David Brooks: “Not long ago, I was at Williams College, speaking with a fascinating and terrifically observant senior named David Wignall. We were talking about what it was like to be young these days, and he made a point that I’d never considered. “We are the most rejected generation,” he said….He’s right. He pointed to the admission rates at elite universities. By 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while the number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted. That means that about 52,050 were rejected. The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race…Things get even worse when students leave school and enter the job market…It seems we’ve created a vast multilayered system that evaluates the worth of millions of young adults and, most of the time, tells them they are not up to snuff…It’s just phenomenally hard to be young right now. There must be an easier way to grow up.”
Trinny Woodall: “Age is irrelevant, it’s about the energy you bring. You could be 30 and exhausted, or 70 and energised.”
WSJ: “AI agents are poised to make communication between businesses and their customers deeper, more open and more personal. That level of intimacy might be great, but as in any relationship, it creates the potential for hazard, too. The latest generation of AI agents are capable of taking action on behalf of people in a range of functions, including coding, customer service, legal services and booking an appointment with a healthcare provider. Their migration into popular messaging services such as WhatsApp opens up even more opportunities for businesses in the areas of sales, support, marketing and branding. There is a flywheel effect at work here. The AI agent has access to an enormous amount of data about users that makes it possible to tailor recommendations, information, and insights to their needs. And once they reside in a messaging app, they can create a continuing presence in the user’s life, just like a person would.”
FT: “In the search for the next Neymar or Vinicius Junior, sports technology ventures in the biggest country in South America are betting that artificial intelligence will have a key role to play. If the ability to easily record and upload videos to the internet has already reduced the need for scouts to attend games or training sessions in person, the idea is that AI will take the discovery of promising youngsters to the next level through machine-based analysis of data derived from smartphone clips.”
Thinks the main character of Juan José Millás’s “Only Smoke,” “In stories, the extraordinary and the ordinary merge like the materials of an alloy in which it then becomes impossible to separate the original constituent parts.”[via WSJ]
