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Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Platform design choices are not shielded by the First Amendment or Section 230, so companies can be held liable for harmful features.

  Their words

  judges and juries have begun to accept the argument that platform design is not covered by either of those, and companies can be punished for harmful features.

  platformer.news

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

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  Punished by Rewards

  Their words

  Podcast (Part 2). Incentivizing people — punishing or rewarding (with bonuses, commissions, grades, public praise, and other bribes) is manipulative and doesn’t actually work. It seems to work, but only in the very short term and causes severe long-term damage.

  radex.io

Investigative journalist on policing, forensics and criminal justice; wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop and writes The Watch.

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  A confession stops the investigation that would have cleared the innocent person who gave it.

  Their words

  A confession, though, will sometimes preclude police from doing the very sort of investigation that would prove the confessor’s innocence.

  radleybalko.substack.com

Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.

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  The human bottleneck is a safety property: remove it and small, individually harmless coding errors compound at a rate nobody feels until it is too late.

  Their words

  With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late.

  Thoughts on slowing the fuck downmariozechner.at

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

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  Americans tend to be aggressive yet thin-skinned, sure of their own rightness while doubting everyone else.

  America

  Their words

  Americans are mean, but fragile. Bullies, but babies. They are right, always, but also skeptical of every one else.

  get goodblgtylr.substack.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Merlin Suit

  Their words

  Merlin Suit: I dunno what Merlin knows about babies but this sleeping suit is a MIRACLE.

  mariandrew.substack.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  Being big pays off every day and is punished in extinctions, which is why body size keeps getting reset rather than climbing forever.

  Their words

  You're dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there's going to be selection favoring them. But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events, so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff, and then smaller stuff does better again.

  youtube.com

Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

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  Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies

  Their words

  Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

  robkhenderson.com

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  Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

  Their words

  Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

  robkhenderson.com

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  Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers

  Their words

  Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison

  robkhenderson.com

Music critic and historian; author of The History of Jazz and Music: A Subversive History. Writes the newsletter The Honest Broker on music and culture.

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  Anything that might take a reader off the platform, including a news story or an outside link, is punished by the algorithm.

  Their words

  Anything that might persuade you to leave the platform—a news story, or any outside link—is brutally punished by their algorithms.

  The State of the Culture, 2024honest-broker.com

Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

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  Evolution made human babies effectively premature, since bipedalism shrank pelvises while brains grew larger, forcing late fetal development outside the womb.

  Their words

  The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.

  10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  For an online creator the platform is a boss who fines you for breaking rules he refuses to explain, precisely so that you cannot learn to avoid them.

  Their words

  For an online creator, the platform is a boss who docks every paycheck and tells you that you’re being punished for breaking rules that your boss refuses to explain, lest you figure out how to violate them without him noticing.

  Twiddlerpluralistic.net