ysabel

Well

The stunning decline of the preference for having boys Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean towards them

A bit late to this one, but: “Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.”

www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

The Age of Enshittification In a new book, the technology critic Cory Doctorow expands on a coinage that has become bleakly relevant, in Silicon Valley and beyond.

V excited to read Cory Doctorow’s new book - “The experiences we enjoyed in the early days of social media and on-demand apps turned out to be unsustainable; the services that were initially free or subsidized would have to pay for themselves eventually.”

www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

OpenAI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube The company’s new social media app allows users to create short videos with audio from text prompts and insert themselves in AI-generated scenes.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I’m not seeing the USP here? Or is their strategy just to create a carbon copy and hope it sticks better than the others?

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

I am so unfathomably late to this party, but aren’t audiobooks great?!

The Woman Who Ate Only Fruit Karolina Krzyzak went to Bali to meet the raw-vegan influencers she’d followed for years. She never made it back home.

TW: disordered eating

This story highlights precisely how difficult it is to blame social media (Instagram, here) outright for someone’s health condition, while also recognising the app’s blatant harms to people like Karolina, and to others within the same community. www.thecut.com/article/karo...

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article detailed how an internal law enforcement bulletin said that ammunition recovered following the Charlie Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of "transgender and anti-fascist ideology." Justice Department officials later urged caution about the bulletin by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, saying it may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition, and the article was updated Thursday to reflect that. This editor's note was appended on Friday, Sept. 12, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the engravings included one that said "Hey fascist!" along with other messages and symbols. He gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.

hi, cis folks!

the WSJ endangered trans lives with false reporting yesterday. it’s still accepted as truth by many, regardless of it being false. the article’s still up with a little note. it needs full retraction.

it's not even a phone call—it's email. you can do this.

contact info below.🧵⬇️

Lol exactly. It also says in the article that some schools have now banned iPods etc, but I’ll bet the people enacting the new bans love listening to music in their downtime, just like the kids want to do…

Their Schools Banned Phones. Out Came the iPods and Cassette Players.

“Mike Givens, 51, remembers listening to his Walkman on the bus but being instructed to leave it in his locker during school hours. He now belongs to a Reddit forum for iPod enthusiasts that has been flooded with students scrambling to prepare for phone bans.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/s...

‘In December, Google sent an internal guideline to its contractors working on Gemini that they were no longer allowed to “skip” prompts for lack of domain expertise, including on healthcare topics…’

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

And this, reader, is why the AI Overview sucks:

“One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

And from Pete Etchells: ‘“It’s really difficult to craft a story that explains the complexity of the research literature, but still gives people something to take away with them to do. And that’s what parents are craving”.’

Candice Odgers, quoted in the piece: ‘“if our goal is addressing the main causes and contributors to youth mental health, then social media is not the logical place to start”.’

Is Jonathan Haidt right about smartphones? In ‘The Anxious Generation’, Haidt makes the case that social media and smartphones have ‘rewired’ today’s teenagers, but his critics say the evidence tells us something very different - and that bann...

If you have a spare 15 minutes today and care about the kids X smartphone debate, then read this excellent, excellent article: www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

Tin Can is a 'landline' for kids. It comes as more parents are trying to keep their kids from cellphones. Tin Can is a kid-friendly WiFi phone that replicates an old-fashioned landline. It's aimed at parents who want to delay giving their kids a cellphone.

‘Alison Bennett, a mom in Los Angeles, has been going "full '90s" in her efforts to avoid buying her 8-year-old a phone. Bennett bought her an MP3 player for music, rents DVDs for movies, and gets paper delivery of the Los Angeles Times.’

www.businessinsider.com/tin-can-land...

Who Was Cyberbullying Kendra Licari’s Teen Daughter? For a year, parents and school officials searched for the person behind the vicious, relentless texts. The culprit was under their noses all along.

I am quite late to discovering this article in @thecut.com (lovely new baby etc), but it is *wild* and well worth a read if you have a spare bit of time:

www.thecut.com/article/kend...

Exactly - by the time they reach the ‘real world’ they’ll probably have to adapt to a newer tech anyway 🤷🏻‍♀️

In the article one of the interviewees (an OF creator) says she suspects the most successful people on the platform already had a following of some sort. I haven’t used OF so I’m not sure what the interface is/how you ‘discover’ new people but if it’s anything like social media I guess this tracks!

Vice voces for all!

(🫠)

The Rise of the Campus OnlyFans Side Hustle Remember when coeds made some extra cash stacking books at the library or working a shift at a restaurant? Now, with tuition skyrocketing and talk of entrepreneurship and fast and easy millions in the...

“The median OnlyFans creator makes just $180 per month. The top 1 percent of accounts make 33 percent of all the money, and the top 10 percent gobble up 73 percent of the funds paid out.”

www.townandcountrymag.com/society/mone...

“…members of Gen Z appear to be mining the past to enrich their present lives — especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living.”

Opinion | Why Gen Z Is Resurrecting the 1990s

Here, nostalgia is argued to be a productive force shaping Gen Z’s relationship w/tech.

“…nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...

I like this quote: “Contrary to much popular opinion, college is not in the information transfer business; we are in the identity formation business.”

Opinion | Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.

“Tuesday is the 1,000th day since ChatGPT’s release. In that short time, it’s already clear that the arrival of software that can generate unlimited amounts of OK-ish text will devalue many kinds of writing.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

To be clear, and as ever, you can’t straightforwardly place all blame on ChatGPT for this tragic situation, as there are so many other motivators.

But you can, I think, make a very strong argument for its partial culpability.

🚨 TW: suicide

It also assisted Adam with the methods he used. Although he bypassed ChatGPT’s safety measures by saying he was writing a story there are, in my view, clear instances in these transcripts where the tool overstepped, and dangerously so (see photo for an example).

🚨 TW: suicide

I am speechless after reading this article. The transcripts of Adam’s conversations with ChatGPT make it painfully clear he was leaving hints for people in his life to pick up on: something at one point ChatGPT discouraged him from doing (see photo).

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

“Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: a nostalgic (re)imagining of Myspace This paper provides an analysis of a nostalgic Myspace discourse that contradicts the narrative of Myspace as a failed platform. The Myspace nostalgia discourse is especially dominant on Twitter an...

Sydney says startups are ‘swooping in with the promise of bringing users back to an internet that was more weird, fun, and social’, but cautions against remembering the early web as problem-free.

For more on this topic, see my paper w @katemiltner.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A new guard of startups is racing to bring back the 'old internet' The 2000s and 2010s are making a comeback in new social media and internet startups. They're trying to revive early internet vibes and aesthetics.

I spoke to @businessinsider.com’s fabulous Sydney Bradley this week about the rise of startups cashing in on mid-2000s nostalgia and trying to bring back the ‘old internet’.

www.businessinsider.com/nostalgia-ol...

things were better when the computer lived in its own specific room and you only went in there sometimes