I know some days I get inside your head. I share some disturbing news and you find yourself thinking about it more than you want to. It’s like an earworm melody that gets stuck in your head long after you’ve stopped listening. Songs and words get inside your head the old fashioned way—through your eyes and ears. The next generation of technologies aren’t taking such a meandering route. They’re attaching directly to your brain. Like all new technologies, that’s both good news and potentially really disturbing news. Let’s join Linda Kinstler in the NYT Magazine(Gift Article) as she does something as simple as putting on what looks like an ordinary pair of grey eyeglasses. Before long, she was using her mind to move a robotic soccer ball set on a table in front of her. “The ball had been programmed to light up and rotate whenever my level of neural ‘effort’ reached a certain threshold. When my attention waned, the soccer ball stood still. For now, the glasses are solely for research purposes. At M.I.T., [scientist Nataliya] Kosmyna has used them to help patients with A.L.S. communicate with caregivers — but she said she receives multiple purchase requests a week. So far she has declined them. She’s too aware that they could easily be misused.” The Next Privacy Battleground Is Inside Your Brain. Scientists have used these kinds of brain computer interfaces to allow “people with locked-in syndrome, who cannot move or speak, to communicate with their families and caregivers and even play video games. Scientists have experimented with using neural data from fMRI imaging and EEG signals to detect sexual orientation, political ideology and deception, to take just a few examples.” (I’m thinking of wearing a pair of brain-sensing glasses while I write NextDraft. I want to see how many news tabs I have to open before the robotic soccer ball rolls off the table and deflates.) 2The U (of You)“Higher education has by and large embraced influencer culture, which already dominates beauty, travel, health and so much of everyday society. Plenty of schools, like Miami, funnel marketing dollars toward student creators as a recruiting tool or have embraced the RushTok phenomenon of viral sorority selections. But influencing can also be messy, mean and unpredictable, as the college of the Hurricanes discovered last month, when a tearful spat between two freshman influencers spilled offline, generating weeks of tabloid headlines for the university and spiraling into the office of the dean of students.” WaPo (Gift Article): Influencers are royalty at this college, and the turf war is vicious. “Miami no longer had two influencers earning social cred for the school; it had a digital slap fight that hundreds of thousands of people were watching. The student newspaper couldn’t keep the print copies on the news stands fast enough ... The New York Post ran a story titled, ‘Campus influencers are in tears over having fewer followers than their peers — and the grift is ruining their college experience.’” 3Trump Calls His LawyerTrump has launched his latest salvo in the war over the Epstein files. He says he’s asking Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s ties to slew of high-profile figures (who all happen to be political opponents or enemies). I’m not sure Trump’s strategy will slow down this scandal. But it points to an even bigger one: The way the president has turned the FBI and Justice Department into his own personal legal force. And they way the leaders of those institutions are going along with it. 4Weekend WhatsWhat to Binge: “Marissa Irvine arrives to collect her young son Milo from his first playdate, but the woman who answers the door isn’t a mother she recognizes. She doesn’t have Milo and has never heard of him.” Sarah Snook stars in All Her Fault on Peacock. 5Extra, ExtraThe Fix is In: “The Trump administration is preparing broad exemptions to certain tariffs in an effort to ease elevated food prices that have provoked anxiety for American consumers.” (Wait, I thought consumers didn’t pay for tariffs?) So they’re trying to solve a problem they created. And their base will probably give them credit for it. 6Feel Good Friday“Last year, as his economics class at the Brooklyn Friends school studied the national housing crisis, he and a classmate hatched an idea for an online housing platform that could help people find homes they could afford. First, he taught himself to code.” NYT(Gift Article): New York Lacked an Affordable Housing Portal. So These Teenagers Made One.
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Friday, November 14, 2025
Hack and the Bean Stalk
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