The most interesting things to read this second weekend in December

Dear Friends,

I want to start this week by recommending a story I couldn’t put down: Andy Greenberg’s epic account of the three young men who created the devastating Mirai botnet: a homeschooled kid from a strict Christian family in rural Pennsylvania; a kid from New Orleans struggling with a stutter; and a kid in Mumbai who loved Minecraft. The trio collaborated to hack IOT devices at scale and then used them to wreck the Internet. Yes, your old router and potentially your old thermostat might have been enlisted to knock Amazon.com offline. It’s a story about a weird friendship, a reckless fight, and, one hopes, redemption. The villains are sympathetic, but not too much so to believe.

I also want to recommend this Harper’s essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan, which is surely the best thing I’ve ever read about plumbing . It’s a useful story to read if you want to figure out why your house smells slightly odd or if you just want to appreciate genius in a craft. Then there’s Melissa Johnson’s essay from Outside about trekking for days to a wedding of two female friends in the Guatemalan Jungle. “When you’ve been forbidden to be yourself for so long, a lost city feels like home,” she writes. The piece also includes the most harrowing story of a tick bite and removal that you will ever read.

Speaking of adventures, the new Miyazaki movie, The Boy and the Heron , is absolutely worth seeing. I scored it 10/10, and my sons all gave it 9/10 or higher—though we all admitted to being utterly confused at parts. It was refreshing to see an entirely bizarre and twisting story that didn’t suffer from Hollywood conventions and script banality. You also have to read Mark Bowden’s whodunit on the destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline . He works through the various hypotheses (was it the Russians? The Americans? The Ukrainians?) and also the surprising sleuths tracking down the culprits.

James Bennet, meanwhile, has 17,000 words on when he was fired as editor of the New York Times op-ed page after publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. It’s his side of that famous story from three years ago, as well as a much bigger story about his view of journalism as a whole. It’s worth reading in full. Speaking of journalism conflicts, here is the essay from Masha Gessen that led to two sponsors of the Hannah Arendt Prize removing their support for her winning the award.

And I want to end with a shout-out to One5C, a superb climate-action newsletter aimed at demystifying the most complicated environmental issues of our time. They’ve just published an epic 50,000 word guide to plastic pollution. That’s a lot of words, but there’s also a lot of plastic in the ocean.

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Now I want to shift to one of the great questions of my profession: how will AI change the way journalism works? Last week, I gave a four-minute speech on the topic, which you can view here .?Even if you think my ideas are all wrong, I hope you agree that the background is gorgeous and weird.?

How exactly is the profession using the tools? There are some interesting examples. In 2020, the Washington Post’s Heliograf gathered congressional- and presidential-election updates; then an AI voice assistant read them directly into political podcasts. The Los Angeles Times’s Quakebot drafts?stories on earthquakes . News sources like?the Associated Press —which began using AI nine years ago—rely on algorithms to automate earnings and game recaps. Around the world, news organizations have been using AI to help report stories on dense, statistical topics, like annual political donations?in Australia and local elections in?all 32,000-plus French municipalities . A fascinating tool called?FUNES , from Peruvian news outlet?Ojo Público , has been used to scrape public data and calculate the corruption risk of government contracts.?

It’s important to note: these are tools for getting basic information out quickly. And the use of AI is honestly disclosed. Other publications have been less forthcoming and have rightly paid the price. I used to love Sports Illustrated and stacked years of them in my mother’s basement. I recently uncovered one issue in our attic, with a full-stride Carl Lewis on the cover in 1984. So it was heartbreaking to see that they are now credibly accused of using AI to create fake authors, with fake headshots . This is related to the nonsense from CNET , Buzzfeed , and others. Carl Lewis—who, bless his heart, has the same interest in crazy ultra-running as I do—would not be happy.

AI is going to be a great tool for journalists and for information discovery. But its use should always be disclosed, as we do with our wonderful AI-read Atlantic audio stories . Also, every media organization needs to remember that AI can’t report or write with style. AI is a tool that can help journalists and readers. It will profoundly change the profession. But any company that tries to rely on it does so at its peril. It’s on leaders—at media companies, but also everywhere else—to set clear parameters and guardrails and ensure that AI is being used properly within their organizations.

Meanwhile, we are about to enter an age of misinformation. Let’s hope the media helps on the good side of this fight. Researchers are making significant progress —using deep learning and natural-language processing—in training AI to help us recognize propaganda ,?fake news ,?rumors on social media , and other kinds of?misinformation . I’m all for the use of AI, but I’m also always going to be on the side of the authentic and the real.?

cheers * N

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