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“It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism”
In this edition of the Weekender: the history of looksmaxxing, a defense of love, and the myth of timelessness
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It’s Valentine’s Day and everyone’s making questionable decisions—about love, about peptides, about couches, and about eating a mystery gummy and then wandering into the woods.
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THE DISCOURSE
Briefly noted
Looksmaxxing takes center stage: laura reilly announced a new health and aesthetics newsletter, High Touch, with a viral post that described an extensive beauty regimen. Responses ran the gamut, from “this sounds like a dream month to me” to “I truly think I’d rather just be ugly and die a little sooner.” But, as Kaitlin Phillips points out, the newsletter is called “‘High Touch,’ not ‘Accessible Health Hacks for Poor People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Go To The Gym.’”
Is AI coming for our jobs? redux: An AI startup founder’s viral essay on X sparked the latest round of discussions on whether AI is coming for white-collar work. Derek Thompson talks through “The Doomsday Scenario for AI and Jobs,” while David Oks pushed back on the idea that AI is soon to replace humans—largely due to the bottlenecks that humans themselves present.
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DESIRES
Consumerism vs. spiritualism
A weed-induced crisis in the woods leads to a spiritual reckoning with what we actually want.
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