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis Response to Citrini Research

A lot of the "Technological optimism" we see online is actually manufactured by those who have the most to gain and by various financial motives and incentives.