What to Read This Weekend

I have been missing in action for a couple of weeks. I apologize for my tardiness, but I have been busy with personal matters. Both my heart and mind were not in it. Anyway, this week I have some great (and fun) pieces that I enjoyed reading in between meetings.

One thing I noted is that both my reading and what I end up finding on the web these days are dominated by AI and everything related to it. I am going to try and make it a point to diversify my own reading and also what I share with you, the gentle readers.

I am working on two short essays, on fashion and one of my favorite writers in the age of AI. Hope you come back next week to read them.

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The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon — Current Affairs

I used to think I was the only person who couldn’t stand Jimmy Fallon. Turns out I wasn’t. The pseudo-jokes, the relentless, performative delight at nothing. It adds up to something. What makes it banal, and that’s what makes it horror. Great commentary on the present.

Meet the Sad Wives of AI — Wired

Funny and dispiriting in equal measure. AI is a men’s first world, yes. It’s also a well-compensated one. I kept waiting for the author to reckon with the other side of the ledger. The beautiful apartments, the luxury life, the stock that keeps going up.

Silicon Valley Keeps Misreading China’s Role in Tech — Rest of World

The CEOs who actually run the companies treat Chinese firms as peers, not enemies. What they do is more important than what Washington says and its rhetoric.

Leslie Baird on Surveillance in Society and Fiction — CrimeReads

There is a camera just above the screen you’re reading this on. Baird uses Foucault’s panopticon, Orwell, Atwood, Dave Eggers, and others to trace how surveillance migrated from dystopian fiction into the background hum of everyday life.

Andy Jassy Is Rewriting Amazon’s Playbook for the AI Age — Bloomberg Businessweek

Five years in as CEO, Jassy is killing projects, cutting staff, and steering Amazon through what may be its biggest transition yet. The profile captures a man operating without Bezos’s shadow for the first time. What it looks like when a company this large tries to move fast.

The Feed Is Fake — Vulture

If you have been reading me over the years, I have been writing about this very thing. Social media is fake. The “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer drama, comeback you’ve been seeing? Likely the product of a stealth marketing campaign. Vulture traces how digital agencies seed content into fan pages, sports clips, and algorithmic recommendation systems, and how journalists who get their ideas from social feeds are manipulated. Great read. As I keep saying, Social is dead.

The Old Guard — Harper’s

Samuel Moyn, Yale law and history professor, writes about how the old are hoarding power and wealth. The core argument is less about any individual politician than about a culture that has failed to confront mortality and succession. I couldn’t agree more with this one, even as I become part of that older generation. The future always belongs to the young, and they should decide it, guided by our wisdom, not old men and their greed.

ICYMI

The Rocket That Runs on Broadband — I dug into SpaceX’s freshly filed IPO prospectus. At $1.75 trillion, it would be the largest IPO in American history. The rocket company is real. The valuation depends on Starlink, and what you believe about broadband as infrastructure.

AI Is the New Netflix — In 2008 I asked Reed Hastings whether streaming would become broadband’s killer app. It took a decade. AI inference is doing the same thing to upstream bandwidth that Netflix did to downstream.

AI in Everything, Everywhere — A follow-up to the Netflix piece, prompted by a question from Surj Patel. If AI drives the next wave of upstream traffic, are we heading toward something more like peer-to-peer than client-server? My argument is that AI will be in everything, and everywhere.

Signing Off in a World of What’s Next — A small essay about watching a YouTube farmer say goodbye. About creators who leave, the quiet grief of following someone’s work for years, and what it means to sign off when the internet always wants what’s next.

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RIP Peter G. Neumann (1932–2026)

Peter Gabriel Neumann died on May 17 at 93, still working full time on CHERI, a DARPA-funded hardware security project aimed at fixing the most fundamental memory safety problems in computing. He co-designed the Multics file system at Bell Labs with Bob Daley, the work that gave Unix its file hierarchy, access control lists, and dynamic linking. He had breakfast with Einstein as a Harvard sophomore in 1952. What stayed with him was the principle that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. He spent the next seventy years watching the computing industry repeatedly ignore this simplicity doctrine. The New York Times marked his passing. His friend and longtime collaborator Steve Bellovin wrote a tribute at his Columbia blog that is worth reading alongside the Times piece.