Alex Rainert

For people coming of age after 2010, it’s easy to assume Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are just what being social on the internet looks like. It’s a reasonable assumption as those products (especially Facebook and later everything else they picked up along the way) have become so ubiquitous, and their businesses massive. People treat them like water or electricity - a necessary utility to maintain social connections - to friends, schoolmates, local parents, and others. While many companies ha

Like many, I came into this year with the wholly unoriginal goal of majorly resetting my relationship to “content.” Last May I came off 7 years working at the New York Times, where most of my waking life was intertwined with what was and continues to be an overwhelming period of news. That professional reality was paired with a deeply entrenched addiction to the pull-to-refresh slot machine of new information honed through 16+ years of heavy Twitter usage. It was clear these habits weren’t playi

This mashup trailer for the doc is 💯 It premieres tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 27.

Consensus reality—our broad, shared understanding of what is real and true—has shattered, and we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of subjective, bespoke realities. A deluge of content, sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously between aligned believers, has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts. On the eve of the second Trump administration, I just finished reading Renée DiResta’s Invisible R

One of my favorite 2024 listens is 99% Invisible’s Power Broker Breakdown - a podcast series that functions as a distributed book club celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan break the 1200+ page book into 12 episodes that they released each month throughout the year. The format was great and I wonder what other book-host combos would benefit from it.  Each episode is about 2.5 hours long. While I don’t usually listen to podcasts that long, they broke it up w

Recently, many government norms we’ve taken for granted as “how America works” have been exposed to be just that - norms. They’ve proven to be malleable (and in some cases optional). For those of us who only know this country, it can be challenging to know what to make of it. While we’ve learned about other democracies’ deterioration and collapse through history, those moments feel far removed from the 🇺🇸 Democracy 🎇 we‘ve enjoyed here.  Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, is on

Over the past year, I’ve regularly switched between the different LLMs for my day-to-day work to keep up with their evolution. While they’re quickly getting more capable, I feel their incredible value remains inaccessible to normal people. I expect that over the next 6-12 months, we’ll see many companies focus on the experience layer that sits between the user and the LLM. This is where users have a clear path to this new value without needing to know the what the model is doing behind the scen

Earlier this week, I took my mom to see The Wild Robot and I loved it. It explores aspiration, acceptance, and resilience in a funny and moving way, and the visual storytelling is beautiful. I'm a sucker for both animal and robot-with-feelings stories, so this film is right in my wheelhouse. This movie hit hard as a parent who regularly thinks about our kids (now 14 and 11) growing up and heading out on their own. I hadn't read the book it's based on, but I'm happy to learn there are two