Weekend Longreads 2026

Longread Links from The Ride Home Podcast

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Friday, July 31 2026

• How TikTok, Reels, and Amazon storefronts enabled microinfluencers with less than 100K followers to earn middle-class salaries via brand and affiliate deals (Bloomberg)
• What happiness researchers say about enjoying your time off: anticipation is a free source of pleasure, company beats going solo, and build in some physical challenge (Washington Post)

Friday, July 24 2026

• Meet All The Middle Aged Women Who Don’t Exist: AI-generated wellness influencers, all gorgeous and all “57”, are selling NMN supplements to women over 40 (Charlotte’s Book)
• Big US pizza delivery chains are struggling as DoorDash and Uber Eats give independent pizzerias greater market access, erasing the tech moat chains once had (FT)

Friday, July 17 2026

• The Verge spends a month testing Siri AI in the iOS 27 public beta, finding it’s already reshaping how people use their iPhone, though it can’t yet reach non-Apple apps (The Verge)

Friday, June 26 2026

• How Chicago is betting on quantum computing, including turning the site of its former US Steel mill into a campus, after largely missing the digital revolution (WSJ)
• As China’s working-age population shrinks, consensus is growing that China must embed embodied AI robots into as many tasks as possible, as soon as possible (FT)

Friday, June 19 2026

• Google Is Using Nvidia’s Playbook to Build a Rival AI Chip Business (WSJ)
• AI Is Splitting the Job Market in Two, PwC Study Shows (Bloomberg)
• Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness (The Verge)

Friday, June 12 2026

• As companies are hit by rising AI costs, they are increasingly using tools that tap cheaper models, including some from China, putting price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic (WSJ)
• Sixteen economists weigh in on what AI will mean for the US economy, workers, and workplaces; only two expect AI to actually create more jobs (WSJ)

Friday, June 05 2026

• A preview of what to expect from WWDC on Monday, including iOS 27, a revamped Siri, macOS 27 Liquid Glass refinements, and more (Bloomberg)
• Ted Chiang argues LLM conversations are cleverly disguised sentence continuation, not consciousness, and that no intrinsic property of neural networks suggests otherwise (The Atlantic)

Friday, May 29 2026

• Simon Willison on how coding agents gave Anthropic and OpenAI real product-market fit, burning $1,000+/month in tokens per power user and changing enterprise pricing (Simon Willison)
• Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s highest-grossing law firm, is setting aside $500M to build its own AI platform rather than rely on tools available to its rivals (FT)

Friday, May 22 2026

• In more than two-thirds of the world’s countries, birthrates have fallen below replacement, and researchers increasingly point the finger at smartphones and social media (FT)

Friday, May 15 2026

• OpenEvidence, an AI clinical tool, is now used by ~65% of US doctors across 27M clinical encounters per month, becoming an AI-era equivalent of consulting a colleague (NBC News)
• Janitor AI, a romantic fantasy roleplay chatbot site run by three men, claims 2.5M DAUs and 15M total users, with 70-80% identifying as women (Forbes)

Friday, May 08 2026

• Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark explains why there’s a 60%+ chance of AI systems autonomously building their successors by 2029 and the consequences of automated AI R&D (Import AI)
• How Delta SkyMiles and airline loyalty programs turned carriers into fintech companies with wings, and why most airlines couldn’t survive without them (NY Mag)

Friday, May 01 2026

• Talkie-LM: what happens when you train a language model exclusively on text from before 1930? Can it predict the future or independently rediscover General Relativity? (Talkie)

Friday, April 24 2026

• A look at the AI nonprofit METR, maker of maybe the most important AI benchmark, whose time-horizon metrics are used by researchers and Wall Street to track AI development (NYTimes)
• The Infinite Machine Olto e-bike review: a more elegant solution for trips too long to walk but too short to drive (The Verge)

Friday, April 17 2026

• India produces 1.5M+ CS graduates annually, but AI coding tools are forcing its $315B IT outsourcing industry into an existential reckoning (Bloomberg)
• Doug Liman’s $70M movie Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi uses AI for sets, lighting, and more in post-production, cutting costs from an estimated $300M (The Wrap)
• Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data (Forbes)

Friday, April 10 2026

• An Internet of Checkpoints (Longreads)

Thursday, April 02 2026

• How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company (NYTimes)
• AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again (Bloomberg)

Friday, March 27 2026

• Gemini task automation is slow, clunky, and super impressive (The Verge)
• How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days (Fast Company)

Friday, March 20 2026

• ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer (The Verge)
• The Human Skill That Eludes AI (The Atlantic)

Friday, March 13 2026

• Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did (David Oks’s Blog)
• James Mason in a cave with a cat (Joel Morris’s Substack)

Friday, March 06 2026

• SpaceX: the final frontier of IPOs (FT)
• Who needs data centers in space when they can float offshore? (TechCrunch)

Friday, February 27 2026

• The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored (NYTimes)

Friday, February 20 2026

• Who needs a laptop when you have a folding phone? (The Verge)

Friday, February 13 2026

• The AI Gold Rush Is Breaking a Silicon Valley Taboo: Cashing Out Before the IPO (WSJ)
• The New Fabio Is Claude (NYTimes)

Friday, February 06 2026

• Inside Elon Musk’s $1.25 Trillion AI and Space Megamerger (WSJ)
• Everyone is stealing TV (The Verge)

Friday, January 23 2026

• Russia, Ukraine and the race for Chinese drone components (FT)

Friday, January 09 2026

• The Man Who Could Be Apple’s Next C.E.O. (NYTimes)
• The cost of America’s nuclear revival (FT)