Porn
Scott Galloway:
I graduated (barely) from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA. I did, however, go on campus almost every day. Specifically, I left my fraternity to venture on campus as UCLA in the eighties was like a Cinemax film set in Brentwood. I would hang at North Campus with friends and, to be blunt, hope to meet someone I might (note: “might” is doing a lot of work) have sex and establish a relationship with. If I’d had on-demand porn on my phone and computer, I’m not sure I would have graduated, as I would have lost some of the incentive to venture on campus. I just read the previous sentence, and it sounds crass and shallow — but it’s also accurate. And that’s the rub, so to speak. Porn can reduce your ambition to take risks, become a better person, and build a better life. The best thing in my life is raising two men with a competent, loving partner. The catalyst for me risking humiliation, approaching her at the Raleigh Hotel pool, and introducing myself wasn’t a desire to someday qualify for lower car insurance rates, but the desire / hope to have sex.
Scott can be obnoxious at times, but I admire his candidness.
It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive
Freddie deBoer:
You can’t stop the flow of time. But you can count the costs. And I think a lot of people, for reasons I can’t quite make out, are threatened by the idea of counting the costs when it comes to change. That’s what I’m asking you to do today: count the costs. Count the costs with me.
I can put my finger on two things that have meaningfully changed in the last 25 years: my age and the internet.
I was thirteen at the turn of the millennium. I came of age in the 90s, and I too have this romantic nostalgia for that time. Issues of Star Wars: Insider delivered to the mailbox, music on CDs from record stores, the nascent internet and action figures and trips to DQ and Memorial Day spent at the family cemetery. Things felt slower then, and they were. The speed at which things change, at which culture is grown and shaped and discoursed and discarded, at which information flows, was so much slower then.
Now things feel fraught. Now things feel fragile. Now things feel on edge and tense and anxious and uncertain. And maybe they aren't — maybe they just feel that way. But why would they feel that way? What's changed?
My age and the internet. The latter changed everything, and not for the better. Sure, things might seem better — things might objectively even be better. But things don't feel better.
Why is that?
It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI
…what’s the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to spoon-feed them answers? Who, apart from the AIs, will read what you write?
I was asking myself the same question when I started blogging semi-regularly again last year, and this post is an attempt to summarise why I decided that it was worthwhile. The TL;DR: blogging isn’t just about being read – it’s about learning and thinking, and having a durable proof that you can do both.
Requiem For The West
Andrew Sullivan:
Those three words — “the free world” — mean nothing to Trump and never have. And he has now fatefully told the entire world, including our former allies, that this is America’s position now as well. He has updated Reagan with these words: “We were with you then. We see no reason to be with you now. In fact, we’re siding with a dictator who threatens you.”
This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.
This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again.
AirPods Pro 2, Now With USB-C Charging Case
The Vision Pro is Apple’s initial foray into spatial computing. But Vision Pro is not Apple’s first product in the world of augmented reality: AirPods Pro (and to a lesser degree, at the moment, AirPods Max) are. We humans are visual creatures and we naturally tend to think of augmented reality as a primarily visual experience, but AirPods Pro offer profoundly enjoyable and useful augmentation of the aural world around you. Starting today, Adaptive Audio takes that to another level.
Adaptive Audio is only available for the AirPods Pro 2, which means I’m only going to be more irritated if I ever again find myself wearing my old first-generation AirPods Pro out of necessity. At this point AirPods Pro 2 are as much better than the original AirPods Pro as the original AirPods Pro seemed from the original non-pro AirPods. They’re far more than wireless earbuds — they’re clever, powerful, delightful computers you put in your ears.
He’s right. I’ve used the AirPods Pro 2 for the last year and they are incredible little computers. For years, I only used regular AirPods, insisting that for my lifestyle, I don’t want anything that slides into my ears and seals — I need to be able to hear what’s around me.
But these second-gen AirPods do exactly that, but they make it optional. I can hear what’s around me when I want to, but I can also enable noise canceling and tune it all out. Most often, I find myself in a noisy place and just sliding them in. I don’t listen to anything, I just enable noise canceling. It’s helped my focus tremendously.
The new Adaptive Audio feature in iOS 17 is scary good. Though it’s only been a day, I no longer find myself toggling between transparency and noise cancellation — the AirPods do it themselves.
Computers, when designed thoughtfully, are magic.