Weekend Longreads 2025
Longread Links from The Ride Home Podcast
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Wednesday, December 31 2025
- 2025 letter (Zhengdong Wang)
Wednesday, December 24 2025
Friday, December 19 2025
- Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s turbulent bet on AI (FT)
- Economics of Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers (Andrew McCalip)
- Feeding the Machine (The Verge)
Friday, December 12 2025
- Want This Hearing Aid? Well, Who Do You Know? (Wired)
- Tech bros head to etiquette camp as Silicon Valley levels up its style (Washington Post)
- Why AGI Will Not Happen
Friday, December 05 2025
- 18,000 Reasons It’s So Hard to Build a Chip Factory in America (NYTimes)
- In Arizona Desert, Taiwanese Families Create Community and Build a Factor (NYTimes)
- A Growing U.S. Tech Hub Needs Workers. Colleges Try to Keep Up. (NYTimes)
Wednesday, November 26 2025
- Kicking Robots
- The Pentagon Can’t Trust GPS Anymore. Is Quantum Physics the Answer? (WSJ)
- I’m officially done with YouTube Kids (The Verge)
Friday, November 21 2025
- Google’s new AI image creator took my shirt off (The Verge)
- Google’s Nano Banana Pro generates excellent conspiracy fuel (The Verge)
- The new silicon valley (literally) (The Verge)
- How America’s Hottest Chicken Chain Keeps Its Secret Sauce a Secret (WSJ)
Friday, November 14 2025
- Sundar Pichai Is Google’s AI ‘Wartime CEO’ After All (Bloomberg)
- CRYPTO: Realm of the Coin
- I’m Going to Be a Dad. Here’s Why I’m Not Posting About My Kid Online
Friday, November 07 2025
- How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time (MIT Technology Review)
Friday, October 31 2025
- Nike says its first ‘powered footwear’ is like an e-bike for your feet (The Verge)
- Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound (The New Yorker)
Friday, October 17 2025
- AI Data Centers, Desperate for Electricity, Are Building Their Own Power Plants (WSJ)
- Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream
- How Sam Altman Played Hollywood
- TiVo Has Sold Its Last DVR. These People Refuse to Let Go. (WSJ)
Friday, October 10 2025
Friday, October 03 2025
- Egon Durban’s $55bn buyout bet raises stakes for Silver Lake (FT)
- Silver Lake Cements Power Broker Status With $55 Billion EA Deal (Bloomberg)
- ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners
Friday, September 26 2025
Friday, September 19 2025
- Since Leaving Washington, Elon Musk Has Been All In on His A.I. Company (NYTimes)
- OpenAI Raids Apple for Hardware Talent, Manufacturing Partners (The Information)
Friday, September 12 2025
- Why is AI struggling to discover new drugs? (FT)
- Online travel platforms prepare for rise of artificial intelligence ‘agents’ (FT)
Friday, September 05 2025
Friday, August 29 2025
- AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers (Wired)
- This Visiting Interstellar Comet Just Keeps Getting Weirder
Friday, August 22 2025
- He Sold His Likeness. Now His Avatar Is Shilling Supplements on TikTok. (NYTimes)
- Bill Gates meets Willy Wonka: How Epic’s 82-year-old billionaire CEO, Judy Faulkner, built her software factory (CNBC)
Friday, August 15 2025
- Big Tech’s A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone (NYTimes)
- Behind Wall Street’s Abrupt Flip on Crypto (NYTimes)
Friday, August 08 2025
- AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’ (WSJ)
- SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO. (New York Magazine)
- Is Perrier as pure as it claims? The bottled water scandal gripping France (BBC)
Friday, August 01 2025
- The first commercial space station is nearly here. And it could change space forever
- A Deadly Fungus Killed 10 Scientists Working in a Tomb. It Could Be a Breakthrough in Curing Cancer.
- What happens once we spot the asteroid that will hit Earth? (FT)
Friday, July 25 2025
- First Look: macOS Tahoe Public Beta
- If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good For Everything, Should We All Be on Them?
Friday, July 18 2025
- 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment (The New Yorker)
Friday, July 11 2025
- The Grand Unified Theory of Rogue Waves (Quanta Magazine)
- This Breakthrough Sponge Could Change How the World Gets Clean Water
Friday, June 27 2025
- My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them (Wired)
- AI is ruining houseplant communities online (The Verge)
Friday, June 20 2025
- Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content (Ars Technica)
- Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex (Quanta Magazine)
Friday, June 13 2025
- Why we should worry about the rise of stablecoins (FT)
- Nintendo Switch 2 review: bigger, faster, and the best handheld since Game Boy
Friday, June 06 2025
- Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela wants Hollywood to embrace AI video (The Verge)
- The Man Whose Weather Forecast Saved the World (NYTimes)
Friday, May 30 2025
- For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here (NYTimes)
- How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull Financed the Making Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Friday, May 23 2025
- Exclusive look at the creation of High NA, ASML’s new $400 million chipmaking colossus (CNBC)
- Is Mubi Really Worth $1 Billion? Inside Efe Cakarel’s Plan to Make the Global Streamer Cooler Than A24 (Variety)
Friday, May 16 2025
- I let lasers power my smart home — and I don’t want to go back (The Verge)
- The Popular Alternative - The State of A24
Friday, May 09 2025
- Can we make AI less power-hungry? These researchers are working on it. (Ars Technica)
- Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again (Wired)
Friday, May 02 2025
- When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History (Quanta Magazine)
- The Life of the Most-Used Citi Bike in New York City (Bloomberg)
Friday, April 25 2025
- The Apple Watch Just Turned 10. Here’s How Far It’s Come (Wired)
- The Race to Fix Aging Computer Systems Heats Up With AI’s Help (Bloomberg)
Friday, April 18 2025
- As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond
- Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet (NYTimes)
Friday, April 11 2025
- 12 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2025 (IEEE Spectrum)
- Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military (MIT Technology Review)
- How Apple Fumbled Siri’s AI Makeover (The Information)
Friday, March 28 2025
- Yahoo Is Still Here—and It Has Big Plans for AI (Wired)
- Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science (Wired)
Friday, March 21 2025
- How the AI Boom Created the Most Valuable Monopolies in History (Bloomberg)
- One Man’s Crypto Windfall Is Funding a $1 Billion Space Station Dream (Bloomberg)
Friday, March 14 2025
- ‘Ne Zha 2’s $2B+ Box Office Run: How It Happened And What Does Blockbuster Behemoth Mean For China & Hollywood Ahead
- The End Of Children (The New Yorker)
Friday, March 07 2025
- McDonald’s Gives Its Restaurants an AI Makeover (WSJ)
- YouTube at 20: How the Video Colossus Launched the Creator Economy and Turned From Hollywood Foe to Friend (Variety)
Friday, February 28 2025
Friday, February 14 2025
- Forget DeepSeek. Large language models are getting cheaper still (The Economist)
- How a resurgent Walmart saw off the Amazon threat (FT)
- Developer creates endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction (Ars Technica)
Friday, February 07 2025
- How is Fortnite’s Attempt to Become the YouTube of Gaming Going?
- The Sims Turned Players Into Gods. And Farmers. And Vampires. And Landlords. (NYTimes)
Friday, January 31 2025
- DeepSeek Chief’s Journey From Math Geek to Global Disruptor (WSJ)
- Chinese Quant Whiz Built DeepSeek In The Shadow Of a Hedge Fund Rout (Bloomberg)
- DeepSeek Debates: Chinese Leadership On Cost, True Training Cost, Closed Model Margin Impacts
Friday, January 24 2025
Friday, January 17 2025
- Charlwin Mao, the Chinese tech founder welcoming ‘TikTok refugees’ (FT)
- Kids Turn to a Mental-Health Chatbot to Share Their Anxieties (WSJ)
- To release Animal Crossing in the West, Nintendo ‘had to change everything’
Friday, January 10 2025
- The New $30,000 Side Hustle: Making Job Referrals for Strangers (Bloomberg)
- The smart glasses era is here — I got a first look (The Verge)
- The Anti-Social Century (The Atlantic)
Friday, January 03 2025
- AI Needs So Much Power, It’s Making Yours Worse (Bloomberg)