What is aging supposed to look like?

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A few weeks ago, a pair of tiny crows hatched in a massive magnolia tree that stands in the shadow of my Washington, DC, apartment building. This appearance of new life in old felt like the purest sign of spring’s arrival, more so even than the sudden explosion of green in the canopy of the park across the street. Before long, the fledglings had begun test flights into that emerald sea. I reassured my neighbors that the young ones would return, knowing they still had things to learn from their parents back in the nest.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how these social, intelligent birds will begin to live in the urban world that we’ve made both in spite of and for them. I have an article of my own coming some time next week that’s partly about that very question. But as I’ve been writing it — watching wind in the leaves and the birds gliding past — I’ve also been learning from the work of my Vox colleagues.

Here are a few of my recent favorites.

–Jacob Brogan, deputy editor, Future Perfect

What is an aging face supposed to look like?

“The desire to not age is laughable,” Allie Volpe writes near the start of this article. And yet, almost all of us try, in one way or another, to arrest aging’s inevitable creep. I appreciated the honesty with which Allie evaluates the unsettling appeal of the anti-aging industry by thinking through the way that it calls to her. But this is more than a personal essay; it’s a sweeping, thoughtfully reported exploration of what it means to live in a changing body and how we can learn to focus on the lasting effects we make on others rather than the changing tracery of wrinkles at the edges of our eyes.

Millions of people voted for these animal welfare laws. Congress is trying to overturn them.

Across the United States, countless pigs are confined to gestation crates that are, as Temple Grandin framed it, akin to “forcing a human to live in an airline seat.” Over the last quarter century, several states have banned that practice via ballot measure. But now, Kenny Torella reports, the meat industry is trying to overturn those laws by pushing legislation through Congress that would override the will of the voters. It’s a frustrating and important story about the anti-democratic forces impinging on efforts to make our world even a little kinder. 

What would J.R.R. Tolkien think of Palantir?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably wondered at big tech’s tendency to take up language and concepts from beloved sci-fi and fantasy works, even when their borrowings have slightly sinister implications. In this video, Benjamin Stephen dives into one of the most egregious examples: Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s appropriation of the name Palantir from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As Benjamin shows, Tolkien, who considered himself on the side of the Hobbits, probably wouldn’t have cared for these companies, which tend to lift his vocabulary without much consideration for the moral grammars that underlie it.

Is it a bad book or is it AI?

As a person who makes his living from words, I want very badly to believe that AI will not replace me. After this episode of the Today, Explained podcast, I’m not sure how confident I can be about that. In the first half of the show, host Noel King chats with Imogen West-Knights about the case of a horror novel that was picked up by a mainstream press, only to be pulled from publication when readers pointed out that it had almost certainly been partially crafted by a large language model. It’s a troubling scandal, though I find some reassurance in the publisher’s willingness to do the right thing. But then, in the second half of the episode, the journalist and novelist Vauhini Vara describes an experiment she conducted in which she found that even her closest friends couldn’t tell the difference between her work and an LLM’s imitation of her. All I can promise you is that I wrote every word in this email without digital assistance. I sure hope that’s enough to keep you reading.

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