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Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I'm David, a journalist and a curious generalist.
The Weekly Filet is my humble part in the necessary rebellion against the enshittification of the greatest information ecosystem we've ever had.
We live in an age where trustworthy and substantial information is hard to come by.
If we don't actively resist, all of this is imposed on us through hyperpersonalised, superaddictive feeds.
They are convenient. And they work so well because they show you what you already like, confirm what you already believe, and get you enraged about what you're convinced is wrong.
Real value, though, comes from things that make you pause. That invite you to take a different perspective. That make you rethink.
That pause and the brief moment of reflection is a win in itself, always. Sometimes, though, it's the seed that grows into something bigger. Changes in how you see the world and how you choose to act often start with that one irritation: Huh, I never thought of it that way!
It comes down to this: Nothing matters more than what you pay attention to. Where you invest your time, what you open your heart and your mind to.
The Weekly Filet is all about mindful attention.
To what really matters. To what truly moves you. And to people who inspire.
I will be there, by your side, trying to be a helpful guide in this endeavour.
Join the rebellion. And get your weekly dose of «Huh, I never thought of it this way!» moments.
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What’s not to love about Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a tireless and inspiring advocate for climate action. Asked to speak about hope at an award ceremony, she delivers this banger: «Fuck hope. What’s the strategy?»
It’s embarrassing, really. The richest nations in the world got rich by burning fossil fuels. And now that it’s way past time to fix the mess, they won’t lead. As Bill McKibben writes: «If there’s going to be a solution, for now it’s mostly going to come from the poorer nations of the world.» This detail had my jaw drop: Last year, China built so many wind turbines and solar panels, the steel they used for it would have been enough to build a Golden Gate Bridge on every working day of every week that year.
Good essay. «Don’t get me wrong—we need to address the epidemic of male loneliness both because it’s a breeding ground for misogyny (and, apparently, fascism) and because our sons deserve better. A patriarchal culture creates a nonexistent binary between the sexes as a way to give men more power, and while it succeeds in that, it weakens everyone.» (…) «The failure to recognize the link between men’s sense of superiority and their own suffering is where I lose patience.»
«Home is everything. Everything—safety, comfort. No matter what happened during my day, I always knew I’d come back home.»
The AI that kills all of humanity makes for great dystopian stories. But it’s a distraction from a much more real danger: That those with access to huge arsenals of nuclear weapons are willing to hand over decision power to AI. Chilling analysis with this gem of a sentence: «If you don’t know if an incoming missile has a conventional or nuclear warhead, AI can make a wrong decision — but faster.»
How a unicorn with a Zebra leg and a machine that tricks livers into thinking they are inside a body are saving more people’s lives.
«The fact is, you cannot participate fully in contemporary life without devoting a substantial amount of time to the screen. […] Screen time is a systemic issue, so an individual response—your screen-time monitoring, your screen-time mitigation—will likely be of little use.»
Large language models can’t see the world. Technically, they don’t even know the world exists. But given everything they’ve been trained on, what do they think the world looks like? This is a fascinating experiment: Give many different large language models coordinates of the world, one by one, and ask a simple question: Is there land or water? Assemble and get maps of the world. Of sorts.
«In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.» Take the time to watch this extraordinary speech in full. A breath of fresh air.
Last year, 5 million children under the age of five died. That’s a terrible number, but at the same time the result of decades of progress. 75 years ago, four times as many children died. In the time since, an unfathomable total of 1 billion. As Max Roser once put it so succinctly: «The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.»