Stephanie Sylverne

Truth Hurts: Scrolling at Night Is Cooking My Brain In this, his first column, John DeVore confronts an ugly truth about bedtime

"The only way to change these habits is to repeat the truth again and again: social media is rotting our souls from the inside out."
open.substack.com/pub/opensecr...

Gen Z Parents Don't Want to Read to Their Kids, New Study Shows A new study from HarperCollins Publishers shows that parents, specifically Gen Z parents, no longer want to read to their kids. Experts warn that not reading to kids could lead to long term consequenc...

jfc.
www.parents.com/gen-z-parent...

‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s

see also:

The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them

this is the most important thing you'll read all year->
"We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line."

#booksky

Folds: If we’ve been told our whole lives that we can’t spend money on the arts because they’re not important—then why was taking over the Kennedy Center and the arts the first thing they did?

It is extremely important. It’s the bedrock of self-expression.

I don't know if he still does it, but GRRM writing his books on an Apple IIe word processor makes more and more sense to me every day

How To Be a Writer, #24262111:
Open work-in-progress
No, not that one
Not that one either
Nope. Try another one.
Yeeeeaaahhhhhhhh - no.
Worry vaguely that you might *just* have too many works-in-progress -
But wait, what's this great new idea?
Tea.

Movie you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, or Marvel

if there's one thing my dad's gonna do, it's drive exactly the speed limit in the middle of a five lane highway

one day you're carefree and wild and then suddenly you find yourself scrolling through a podcast called "Boring History for Sleep" but can't choose an episode because they all sound too interesting

a tweet reading, "It's so cool that cities are like 'pweeease only turn your AC on if you're actively dying and don't go below 79,' while the AI nobody asked for is slurping up the power grid to make 1 image of a girl with 5 tits."

The electric bills in Pennsylvania have gone up because the state cut a sweetheart deal with AI data centers. Good times out here.

“Many people think that a wealthy man wants to get married”

“[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”

– Judy Blume

#booksky

O Lord, they fight! I will go call the watch.

I will voluntarily disconnect from the Internet and all of the benefits it provides to my life before I will use the world burning plagiarism and lying machine intentionally.

Opinion | The end of writing and reading will be the end of freedom Why graduation season is so heartening to me.

"Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being."

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

Yes, it's long. Yes, it's complex. Yes, it's detailed. And yes, it will make you sad unto nihilistic depression. But it's also necessary to read because AI is going to fuck the planet beyond expression. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

Streamers can't play music in the background as they talk, can't play games with licensed soundtracks turned on, can't even show a trailer with the sound on without fear but sure let's let Sam altman take everything for free

This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?

Marked decline in semicolons in English books, study suggests Usage of punctuation down almost half in two decades as further research finds 67% of British students rarely use it

Mantel imagined the politician, writer and best-known journalist of the French Revolution having no doubts about it at all: “I wonder why I ever bothered with sex. There’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.’”

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Meet the Mysterious Renaissance Muse Immortalized in the Only Leonardo da Vinci Painting in the Americas Ginevra de' Benci was a poet famed for her beauty and intellect. But art historians know little about her beyond the writings and artworks left behind by the men who admired her

"Tragically for historians and literary scholars, her poetry does not survive today, except for one striking, thought-provoking line: 'I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger.' These words inspired L.M. Elliott’s 2015 historical novel, Da Vinci’s Tiger."

the internet drives each person insane a little bit differently. it is beautiful to see

Exclusive: Vauhini Vara wants communion, not "content" Behind the book with the author of 'Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,' one of Esquire's best books of 2025 so far.

"Should writers and editors be concerned that AI will soon make them unemployable?"

"Yes! And, therefore, we should exercise our agency and respond to that concern, individually and collectively."

For The Frontlist, I spoke with @vauhinivara.bsky.social about 'Searches,' one of 2025's best books.

Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks Amazon brand will offer more than 100 artificial intelligence-generated voices in English and other languages

Fuck this, absolutely fuck this, everyone who loves audiobooks loves their favourite narrators because they are great at their jobs and interpreting the author's words and they make the experience what it is www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

"Those plucky venture capitalists need something to invest in, after all, and what better than generative AI? Be glad, fellow tiny economic unit, for a small number of people are getting insanely rich! That’s what being human is all about, right?"

What happened to "free enterprise"?

also, if you're going to listen, don't look up spoilers. I was tempted, but glad I didn't.

I'm way behind on this, but BONE VALLEY is one of the best podcasts out there. Starts as a true crime mystery, complete with wild plot twists, becomes a courtroom drama/indictment of the justice system, and transforms into a heartwarming story of redemption. Gilbert King did a beautiful job.

"Après moi, le déluge, motherfuckers"