Owen Lewis

Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life. Kate Fox says Joe Ceccanti was the ‘most hopeful person’ before he started spending 12 hours a day with a chatbot

I recognize I am an extremely rare holdout in that I have been so hardline anti-AI that I have still yet to use a chatbot willingly, but uh, I feel like every other story I read is about how all the consumer-facing stuff is a mental illness particle accelerator www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

So we just live in a Black Mirror episode now huh

If America still had the rule of law, this would be the easiest prosecution ever, but we all know absolutely nothing will happen.

Anthropic still owes me $3000 for stealing my book

A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish | Defector If you walked down Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles at some point in the past three years, you might have noticed a modest, pueblo-style beige building with “PHOTO” pai...

After Jason Lee opened a camera shop in Eagle Rock, I thought, man, that'd be a fun story to do. I did not know that it would eventually lead to him threatening to take me to court. For @defector.com, the whole bloody affair:
defector.com/a-compliment...

The Mournful Ballad Of Punch The Monkey | Defector When I first heard rumblings that the world had assembled a conclave to elect a new celebrity zoo animal, I felt preemptively wary, partly due to world events and partly because we still don’t know th...

I wrote about Punch the monkey and who, if anyone, is really to blame for the suffering of primates
defector.com/the-mournful...

I Lost My Mind Watching (Almost) All Of 'Survivor' In A Year Conventional wisdom states that no one really cares about another person’s dreams unless they’re been paid to care, but humor me. Over the last year or so, I have had a recurring dream in which I am a...

More Survivor content no one asked for!

I wrote about watching 44 seasons of the show over the last year, and how I slowly went insane from the Jeff Probst of it all. defector.com/i-lost-my-mi...

The Overthinker - The Second Serve For the past three seasons, it's been more struggle than smooth sailing for Iga Swiatek.

Tried to get at Iga Swiatek's recent struggles here: www.thesecondserve.com/iga-swiatek-...

Also imagine showing this to someone not familiar with Defector and then telling them that Chris is not exclusively a movie critic, he also writes well and frequently about the NBA and the media, lol. Subscribe!

Gasped many more times reading this than I did while watching the movie -- which I didn't think accomplished what it set out to, and as Chris outlines beautifully and savagely here, is questionable just for trying to accomplish those things

Have you seen the news? Or, not the news, but the press releases? “Prediction markets,” which are fundamentally gambling companies that benefit from preferential regulatory treatment, are shacking up with putative “news organizations.” In December, CNN and CNBC signed “multi-year exclusive partnerships with prediction market platform Kalshi to integrate event-based probabilities across its TV, digital, and subscription products from 2026.” Polymarket has cut similar deals with Dow Jones, Yahoo, and Substack. This is a familiar playbook. Outside of Defector and a few other oases, contemporary sports media primarily functions as the top of the funnel for gambling interests. There is an addled, soulless logic to running this scheme back with the political and financial press. To their credit (?), Polymarket has put a fresh coat of heavily leaded paint on the approach: The post announcing their Substack deal highlights an anti-vaccine and pro-Ghislaine-Maxwell influencer linking to the odds that the US government confirms that aliens are real. They expect you to regard this as the future of journalism; it is followed by a disclaimer that none of this “financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice.” I’ll grant that this is one possible future of journalism. But Defector is another, better future. We don’t feed our readers to gambling companies; we don’t use generative AI; we don’t have outside investors to please. Subscribers enable our critical, independent stance. If you’re as sick of this shit as I am, please consider becoming one.

subscribe to defector: defector.beehiiv.com/p/journalism...

Cipher and Sean email archive, lfg

The Suffering Of Lindsey Vonn | Defector I woke to a flurry of notifications on my phone. Overnight in Cortino, Lindsey Vonn violently crashed in her Olympic downhill race and was airlifted from the mountain. My group chat, made up of colleg...

Holy shit this piece is incredible, like the kind of thing that makes me jealous I didn’t write it and feel lucky that I get to read it defector.com/the-sufferin...

How a Cute Dog in a Super Bowl Ad Revealed a National Surveillance Crisis The Ring commercial pulled back the curtain on the state of mass surveillance. What comes next is ... woof.

I wrote about the Ring Super Bowl ad, the state of surveillance, and WeRateDogs

Tweet from a loser that says, "I will have 30k to make a fully AI film, what’s the plan? I’m supposed to have ideas by next week. cmon guys what would you want to see? I like sci-fi but it feels to obvious for AI 🤷‍♂️"

AI filmmaking is completely unserious.

You've got people with $30k begging the internet for ideas by next week because they have nothing of their own to say, it's just slop for the sake of slop. Embarrassing state of affairs.

I Traveled 800 Miles To Eat Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza At Criss Angel’s Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza | Defector When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but ...

by the end of this weekend my phone had learned "cablp" without autocorrecting it. please enjoy my trip report: defector.com/criss-angel-...

I look at the New Yorker's website every day, but I've read enough of their almost uniformly bad AI coverage that I think I'm done clicking on their pieces about it

Leading the site the same day Becca Rothfeld wrote a eulogy of the Washington Post's Books section, feels so so bad

Extremely exciting news: We're hiring a full-time film critic to come work with me at The A.V. Club!

You probably have an idea if you're qualified for this, but if there's something that's not in the job listing, I'm sure I can answer Qs www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

‘We all on Kalshi now’: Giannis Antetokounmpo and the quiet collapse of sporting trust The Bucks star has become a shareholder in one of the world’s largest prediction markets. It only ushers the NBA further into the fetid swamp of sports betting Couldn’t he have just started a podcast? “The Internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own,” Giannis Antetokounmpo, one of the four best basketball players in the world, posted in a statement announcing that he was joining the prediction market Kalshi as a shareholder. “We all on Kalshi now.” We are not, but doesn’t the tone sum it up? The universe’s ineffable forces have clearly decided that the ubiquity of sports betting companies is insufficient. There must be new companies, with which you can bet on any outcome – Kalshi competitor Polymarket has hosted markets tied to geopolitical outcomes, including scenarios related to Israel and Gaza, for instance – that incentivize people to treat life’s most important avenues as trivially as a sports game. Kalshi and Polymarket are prediction platforms rather than traditional betting companies. Users effectively bet (or “trade”) against others on the platform about the outcome of events, from familiar wagers such as the result of a sporting event, to the obscure, such as the color of a politician’s suit at an election appearance. Kalshi has enjoyed plenty of freedom under the second Donald Trump administration, and Donald Trump Jr is a “strategic advisor” for them and Polymarket. A Kalshi outcome taking bets until recently was “Giannis Antetokounmpo’s next team?” as rumors swirled that the two-time NBA MVP was about to leave the Milwaukee Bucks. Antetokounmpo will be involved in marketing and publicity for Kalshi, and is forbidden from trading on markets related to the NBA. The move is also in step with the NBA’s rules – players are allowed to endorse betting companies as long as they don’t gamble on the league itself. But that hasn’t prevented scores of fans across Instagram and Reddit, and media members on Twitter, from expressing their displeasure at the move and insisting there is a conflict of interest. Continue reading...

‘We all on Kalshi now’: Giannis Antetokounmpo and the quiet collapse of sporting trust

at the end of the six months, only one of you will have written a book

thanks Mitchell!

What could go wrong!

Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?, by Adam Morgan What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.

With Ron Charles and Becca Rothfeld laid off from WaPo, there are now only 5 full-time book critics working in the United States.

That's down from 7 when this pubbed last year, though you may find my definition of a "full-time book critic" arbitrary.

worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

What We Loved About Dan McQuade | Defector Today is Dan McQuade’s funeral. To celebrate our friend, we wanted to give the people he worked with a place to explain what they loved so much about him. If you would like to support Dan’s widow Jan,...

What we loved about Dan McQuade:

A Pure Tennis Boy | Defector MELBOURNE — “I just want him to be a pure tennis boy,” the journalist behind me said to their neighbor as we waited for Carlos Alcaraz to come to the main interview room. They were saying how they…

A pure tennis boy:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments, not just the newsroom, is being laid off.

Dan McQuade, 1983–2026 | Defector Dan McQuade, our friend and colleague, died this week at the age of 43. He is survived by his wife and young son. At the end of 2024, Dan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. The news of his…

Dan McQuade, 1983–2026: defector.com/dan-mcquade-...

This is great and the Whiskey Fridays section also functions as a try not to laugh challenge (impossible)

The Ghost Writers - The Second Serve Some AI books are downright weird, like Harrison F. Cole’s biography of Carlos Alcaraz, the cover of which is definitely not a photo of Alcaraz; it’s no tennis player I’ve ever seen and looks vaguely ...

Dire shit: www.thesecondserve.com/open-tennis-...