The actors may join the writers on strike, and Hollywood’s publicists are freaking out.
“It would be a miracle at this point” to reach a deal by this Wednesday, one producer told Variety.
I enjoyed this story about Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, who is the personification of the boring business bro who doesn’t care if a movie is good as long as it is profitable and predictable. But the phenomenon David Roth identifies here isn’t limited to Zaslav and could apply equally the AI cheerleaders, serving us glurge because these dead-eyed losers have no idea what is worthwhile about other people.
[defector.com]
Here’s WIlliam Cohan on Musk’s various new legal stuff, including the nastygram Alex Spiro sent to Mark Zuckerberg:
I think there is only one person in the world who could make Zuckerberg appear sympathetic and we have found him in Elon Musk. Suing the company that may or may not have hired the employees he fired, many of whom he stiffed of their severance from Twitter? That takes an extraordinary level of hubris and a belief that the rules just do not apply to him.
As I have noted before, one service Musk provides is demonstrating exactly how much the rules truly don’t apply to him. Anyway I personally would not sue a pack of lawyers that already handed me my ass once, but I am not Musk.
This time, by suing Levine’s old law firm while Levine is on vacation without a laptop. I will update the story when Levine’s emergency newsletter drops.
Broderick didn’t follow anyone and bathed in the algorithm instead:
My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show. It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again.
[www.garbageday.email]
On PJ Vogt’s new podcast, Search Engine, he tackles an old question: is the water on airlines safe? In 2002, WSJ reporters discovered that you should probably bring your own bottle onboard. Since then, new regulations have been passed in the US. Has that made things better? Can you drink that coffee?
Lots of flight attendants will tell you no. But Vogt calls in a microbiologist to really get down to brass tacks.
Delany, who is seriously one of the greats, is “willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers.”
The profile is a delight all the same.
[The New Yorker]
Sure, yeah, Infinite Jest predicted Instagram filters and Zoom fatigue. But Wallace also anticipated something else:
What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort. This benefited him for a while, as he was the Great Group Read.
Infinite Jest contains a samizdat video called The Entertainment that is so compelling people who view it never want to do anything else, including eat or sleep. The only thing it got wrong about social media was that The Entertainment wasn’t portable.
[London Review of Books]
Personally, I think it would be more effective for the government to deal with the proliferation of spam calls that have made most of us stop picking up our phones, but this is fun too:
Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4, the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. Once ready, the AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.
