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(Recommended by Cheri Lucas Rowlands)
In this Noēma essay, Laura J. Martin, an environmental studies professor, examines how the internet has transformed from a place we once visited during dial-up days into an environment we always inhabit—seeping into our most private spaces like the bathroom. Martin argues that in the age of AI, we mistakenly treat intelligence as disembodied and placeless, when in fact it is environmental and physical. Her call to action? Think beyond screen time, and start restricting screen space.
“brb” once acknowledged departure and faith in return. It reminded us of the body behind the screen. Now, we are infinitely available, and AI is sold to us as the tireless and needless assistant. But our bodies continue to live in the world with stubborn persistence, despite Silicon Valley’s dream of the immortal avatar, the ability to upload our essence into a durable machine, which is a dream of escaping death and environment alike.
(Recommended by Peter Rubin)
As inactive as I am on social media these days, I somehow feel more inundated by it. There’s a good reason for that, one that Willy Staley articulates well in this breezy thinkpiece: These platforms, via the people who harness it to create social capital for themselves, have become the wellspring for culture both online and off. Congressional representatives saying “6-7” wasn’t the beginning, and it definitely wasn’t the end.
The “6-7” meme was revelatory because of the immense gap between its symbolic payload — essentially nonexistent — and its cultural penetration. It worked like tracer dye running through our information ecosystem, revealing its functions and dysfunctions. And the strange thing about this meme, or slang, or whatever you want to call it, is that our shared world of people, places, things and events didn’t factor into it. It simply flowed out from social media platforms into that world — with an extraordinary degree of success, and for no real reason at all, a secret message to us from the world within the phone.
Or perhaps a demonstration of force: This is how things are going to go from now on.
(Recommended by Brendan Fitzgerald)
“What makes one person fold into despair and another walk through the countryside looking for graves?” For the first issue of Now Voyager, John Gibler tells the story of Araceli Salcedo Jiménez, whose daughter, Rubí, was abducted from a bar in Veracruz, Mexico, in 2012. Since then, Jiménez has coordinated search parties that have surfaced the remains of dozens of Mexico’s disappeared—but never those of her daughter. Gibler folds years of reporting into a story that braids Rubí’s disappearance with Jiménez’s perilous search. Now Voyager puts the reading time at 63 minutes, but I bet you’ll read it faster; I certainly did.
It seems likely that Oviedo drove Rubí to the Bulldog Bar and then left with her—whether by force or deception—some thirty or forty minutes later. It’s possible that she got involved, however tangentially and briefly, in some illicit activity with the Fernández brothers. Based on the available evidence, it’s more likely that she didn’t. It’s possible that Oviedo sought to punish Rubí for asking for his help to release the young men in police custody in Río Blanco, or for saying that Uriel was her cousin, when in fact he was her ex-boyfriend’s brother. It’s possible that he took her to Rancho Cali that night. It’s possible that the Zetas murdered and buried her then and there. It’s possible that she was trafficked somewhere else and killed later. And it is remotely, hauntingly possible that Rubí could still be alive.
(Recommended by Seyward Darby)
What if we’ve been thinking about ADHD the wrong way? Anne-Laure Le Cunff of the ADHD Research Lab at King’s College London suggests a new paradigm in which what society has long considered a disfunction is actually a misalignment between a person and their context:
Human attention did not evolve in an environment saturated with infinite information and algorithmically optimised distraction. For most of our history, novelty was relatively rare and often meaningful; today, exposure to novelty is constant and difficult to escape. The same mechanisms that once guided potentially rewarding exploration are now mercilessly captured by feeds and notifications. The result is a growing mismatch between a hypercurious attentional style and our modern environment.
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