Weekly Link Roundup

+ Review: The Chicken Big Mac Can’t Quite Beat The Original (The Takeout): “The patties, which are made specifically for this product, are roughly the size of the usual hamburger patties in its original namesake .. They’re more akin to Chicken McNuggets, using the same ground all-white meat mixture and tempura-style exterior, re-proportioned for the dimensions of the new Chicken Big Mac … because of the breading and the relatively dry doubled-up chicken patty situation, the sandwich is a whole lot drier than a traditional Big Mac.”

+ McDonald’s New Menu Item: The Chicken Big Mac (USA Today): “… the Chicken Big Mac, which has previously been tested in international markets including the U.K. Also tested in Miami in 2022 … The new sandwich swaps out the two all-beef patties on the traditional Big Mac for a pair of tempura battered chicken patties. Otherwise, the ingredients and toppings are the same: the Big Mac bun, Big Mac sauce, cheese, lettuce and pickle slices.”

+ The Blocking of the Tapestry-Capri Merger Spells Trouble for American Fashion (The Business of Fashion): “… Judge Jennifer Rochon in the Southern District of New York … blocked the $8.5 billion merger between Coach-parent Tapestry and Michael Kors owner Capri Holdings. The preliminary injunction … is a win in the Federal Trade Commission’s suit to deter the union of three major players — Coach, its sister brand Kate Spade, and Michael Kors under Capri — in what it refers to as the ‘accessible luxury’ market … Tapestry has said it will appeal the decision but the ruling significantly shrinks the likelihood of the deal’s completion.”

+ Redditors Are Trying to Poison Google’s AI to Keep Tourists Out of the Good Restaurants (Gizmodo): “Ever since Google rolled out its AI-generated summaries on Search, the tech giant’s summaries are the first thing a person might see if they were to search for local tourist destinations in a new city. But those results are culled together from an automated analysis of internet entries … After people began complaining that Google’s search quality had degraded, it became increasingly common for people to add ‘Reddit’ to their Google searches. In February of this year, Google struck a $60 million licensing deal with Reddit, in which Reddit would allow Google to use its content to train its AI algorithm. Now, in an apparent effort to manipulate Google’s search results, Redditors seem to be degrading the content quality of their own platform.”

+ People Are Using Google Study Software to Make AI Podcasts—And They’re Weird and Amazing (MIT Technology Review): “… Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview … was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short summaries. The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic … The company is now working on adding more customization options, such as changing the length, format, voices, and languages … The tool shines when it is given complicated source material that it can describe in an easily accessible way.”

+ The Emerging Age of AI Diplomacy (Foreign Affairs): “For Saudi Arabia and … the United Arab Emirates (UAE), AI plays an increasingly central role in their attempts to transform their oil wealth into new economic models before the world transitions away from fossil fuels. For American AI companies, hungry for capital and energy, the two Gulf states and their sovereign wealth funds are tantalizing partners. And some policymakers in Washington see a once-in-a-generation opportunity to promise access to American computing power in a bid to lure the Gulf states away from China and deepen an anti-Iranian coalition in the Middle East … The two Gulf states’ interest in AI is not new, but it has intensified in recent months. Saudi Arabia plans to create a $40 billion fund to invest in AI and has set up Silicon Valley–inspired startup accelerators to entice coders to Riyadh. In 2019, the UAE launched the world’s first university dedicated to AI, and since 2021, the number of AI workers in the country has quadrupled … Even though the United States has an economic and geopolitical opportunity in the Gulf, there are also significant risks to offshoring major clusters of advanced AI chips to authoritarian regimes with elaborate surveillance systems, an appetite for military adventurism, and expanding ties to China.”

+ The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses (The New Yorker): “Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince who became Saudi Arabia’s de-facto ruler after the death of Abdullah, has touted women as a key part of his plan, called Vision 2030, to modernize the country; he has created employment opportunities for women and appointed female ministers and ambassadors. These gestures have been welcomed by Western governments, though many experts discount them as a fig leaf. Women in Saudi Arabia continue to live under a strict system of male guardianship, and people who advocate for gender equality are routinely jailed. In March, Saudi Arabia was selected to chair the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, despite condemnation of the country’s ‘abysmal’ record by human-rights groups.”

+ When Couples Therapy Becomes a Weapon (The Cut): “… instead of helping us see each other more clearly, therapy gave us new words to use to criticize each other. Every constructive lesson became a knife. I learned about trauma responses, and so everything he did elicited a trauma response in me. He was my father! I was his mother! When he learned about gaslighting, everything I did became gaslighting. When we argued about a time he called me stupid, therapy gave him a new explanation for why he said it.”

+ Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read (The Atlantic): “Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone … The ‘forgetting curve,’ as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in … In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely … what’s called recognition memory is more important … The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out … Memories get reinforced the more you recall them … If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time.”

+ I bought Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot in 2021 for a book club discussion that BFF and I signed up for, but neither of us made it through the first chapter before the event. I then gave up on the book until several months later, when I picked it up again on a whim. The book is slow-building, somewhat bloated with the protagonist’s struggles as a writer, but once the main mystery was presented, I found it hard to put down–I wanted, no, I needed to know! What was The Plot?!

In the end, the mystery payoff is less satisfying than the build-up, but it was gratifying to have guessed all of the twists before the events unfolded, even if the unraveling of the mystery was done by exposition instead of in action. The author doesn’t try to trick her readers with red herrings nor did she plant any twists that weren’t hinted at early on. If you are looking for an easily-digestible mystery thriller, The Plot might be for you.

+ I thought The Plot did an adequate job of revealing its twists and tidying up any loose ends, so was surprised to learn that its author, Jean Hanff Korelitz, penned a follow-up predictably titled, The Sequel, which is as much a prequel as it is a sequel to The Plot.

(SPOILERS) And I waited about seven chapters for a conflict to come to the fore, as the protagonist Anna feels neither remorse nor guilt for the many homicides under her belt (as there are seemingly no survivors or witnesses to her crimes). If The Plot was driven by an anticipation and eagerness to get to the big reveal, The Sequel is propelled forward by a different force: an ambivalent struggle between wanting Anna to face consequences for her actions, and rooting for her at every turn to escape accountability. While I didn’t find The Sequel as gripping as The Plot, it’s still extremely readable and easy to get through in a weekend (or in a night if you are a fast reader).

+ Is Fast Fashion Worth Recycling? (The Business of Fashion): “… two major European recycling lobbies put out a stark warning: the sector is facing ‘an unprecedented crisis, even more significant than during the Covid-19 pandemic’ … Since the spring, the price of sorted secondhand garments has been lower than the cost of processing them … Europe’s rag trade has always been a volume game. Traders collect and sort through tonnes and tonnes of material in search of so-called ‘cream,’ the highest-grade, highest-value products. The process is labour intensive, which makes it expensive. And if there isn’t enough cream in the mix, traders can’t recover their costs … receiving countries have become dumping grounds for rich country’s fashion discards. While exactly how much of the secondhand clothing exported to markets in Africa and Latin America is trash on arrival is the subject of increasingly heated debate, piles of imported fashion waste in Chile’s Atacama desert and tangled textile snarls on Ghana’s beaches have become powerful visual symbols of the high environmental cost of throwaway fashion.”

+ “Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care (ProPublica): “… insurance companies … often outsource medical reviews to a largely hidden industry that makes money by turning down doctors’ requests for payments, known as prior authorizations. Call it the denials for dollars business. The biggest player is a company called EviCore by Evernorth, which is hired by major American insurance companies and provides coverage to 100 million consumers — about 1 in 3 insured people. It is owned by the insurance giant Cigna … EviCore uses an algorithm backed by artificial intelligence, which some insiders call ‘the dial,’ that it can adjust to lead to higher denials. Some contracts ensure the company makes more money the more it cuts health spending. And it issues medical guidelines that doctors have said delay and deny care for patients … EviCore markets itself to insurance companies by promising a 3-to-1 return on investment — that is, for every $1 spent on EviCore, the insurer would pay out $3 less on medical care and other costs. EviCore salespeople have boasted of a 15% increase in denials.”

+ A Husband in the Aftermath of His Wife’s Unfathomable Act (The New Yorker): “Diagnosing a psychotic disorder typically requires evidence that a patient has lost touch with reality. A new mother may imagine that her baby is under attack by a malevolent force … But some delusions centered on newborns … can be harder to distinguish from more ordinary maternal concerns … Lindsay’s defense team has named ‘horrific overmedication’ as the chief cause of her mental decline, a line of reasoning that may provide some solace to her loved ones … One puzzle of the Clancy family’s tragedy is that, although Lindsay sought help from several postpartum-mental-health specialists, as far as Pat knows she never received a more severe diagnosis than generalized anxiety disorder. He emphasized that none of Lindsay’s providers ever warned him—or, to his knowledge, her—of the possibility of postpartum psychosis.”

+ The Chronically Online Have Stolen Halloween (The Atlantic): “Today, participating in Halloween can feel like being in a competition you did not enter—one that prioritizes social-media attention over genuine, person-to-person interactions … Meme enthusiasts, our modern-day hipsters, must dig through the bowels of the internet for their references to position themselves as savvy. It’s not enough to be Charli XCX anymore; you have to somehow embody ‘brat summer’ instead. The meme costume is a reference to a reference to a reference.”

+ Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide? (The New York Times): “Character.AI, which was started by two former Google A.I. researchers, is the market leader in A.I. companionship. More than 20 million people use its service … The company, a three-year-old start-up, raised $150 million from investors last year at a $1 billion valuation, making it one of the biggest winners of the generative A.I. boom. Earlier this year, Character.AI’s co-founders, Mr. Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, announced that they were going back to Google, along with a number of other researchers from the company. Character.AI also struck a licensing deal that will allow Google to use its technology … Some of Character.AI’s most popular chatbots had names like ‘Aggressive Teacher’ and ‘High School Simulator,’ and many seemed to be tailor-made for teenage wish fulfillment. The description of one popular character, which has received 176 million messages from users, read, ‘Your boy best friend who has a secret crush on you.’ “

+ The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books (The Atlantic): “… middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests … the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But ‘in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general’ … if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it … it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts … attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books … they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past.”

+ Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fight Over Valuable Social Media Accounts (The Wall Street Journal): “Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split. For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account.”

+ TikTok Is Changing How Gen Z Speaks (The Economist): “On social media words spread far and fast. At least 100 English words are produced, or given new meaning, on TikTok a year, reckons Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London. Some linguists think the platform is changing not just what youngsters are saying, but how they are saying it. A ‘TikTok accent’, which includes ‘uptalk’, an intonation that rises at the end of sentences, may be spreading … The mutation of language on TikTok is also due, in large part, to the age of its users. Most are 18-34 years old.”

+ Recently ordered: H&M Cable-Knit Hooded Jacket, Sézane Paula Babies, J.Crew Cashmere Cable-Knit T-Shirt, WAYF x CHÉRIE MADELEINE Joli Ribbon Trim Cable Cardigan, We The Free Freddie Shirt, AllSaints Phoenix Leather East/West Tote, UGG Lowmel Sneaker, J.Crew Relaxed Cable-Knit Sweater Dress, Belle & Bloom One More Night Crossbody Bag, and We The Free Our Song Henley Cuff.