Rabbit Holes (Longform Articles) Part 10

Great non-fiction, longform articles to send you down a rabbit hole and possibly learn something new!

1. "Light Among the Nations" by Suzanne Schneider for Jewish Currents

   
   

2. "Why Americans Hate the Media" by James Fallows for The Atlantic Monthly

   
   

3. "The Whitening Thief: Latent White Supremacy in Percy Jackson" by Maxwell T. Paule for Medium

   1. I found this interesting in the context of everyone suggesting Percy Jackson series in place of Harry Potter. Maybe there is no "perfect, unproblematic" book and parents should always be discussing what their children read to teach those children critical thinking.

      
      

4. "Everyone thinks they are the Underdog" by Jenny G. Zhang for Gawker

   1. Mostly about twitter fights, but really can apply to any online forum space where trying to figure out power dynamics is complicated.

      
      

5. "The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Tradlife" by Zoe Hue for Dissent Magazine

   1. The subtitle of this article really kicks: "In an increasingly expensive and antisocial world, tradwives forsake life with others for the lonely, constrictive spaces of bourgeois ownership." A lot of us don't want the misery of working in capitalism, and influencers are selling an idea of how to get out of this while themselves are working in capitalism. In other words, they're selling leisure.

   2. See also "Ballerina Farm + Care Work Capitalism" by Meg Conley

      
      

6. "The Alarming Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photo" by Monica Uszerowicz for Hyperallergic

   1. Since most "trad wife influencers" are really just women selling a lifestyle of being able to stay home without doing a lot of labor, I thought this article is a good follow-up on how "travel influencers" get caught in the same trap of selling vibes instead of a real life.

      
      

7. "The Evolution of the Oval Office Decor" from American Home Shield

   1. President carter is the only one with a couch facing his desk, implying he let people sit when he was at his desk. All of the other Presidents had chairs, not a couch, near the desk. Also, President Carter and Eisenhower both did not redecorate from their previous president. JFK was the one who added a couch and chair for the center instead of just a room of men standing. Trump has the most chairs. Clinton might be the most iconic with the navy blue, which Biden also copied.

      
      

8. "Why You Should Care More About Crochet and AI" from Luddite Pro

   1. See also "LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This" by Sourav Banerjee for Arxiv, which is a more technical summary of Ai language-learning models but underscores that this is an endemic problem that will not be "learned" away with only time.

      
      

9. "Five Years Later, Who Really Hacked Sony?" by Tatiana Siegel from The Hollywood Reporter