Against Optimization & Immigrant TikTok

Featured Articles

Against Optimization

The Garden of Forking Paths • 6 Jan 2025 • ~3550 words

We are bombarded by messages telling us to worship the gods of efficiency and optimization, life hacking our way to prosperity. It's a trap. Resilience is a smarter, sturdier goal.

These dystopian social tendencies have worsened through the quantification of everything, in which we most value what can be measured and translated into data. From Q3 benchmarks to sleep scores and step counts, data can help guide us, but too often we live in a world where abstract passions are discounted in favor of metrics. Whether it’s courting risk by foolishly “moneyballing” everything, using data tracking to monitor internet-connected egg cartons and salt shakers, or slathering the internet with a thick coating of “life hack” articles, it is clear that many people are devoted to a new religion. The new god is called Optimization—and the disciples are legion.

On TikTok, Every Migrant Is Living the American Dream

The New Yorker • 6 Jan 2025 • ~7750 words

Many people from the Andes have settled in New York. They face tremendous difficulties, but their online posts glamorize their lives, drawing others northward.

These migrants, of course, are curating their lives on social media in roughly the same way that everyone else does. They do not intend to mislead; most are simply young adults in their late teens and twenties who seek the gratification of likes and followers, and feel constant pressure to appear perfect on their profiles. But the wide gulf between what migrants are sharing and what they’re actually experiencing—coupled with the near-endless stream of enticing videos made accessible by algorithmic platforms like TikTok—is having powerful consequences for their communities back home, where many people are relative newcomers to the mobile Internet.

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The Values Gap

Scrupulous Pessimism • 5 Jan 2025 • ~2500 words

We often speak of "shared values" between the United States and other Western nations, but how much is there in common really? This piece examines some stark differences in political norms and societal attitudes.

Americans are exceptionally desensitized to violence, uniquely accepting of collateral damage and negative externalities, relatively open to chaos, and relatively religious. Moreover, American society is unfathomably saturated with racial politics. Once these points are factored in, it becomes obvious that America’s norms and values diverge sharply from those of Europe and the Commonwealth countries.

What Is … the Greatest Game Show of All Time?

Rolling Stone • 7 Jan 2025 • ~4750 words

In the wake of Alex Trebek’s death, Jeopardy! is taking on a whole new life. Behind the scenes of a TV titan’s reinvention.

The program “seems like it ought to come off as elitist and exclusionary,” says Schneider, “and yet somehow it doesn’t. So many *Jeopardy!* fans will tell me, ‘I watch every day, I maybe get two questions right.’ And yet they’re still really invested. Part of it is the standard game-show thing of seeing people coming out of their everyday lives, having this [adventure], and maybe winning a bunch of money, and that’s just fun to watch.” (Last season, the show gave away close to $5.3 million in cash winnings to its competitors.) “But just as a game,” she adds, “it is really well-designed. In terms of the arc within any given game, there’s drama more often than not.”

Italy’s Plans To Process Migrants in Albania

New Lines Magazine • 7 Jan 2025 • ~4600 words

Giorgia Meloni has launched an expensive scheme to detain asylum-seekers in newly built reception centers outside the EU.

As part of this broader anti-immigrant project, Meloni looked to Albania, a small country outside the EU with its own complex history of migration, to test a theory of deterrence: If migrants believe they will never set foot on European soil, they will not seek to come at all. “They do not want the people to leave. They want people to know that if they try to reach Italy, in fact, they will be locked up in Albania,” said Elisa De Pieri, a researcher with Amnesty International. “This is in line with the hardening of the borders all around the European Union.”

The man making a business out of China’s burnout generation

the Guardian • 7 Jan 2025 • ~4750 words

Li Jianxiong was a highflying marketing executive in Beijing until a breakdown sent him to the west on a wellness voyage of discovery – just as his peers were losing faith in the Chinese Dream.

His success, however, came at a cost. By then, China had become notorious for its “996” work culture – 9am to 9pm, six days a week – but Li was working something closer to 007: 24 hours a day, every day. While managing an all-consuming media crisis for his employer, a major tutoring company, he developed insomnia, heart palpitations and a severe rash that doctors attributed to a flagging immune system. He wondered more than once whether he might actually work himself to death.

The Next Drug Epidemic Is Blue-Raspberry Flavored

Intelligencer • 4 Jan 2025 • ~5600 words • Archive Link

How Galaxy Gas became synonymous with the country’s burgeoning addiction to gas.

Alex didn’t know that his employer wasn’t just selling Galaxy Gas — it created the brand. Nor did he know that eventually, according to a Cloud 9 executive, the company’s output would grow to represent nearly 30 percent of all nitrous sold in the country. “They are gray-market specialists,” says another former employee, Chris. “And they’re capitalizing on people’s inability to legislate as fast as they can make new products.”

Meet the man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive

Ars Technica • 6 Jan 2025 • ~3250 words

Steve Young's passion built a business that keeps historic tables running.

If there's one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it's that they break—a lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective sound-deadening properties of the glass under which it's played, but a game of pinball is shockingly violent. Each 80-gram silver ball gains remarkable inertia as it catapults from one target to another. Remove the glass, fire up a game, and you'll quickly be reaching for some hearing protection. It's unpleasant, but playing like this is a good way to appreciate how much of a pounding a pinball machine takes every time you pull that plunger.

Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?

New York Times • 6 Jan 2025 • ~5200 words • Archive Link

Many owners think so, thanks to the “talking buttons” craze on TikTok and Instagram. Scientists are less convinced.

When a dog named Parker on TikTok sees an ambulance and presses SQUEAKER then CAR, she appears to be using words in a way that’s closer to how humans do. Multiword phrases like Parker’s are creative, spontaneous and flexible expressions of language, a quality that the linguist Charles Hockett called productivity. Productivity is thought to be unique to human language. It’s what the most famous animal-language studies appeared to show nonhuman minds were capable of: anecdotally documenting, for example, that Washoe, a chimp, signed “water bird” to refer to a swan; that Koko the gorilla signed “finger bracelet” to mean a ring; and that the orangutan Chantek called himself “orangutan person” to differentiate himself from ordinary, nonsigning orangutans.

Gigantic SUVs Are a Public Health Threat. Why Don’t We Treat Them Like One?

Vox • 6 Jan 2025 • ~2600 words

The anti-tobacco playbook could help turn the US public against their beloved oversized cars.

Secondhand smoke is a textbook example of a negative externality: a product’s costs that are paid by society instead of its users. It’s a framework that helped turn the public against tobacco, and it carries lessons for another product that is as ubiquitous today as cigarettes were 50 years ago. And like tobacco, its use can — and often does — kill innocent bystanders. I’m talking about oversized cars.