lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas

AI slop is mostly a people problem, not a model problem. Alex's framing here is blunt: the only time the Content Machine produces slop is when the person being interviewed doesn't share interesting enough ideas during the interview. The model is shaping clay, not inventing ideas. If the clay is bad, the sculpture will be bad.

personalcanon.com

i'm teaching 2 workshops this summer and you're invited

Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice). Mission statements make our ambitions legible to ourselves and to the external world. But writing one can feel lonely and uncertain, like fumbling through the dark recesses of our psyches.

longreads.com

Happy Fucking Birthday

"Dear Mr. Benjamin Franklin," wrote a seventh grader from Winterville, Georgia. "In your time, the United States hardly existed. As I am writing this letter, it is almost the semi quincentennial, and BOY does the US exist now!"

dwarkesh.com

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.

longreads.com

The End of Books

Paging through nearly three thousand library books, I saw her talk back to them, disagree with them, question and antagonize and struggle with them. In one, she penciled the word succotash —the nineteenth-century equivalent of nonsense ; on the fly of another, inscribed to her lover William Morton Fullerton, she composed a four-stanza poem that does not exist anywhere else in her own hand.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Alfred Tong

It can't have feelings. It doesn't have taste, instinct or chemistry. Those things remain profoundly human, and they're essential to good writing. But AI is brilliant at structure and organisation.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jake Newby

Even if you think you have no interest in those topics, it's hard not to be drawn in by Em's super smart writing and analysis, which regularly broadens out to examine wider cultural and societal issues.

whyisthisinteresting

The Creative Parent Edition

Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.

3quarksdaily.com

Zen and the Art of Persuasive Writing

Judges check page length before reading a word. • Long brief? We read faster and with less attention. • Short brief? We slow down and pay closer attention. Brevity signals confidence.

3quarksdaily.com

Writing Advice from Scott Alexander

The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Most Popular Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)

When you start writing directly for readers, without intermediaries, that begins to happen naturally. Above all, I decide to treat the reader as a trusted friend—with the hope that you might extend the same courtesy to me.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 100 (!)

You feel it in your chest—a deep rumble, then an explosion that makes your ears ring.

3quarksdaily.com

The writing secrets of Stephen King

She wants to identify how he chooses and places words with the intention of producing material effects on the reader's body. How, exactly, does he make hearts beat faster, stomachs lurch and palms prickle with sweat?

honest-broker.com

Why Read the Classic Books?

These older books have a sense of integrity. This project was just an opportunity for me to go back to some of my favorite books and look at the ways that's true.

3quarksdaily.com

Review of “Nonesuch” by Francis Spufford

If you aren't bent gigglingly over your manuscript, like a stock photo model alone with her salad, then what's the point of any of it?

jefftweedy

Year of the Horse

I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go. I think that's taught me to recognize when a song of my own feels right. The same excitement I feel about someone else's song, the desire to be moved, is intact when I'm trying to write my own.

longreads.com

A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half’

The archived typescript shows that King approached the processes of drafting and revising this novel as a real-time collaboration between himself and Bachman, whom he treated as an alter ego.