FT: “Bosses talk endlessly about customers, investors and employees, yet the audience they’re often most anxious to impress is each other. From industry conferences to LinkedIn posts, these are arenas for peer rivalry — who is portrayed as the most visionary, whose message is going viral or whose approach to artificial intelligence or sustainability is best. “Ultimately CEOs are competing against each other,” one headhunter told me. For publicly listed companies, “their primary obligation is to perform better than other CEOs in their sector”. Board directors and investors prioritise relative performance and these executives know it.”
Vasant Dhar on his book “Thinking with Machines”: “I wrote the book because, like it or not, the future is about thinking with machines. And the real question is how we want to shape that future and how we should think about it. The book isn’t about what to think about AI, but how to think about it individually. I also wanted to counter the misconception that AI is recent. It has been around for 60-70 years. As I say in the book, and borrowing from Bob Marley, ‘If you know your history, then you’ll know where you are coming from.’ I wanted to lay out the history of AI, the old problems that remain unsolved in today’s world and the new ones that have emerged around truth, trust and governance.”
WaPo: “Today’s scientists have been trying to explain the puzzling downfall of Harappa, one of the valley’s largest cities, by looking at the environmental conditions. In a study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, an international team used paleoclimate data and computer models to re-create the climate during the civilization’s existence between 3000 and 1000 B.C. They found four intense droughts reduced rainfall and dried up waterways and soils, which probably caused Harappan residents to relocate frequently. “The most surprising finding is that the Harappan decline was driven not by a single catastrophic event, but by repeated, long, and intensifying river droughts lasting centuries,” said Hiren Solanki, lead author at the Indian Institute of Technology at Gandhinagar, India.”
Dwarkesh Patel: “We are moving from the age of podcasts to the age of essays.”
Bloomberg: “Platforms that were engineered to maximize engagement by flooding our feeds may now be driving people away. As news consumption has shifted to social media, avoidance has surged — from 29% in 2017 to 40% in 2025. Young audiences, who live inside these feeds, feel it the most. Many describe the news as toxic and demoralizing, a stream of conflict that leaves them feeling powerless. “The social media era has pushed journalism toward more extreme content,” Newman says. “That’s not what people want.” Research shows that when the body’s fight-or-flight system stays switched on too long, our focus and emotional control begin to fray. News platforms can hijack those same survival circuits, flooding feeds with outrage and alarm until being informed feels indistinguishable from being afraid. Eventually the mind pulls back in self-defense…The unopened alert, the unread terms of service, the avalanche of unread mail silenced with “mark as read”: Avoidance has become our default posture. Ours is the age of the ostrich.”
