Links and things 10/5/26

October 5, 2026

George Saunders and Arielle Swedback

You’ve written that your biggest fear is that we’ll enter a market so saturated that readers lose the ability to tell human writing from AI-generated writing. Do you think disclosure is an obligation to the reader? Should it become the professional norm?

I’m not sure. I guess it would only be fair (?). I think a very adept reader will be able to tell—but most of us are middling readers at best. So we might imagine a world where we were constantly being force-fed Muzak all the time, even in concert halls. Eventually the aesthetic adjusts downward. My guess is this is already happening, just from the preponderance of lite/internet/phone reading we’re always doing—I have felt it happening to me, for sure. Why do we care? Because writing changes the way we think. And the way we think makes . . . the world. If we think with compassion and become more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity and become more patient and curious—the world changes for the better. The inverse has been happening over the last 20 or so years, and I’m guessing that the coarsening of our public discourse is related to the degradation of our reading habits. Garbage in, garbage out, and then the world becomes garbage and we don’t even notice it anymore.

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If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? by Jay Caspian King

King on Nguyen's being “pro social media”, and how it helps you find exactly what you're looking for (my words, not Nguyen's)

I have tried similar tactics in the past, especially when I was writing about specific subjects, such as education policy or A.I. But what I found wasn’t really a sharpening of insight, but, rather, a tightened focus on the social-media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on any given topic. Even in moments when I wasn’t writing directly about some tweet I had seen, I was still gesturing toward it. Writing, in this form, felt more like sticking a comment bubble on an aggregated stream of news stories, social-media posts, and an assortment of video podcasts. Most pundits—at least those who comment on the world in columns, newsletters, or on podcasts—are doing some form of this. Taken together, such writing forms “the discourse.”

”...a tightened focus on the social-media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on any given topic.”

I don't have any insightful commentary to add but this wide-ranging interview with Saunders is fantastic and speaks to me, as does King's article about quitting social media.

-Ira