The people who actually want AI to replace humanity
I'll cop to a personal stake here: I would strongly prefer not to be replaced by a superior digital species. Sigal Samuel's new piece is an unsettling look at the people — many of them inside major AI labs — who don't share that preference. They believe humanity is carrying a torch of consciousness, and the next step in cosmic evolution is to pass it to artificial intelligence, even if we go extinct in the process. Sigal calls them "AI successionists," and she traces the strange genealogy of their thinking from medieval Christian theology through Enlightenment ideas about human perfectibility all the way to today's Silicon Valley accelerationists. It's a long, ambitious read, and the most useful guide I've encountered for what some of the people building the most powerful technology in human history actually believe.
MAHA wellness culture is coming for teens. Grown-ups aren't ready.
When I picture the MAHA movement, I picture the moms. Anna North's reporting introduces the next generation: teenage girls and young women with growing Instagram followings, posting videos about making their own sugar-free Peeps with beef gelatin and explaining why seed oils are bad. On the surface, this is harmless. But Anna traces the pipeline that runs underneath, from anti-seed-oil content to anti-medicine conspiracism, with a heavy stop at eating disorders along the way. The line that stuck with me came from an 18-year-old who told the New York Times she takes 30 supplements a day to manage her eczema because "all pills do is cover up a problem instead of getting to the root cause." Whatever that is, it isn't health.
NYC is full of undiscovered species — and we've hatched a plan to find one.
Here is a fact I find genuinely delightful: Even in New York City, one of the most heavily trodden patches of land on the planet, scientists believe there are still hundreds, maybe thousands, of animal species that have never been described. Benji Jones has partnered with the Central Park Conservancy, the Prospect Park Alliance, and a couple of academic labs to actually go find one. The project runs all summer, involving insect traps in Central Park and Prospect Park, DNA barcoding at a Canadian lab, and expert taxonomists confirming whether anything caught is genuinely new. As someone who lives in Brooklyn, I find it kind of thrilling that there's a bug out there nobody has named yet. Provided it stays far away.
🎧 Got (raw) milk?
Pasteurization is one of the great public health innovations of the 20th century, and it is apparently under attack by people who would like to be sick more often. State lawmakers around the country are pushing to make raw milk easier to buy, and on Today, Explained this week, co-host Sean Rameswaram visits a Maryland dairy to figure out why anyone would willingly drink something that could give them campylobacter. We've been here before. We just keep choosing to come back.
📹 Inside the data center fight in small-town America
Two years ago, almost nobody outside the tech and energy industries talked about data centers. Today they are arguably the most contentious infrastructure question in the country, pitting local communities against state governments, environmentalists against utilities, and the AI industry against pretty much everyone. On a recent episode of America, Actually, Astead Herndon heads to Vineland, New Jersey, to visit one of the largest data centers in the Northeast and talk to residents who say it was rushed into construction without community buy-in.
