Adjacent Weekend

This week: Hollywood workers retraining AI on their own craft, the strange psychology of white identity politics, a pen that never runs out of ink, and the ad director who made an entire era of American comedy.

Your Job Doesn't Love You Back

The TV writers and crew members squeezed out by the strikes and the streaming collapse have found new work — labeling dialogue, annotating scripts, teaching AI systems the exact skills those systems are replacing. Lauren Goode's piece for WIRED is a slow burn about what it actually feels like to be on the wrong side of a transition, not as abstraction but as daily economic reality. You'll come away with a sharper sense of what "AI displacement" means when it happens to creative workers who saw it coming and couldn't stop it anyway.

WIRED · 15 min

The Good Fight Club: The Vibe Shift That Wasn't

Yascha Mounk, Amanda Ripley, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams ask whether Trump has actually remade American culture — or whether the appearance of cultural dominance is obscuring something more fragile. The conversation on white identity politics is worth your time: it takes the psychological drivers seriously without flattering them, which is rarer than it should be. A good antidote to both the triumphalist and the catastrophist takes.

Yascha Mounk · 20 min

Joe Sedelmaier, Auteur Behind 'Where's the Beef?' Ad, Dies at 92

Nearly 1,000 commercials, including the Wendy's spot that entered the language and a FedEx ad built around a man talking faster than anyone thought possible — Sedelmaier built a body of work that most filmmakers would envy, entirely in a medium no one took seriously. This obituary makes a real argument about craft and form: what happens when an artist finds their perfect medium and the culture refuses to call it art. Worth reading slowly.

The New York Times · 10 min

“He directed nearly 1,000 comedic commercials, including a much-quoted spot for Wendy's and one for FedEx featuring a manic speed talker.” — The New York Times

Pininfarina's Forever Pen Needs No Ink, Ever

The design house best known for shaping Ferraris has spent years applying the same thinking to objects you actually touch every day, and this pen — which uses a metal alloy tip that leaves a permanent mark without any ink cartridge — is a good case study in what "designed to last" means when taken literally. The piece is less a product review than a meditation on why we've accepted disposability as the default for tools we use constantly. The question it leaves you with: how many other everyday objects are broken by design?

Yanko Design · 8 min

Why Travel in China Feels Different

The piece uses RedNote — the Chinese social platform that briefly became a destination for Americans fleeing TikTok anxiety — as a window into the gap between how China presents itself to travelers and how the digital infrastructure actually works. It's a travel essay and a technology essay at the same time, and the tension between those two modes is what makes it work. You'll come away with a more textured picture of what the great firewall feels like from inside the experience rather than from the policy paper.

WIRED · 12 min

Al Roth on Why People Should Be Free to Sell Their Kidneys

Roth won the Nobel for designing matching markets — the systems that pair kidney donors with recipients, medical students with hospitals, students with schools — and he's spent decades arguing that squeamishness around organ markets costs lives at a measurable rate. This conversation models how to think carefully about a question where the instinctive moral reaction and the empirical evidence diverge. Whether or not you end up agreeing with him, his framework for thinking about "repugnant transactions" is useful.

Yascha Mounk · 18 min

Which Are the Most Common Everyday Phenomena That We Don't Properly Understand?

Tyler Cowen posts a short list — lightning, sleep, glass, turbulence — and the comments do the rest. It's a simple prompt that opens into something genuinely disorienting: how many things you interact with every day rest on physics or biology that remains poorly understood even by specialists. Good for an afternoon when you want your assumptions rattled gently rather than demolished. The comments section, for once, is the point.

Marginal Revolution · 10 min

Against Gawker Nostalgia: Welcome to media_gossip

Every few years the media industry rediscovers Gawker as a lost golden age — a time when someone would say the thing everyone else was thinking. This piece pushes back on the myth while making a real argument about what media gossip is actually for, how it circulates now, and what gets lost when the venue is a Slack channel only insiders can see. If you work in or around media, it will feel uncomfortably accurate. If you don't, it's a useful window into how an industry processes its own decline.

media_gossip · 12 min