Culture
The Jimothy craze has gotten so big that there will be a Jimothy night at the Seattle Mariners game next week. You know what? I’m into it. We are clearly so starved for something cute and novel and non-political that we have gone bananas for one single deformed raccoon. Whatever works! It’s been fun to see him sweep the nation as a Seattleite, too.
Two lawyers made out on a bench and for some reason it was in the news. Makes me think about the tyranny of widespread peer surveillance, the freedom and peace we got to enjoy before the ubiquity of smartphones, and Jon Ronson’s ahead-of-its-time book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.
Did you know that underneath that big red Macy’s bag billboard was a 100-year-old holdout building? I love the pettiness and drama of NYC real estate history.
Tech
This robot was designed by Satyress to look like an evil and vaguely BDSM-ish centaur, for some reason?? On the plus side, this nightmare gave me a good excuse to take a quick dip into Greek mythology and learn about the Centauromachy.
There was a bit of an open letter party in tech this past week. There was one by Microsoft about open weights and another by OpenAI calling for a slowdown of the pace of AI development.
This piece on Wired goes in a bit more depth on the OpenAI Hugging Face hacking incident, revealing that it also involved other services. Hugging Face also published a detailed “Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion.”
As reported by Ars Tecnica, Anthropic is buying books in bulk and destroying them after scanning. This takes advantage of a legal loophole on copyrighted works created after the public domain cutoff. Bad vibes, man. Ray Bradbury wouldn’t like it, at the very least.
Software for One was a fun small event during Seattle Tech Week. I’ve been giving thought to personal software, like my intentionally over-the-top art market dashboard that’s basically just for me at the moment.
LinkedIn added a user-facing flag for “AI slop,” which I find very funny because a) this language is so slangy and non-specific that it will surely be useless to their internal moderation team, b) their entire platform incentivizes if not embodies this type of writing.
Movies
Obsession was also excellent and is most likely to be my favorite of the year.
TV
The new Larry David American history show isn’t very good, but you should watch it anyway to give them a metrics boost and make sure that comedic performers and writers continue to get paid. We need new funny TV, desperately.
Music
My longtime favorite artist Charli XCX has a new album, Music, Fashion, Film. One track, “Magic Metal Montana,” is a friendship ode to producer AG Cook. I was very lucky to take an online class with him last summer via School of Song, which was possibly one of the best and most inspiring experiences of my life. He is all about not being precious about your own work, which I think you can find reflected on this album to some extent.
My July 2026 playlist of songs on repeat in my car this month. From posthumous SOPHIE to R&B by the granddaughters of Sam Cooke.
RIP Kavinsky :(
