A Book That Changed How I Think | AI Chatbots Won’t Tell You Who To Vote For, But They Will Create Targeted Political Ads | The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done | Elon Musk May Have Given Up On Privacy For His Jet Travels, But Taylor Swift Hasn’t

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A Book That Changed How I Think - The Atlantic

The right book read at the right time can alter not just what you think, but how. The effect can feel like putting on a new set of glasses: Everything remains the same, but you view reality with sudden clarity. It can also be more unsettling—great writing may make the ordinary utterly unfamiliar, so that the reader experiences it unmoored from prior assumptions.

The best memoirs are those that take an occurrence, a life, or a history that is not our own, and so fully transport the reader into the world of the writer that our capacity for empathy expands in ways we could not have imagined. That is the experience I had reading O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, in which she writes beautifully and honestly about living with a chronic, mysterious, and often debilitating illness. Some of my loved ones live with their own enigmatic, ongoing health issues, and this book provided me with insight and context with which to more fully understand their experiences. O’Rourke places her life in conversation with the larger body of historical research on chronic illness, to provide a narrative that is both deeply personal and deeply investigated. In the age of COVID, when so many across the world are still living with the lingering, enervating symptoms of the virus, the lessons and stories here are becoming more relevant to all of us—just as they were for me. — Clint Smith

Because many of my friends and peers are starting to think about parenthood, Still Born immediately caught my attention. It is a novel about two women: Laura, who’s so determined not to have children that she has her tubes tied, and her friend Alina, who is told by her doctors that her baby, conceived after months of desperate trying, won’t survive childbirth. Being a mother is so often portrayed in black and white—you either are one, or you aren’t. How could there be any in between? But Nettel argues, in subtle and thought-provoking ways, that the role of motherhood is actually “porous”—one can shift in and out of it. Laura becomes a mother of sorts to Inés, Alina’s baby, who miraculously survives birth but is severely disabled, and even more so to her neighbor’s son, who throws violent tantrums that his catatonically depressed mom can’t manage. Recent books, such as Angela Garbes’s Essential Labor and Kristen Ghodsee’s Everyday Utopia, have argued for raising children as a communal effort. Nettel’s novel showed me fiction’s power to address this question, offering a complicated portrait of the different, nuanced forms caregiving can take. — Maya Chung

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AI Chatbots Won’t Tell You Who To Vote For, But They Will Create Targeted Political Ads - Forbes

Conversational AI bots like ChatGPT and its ilk have begun telling us how to live and work, advising people on which medicines to take, how to file taxes and where to go for their next trip. But what happens when political campaigns begin using them to shape our opinions?

That's a question top of mind for many as the AI gold rush careens headfirst into the fraught-to-the-point-of-toxicity politics that undergirded an unprecedented attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And it's been at the forefront of widespread discussion among experts and AI leaders even as AI tools are already being tested or deployed by political campaigns, whether it's the Democrats using it to create drafts of fundraising emails, or GOP candidate Ron DeSantis using AI to produce deepfakes of political opponent Donald Trump.

"I think it's pretty dangerous if we start to have AIs campaigning and persuading and having conversations with people about who to vote for," said Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman, speaking at the Wall Street Journal Tech Live event last week. "I would like to take that off the table. We're certainly not going to do that. I think other companies shouldn't either."

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The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done - The New Yorker

In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web designer and avowed Macintosh enthusiast, was working as a freelance project manager for software companies. He had held similar roles for years, so he knew the ins and outs of the job; he was surprised, therefore, to find that he was overwhelmed—not by the intellectual aspects of his work but by the many small administrative tasks, such as scheduling conference calls, that bubbled up from a turbulent stream of e-mail messages. “I was in this batting cage, deluged with information,” he told me recently. “I went to college. I was smart. Why was I having such a hard time?”

Mann wasn’t alone in his frustration. In the nineteen-nineties, the spread of e-mail had transformed knowledge work. With nearly all friction removed from professional communication, anyone could bother anyone else at any time. Many e-mails brought obligations: to answer a question, look into a lead, arrange a meeting, or provide feedback. Work lives that had once been sequential—two or three blocks of work, broken up by meetings and phone calls—became frantic, improvisational, and impossibly overloaded. “E-mail is a ball of uncertainty that represents anxiety,” Mann said, reflecting on this period.

In 2003, he came across a book that seemed to address his frustrations. It was titled “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” and, for Mann, it changed everything. The time-management system it described, called G.T.D., had been developed by David Allen, a consultant turned entrepreneur who lived in the crunchy mountain town of Ojai, California. Allen combined ideas from Zen Buddhism with the strict organizational techniques he’d honed while advising corporate clients. He proposed a theory about how our minds work: when we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that make us anxious. That anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think effectively. If we could avoid worrying about what we were supposed to be doing, we could focus more fully on what we were actually doing, achieving what Allen called a “mind like water.”

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Elon Musk May Have Given Up On Privacy For His Jet Travels, But Taylor Swift Hasn’t - Forbes

When he bought Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk's to-do list included giving Jack Sweeney the boot.

Sweeney, a college student from Orlando, Florida, had been tracking Musk's $65 million Gulfstream G650 and tweeting the whereabouts of the richest man on Earth. Musk wasn't amused. He saw his privacy as a security issue. "I don't love the idea of being shot by a nutcase," he told Sweeney in a direct message.

Musk took his quest for privacy one step further. He enrolled in a free Federal Aviation Administration program called PIA that allows private-jet owners to hide their location by having their planes transmit alternative identity codes.

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