Things I'm thinking about.
Liberation Theology in Peru and Elsewhere
“Catholics inspired by liberation theology created community organizations and work cooperatives, organized labor unions and fostered other initiatives that sought to measurably improve the lives of the poor. In my own research, I’ve documented how priests and nuns in rural Mexico helped organize transportation, corn milling and carpentry cooperatives.”
Shrinking Broadway Orchestras
“Broadway’s orchestras have shrunk and scaled back over the past several decades, a new analysis found. For musicals that debuted from 1990 to 1994, the median size of the pit was 23 musicians, a figure that has gradually shrunk to 14 musicians in the 2010 to 2014 classes of musicals and down slightly more since. That’s due to the total demise of the large orchestra; for the shows that came out in the 1990 to 1994 cohort, 54.1 percent had at least 21 members; in the 2020 to 2024 cohort, that’s down to 8.9 percent.”
Discovered via Numlock (substack)
AI Bots Listening to Music & Committing Fraud
“[P]latforms like Spotify and Deezer present a lucrative opportunity for scammers, who can easily game both sides of a music streaming marketplace. Someone can generate a song in minutes using a platform like Suno, then deploy AI bots to play the track repeatedly, creating a closed loop capable of generating millions of dollars in fraudulent royalties.”
…
“The French streaming service Deezer currently flags 50% of its daily music uploads as AI-generated.”
Lingering is Out; Optimization is In
Amanda’s writing is all fascinating. She has an incredible ability to present data in ways that are so relatable. This article about lingering in public spaces, and I instantly felt the connection to ideas that have been wrestling around in my head about the control that algorithms have on our daily lives.
“What I find most interesting is the data on lingering: Across all the sites, the portion of people just hanging about dropped significantly. Lingering even declined at the Metropolitan Museum, one of the most popular tourist spots in New York.”
Educators to ChatGPT: Which books should we ban?
Bans
The latest data from PEN showed that there were over 12,000 instances of a book being banned from U.S. school districts in the 2025-26 school year, a record high since PEN had to start tracking book bans in 2021. The vast majority of book bans took place in Texas (8,193 bans) and Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban.
Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly
Via Numlock
Life Under the Algorithm
Algorithmic wages and prices don’t just squeeze workers in the present. They make them predictably poor into the future.
Yet another way that algos leave others in control of our lives. Not sure if the wage angle here fits with the reduction of serendipity theme. But maybe it does.
Anthropic Consults Religion on AI Consciousness
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took a veiled shot at Anthropic and its work on the soul of AI, saying he was "very uncomfortable" with the idea of attributing some kind of religious power to models.
The New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah has been meeting with religious leaders to consider questions of model consciousness — but also to figure out how to infuse morals and moral behavior into AI.
Auto mechanic businesses growing
There are 32,000 auto mechanic businesses that have opened up in the United States since 2018, up 12 percent. Many are chains, many are mom-and-pops and some are mom-and-pops that still operate under one of those chains, in a somewhat unique arrangement that has generally defined the auto repair business. They’re riding two big trends: The first is that vehicles got expensive and so people are driving them longer before buying a replacement, and the second is that vehicles got complex, so there’s more that can go wrong with them. All told, spending on U.S. auto services is projected to grow from $211 billion this year to $280 billion by 2031.
Quote from Henry Miller
Novelist and short story writer Henry Miller says to spend more time appreciating and less time ruminating:
"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Source: Henry Miller Memorial Library via James Clear
