Life's final competition

Dear Friends,

My father was obsessed with obituaries. He was a Rhodes Scholar, competitive in every way, and the size and placement in The New York Times was life’s final competition. Martha Graham had been placed on page 1, he must have told me one hundred times, as had Isamu Noguchi. Daniel K. Ludwig, who died around the same time, got put on page A26: “Billionaire Businessman Dies at 95.”

I was thus utterly delighted to read Griffin Dunne’s account of how he tried to scheme to get his father, the author Dominick Dunne, on the front page. Dominick wanted his death to be perfect, and he wanted both the proper acclaim and the proper score-settling. Among other beautiful scenes is the following: “One morning in early spring,” Griffin writes, “I woke to a voice-mail from Dad; he’d called from Claridge’s Hotel in London, where he was on assignment for Vanity Fair. I heard an alarm wailing in the background as he gravely announced, ‘The hotel’s on fire, and we’ve been ordered to evacuate. If I don’t make it out of here, I’m telling you now, I do not want Graydon Carter at my funeral! I want you to stand at the top of the steps at Saint Vincent Ferrer and bar his entrance.’” 

The Most Interesting Things in Tech section below is sponsored by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dominick made it out of Claridge’s and made peace with Carter. When he did pass away, in 2009, he had the deep misfortune to die shortly after Ted Kennedy. The New York Times, naturally, would not have two obituaries on the front page, so Griffin schemed to keep the death a secret. Dominick died at 5 a.m., but Griffin thought he might be able to get an A1 if he could hold the news past noon. He lied to his father’s friends; he declared that his father was “sleeping.” He ran, as he wrote, his own private Weekend at Bernie’s. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that it didn’t go precisely to plan.

The most moving essay I’ve read this month is Chris Jones’s recounting of the moment his marriage—and his closest friendship—fell apart. It’s an excerpt from his book, Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies, and it’s a story about how the worst fires in life can start slowly, burn quietly, and then engulf everything. But it’s also a story about how we can grow after them, and how life can begin anew, just as the plants in a burned-down forest can work their way up from under the ashes.

Ben Taub has a terrific, deeply reported essay about America’s half-cocked plan to take over Greenland. Taub tracks the various quacks, opportunists, and grifters who have egged the President on. He writes, “The reality is that the United States is now a country in which matters of war and peace are decided not among diplomatic or military experts, in the interests of the state, but through informal channels, by people whose personal proximity to the President—through family, business, donations, or flattery—is their principal qualification.” 

The Wall Street Journal has a riveting piece about the mysterious woman who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. And I very much enjoyed Franklin Foer on Radio Atlantic, explaining how the World Cup is the one event that truly combines nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This is a terrific Substack post about the ways that AI could reshape political discourse. And Adam Kirsch writes smartly about the ways that AI could reshape writing. Perhaps, as photography did with painting, it’ll just push people into new forms of creation and art. 

Last, I want to end with a tribute to my dear friend, Om Malik, a man who wrote and photographed beautifully, understood technology deep down to its core, and who could see through the malarkey of the industry he was a part of. He wrote a series of lovely essays for The New Yorker’s website when I was running it. Here are two of my favorites, “In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything And Look at Nothing” and “The Man Who Once Made San Franciscans Look Good.” If X is the new newspaper, Om’s obituary has been appropriately placed on the front page. I will miss you.

The Most Interesting Things in Tech

This section is sponsored by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a leading science and engineering university where creativity and technology converge to solve society's greatest challenges. Visit here to learn more.

We are still seeing the consequences of Anthropic’s decision to shut down Fable after the US Commerce department banned use by foreign nationals. I was at the VivaTech conference in Paris last week, and it’s clear that trust in American companies is in a bad place. Why would you trust your most important work to an American model when the President could just cut you off one Friday afternoon? This will push people to Chinese open source models or even products like Fugu, a new model from Sakana that leverages different LLMs to complete a task.

A clever study from McGraw Hill shows, pretty conclusively, that students are using AI to cheat on their homework. The researchers looked at math questions from before and after the release of ChatGPT and found that, on questions that can be copied and pasted into a chatbot, the time to answer has gone way down for older students, who have access to chatbots, and stayed exactly the same for younger ones, who don’t. Even more concerning: on proctored exams, correct answers on those kinds of questions declined by 25 percent. 

Elsewhere, if you’re reading a story online and a lighthouse keeper named Elias pops up, it was almost certainly written by AI. A recent paper suggests smartphones are contributing to the decline in birth rates. I like this new feature from Instagram that shows what the algorithm thinks is interesting to you—with an option to adjust it. And this is a creative idea from Sir Tim Berners-Lee for how to protect the privacy of the information you give an LLM by changing it just enough to obscure the data without diminishing the quality of the model's answer.

Cheers * N

I hope you enjoy this newsletter. Please continue to forward it to anyone else who might enjoy it. They can sign up here. And you can learn more about Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, this week's sponsor of The Most Interesting Things In Tech, here.