NYTimes: “Oxford University Press has chosen “rage bait” — defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive” — as its 2025 Word of the Year. “Rage bait,” which triumphed over the more upbeat “biohack” and “aura farming,” goes back at least to 2002, when it appeared in a post on a Usenet discussion group to describe a particular kind of driver reaction to being flashed by another driver seeking to pass. Since then, it has become an increasingly common slang term for an attention-seeking form of online behavior. Over the past year, according to Oxford’s data, frequency of use spiked by a factor of three. The two-syllable open-compound word lands with blunt force. It also sparks an immediate “aha.””
Lily Koppel: “To keep a diary is both a way to dig into yourself and a means to express yourself, without constraint. Think about why so many people prefer listening to vinyl records. There is something resonant — and liberating — about the human voice on analog. Turning to a diary — years after composition — is one of the few reliable ways to consult our pasts. So raise your pen, and make your mark — even if you are your only reader, or leave your notes for another to find.”
Economist: “Chatbots offer a personal shopper for all. They can listen to what a user wants, produce a shortlist of products and help with comparisons. This holiday season around two-thirds of consumers in rich countries (and five-sixths of those aged 18-24) plan to use AI to help them shop, according to a survey by Shopify, a provider of e-commerce tools. A study by McKinsey, a consultancy, found that the second-most-common use in America for ChatGPT-like “generative” AI is for shopping advice, behind general research but ahead of writing assistance (see chart 1). Increasingly, consumers can even make purchases directly through a chatbot. By 2030 McKinsey reckons that $3trn-5trn of shopping worldwide will be conducted through such “agents”. The retail industry is on the cusp of its next big upheaval.”
Bloomberg: “The new browsers, including OpenAI’s Atlas and Comet from Perplexity, put artificial intelligence assistants front and center, replacing search engines as the preset option when users enter requests. Many also offer a feature called agentic browsing, enabling them to carry out multi-step tasks on behalf of users, like completing shopping orders and extracting a list of to-dos from unread emails. The goal, as AI developers see it, is for consumers to use their chatbots not just from their own apps or websites, but within browsers and mobile operating systems, potentially opening more avenues for ad targeting and revenue streams. The most advanced features are currently only available on a paid tier, given that AI agent features can be more expensive to run. For now, the two categories of browsers are encouraging different kinds of user behavior, forcing app developers, web services and publishers to rethink whether they’re designing their tools for humans or robots crawling the web — and whether they can be served by the same products.”
