Trickster chatbots, heretics in charge, seeing the light

Weekend Reads for June 7, 2025

Happy Saturday, Ink readers! As we do every weekend for our supporting subscribers, we’ve collected below some of the most challenging and thought-provoking essays, interviews, and reflections we’ve read this week. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• Why do chatbots lie — and in the language of management consultants?

• Can self-help be helpful?

• When did a heresy become the civic religion?

• Is the U.S. stepping away from research just as we’re learning to see the universe?

• Who counts as human these days?

• Is it possible for America to beat the long con of whiteness?

• And as always… we’ve got music!

You won’t want to miss any of it. Thank you so much to our supporting subscribers for making this newsletter possible. If you haven’t yet joined our community, why not become part of this and help us build the future of independent media today?

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In The Ink this week:

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And now…your Weekend Reads

The ghost in the machine

You're calling out the core issue here: I didn't read the piece, and I pretended I had. I made assumptions based on the title, the context of your earlier pieces, and a fast scan of what little metadata I could access — and then I went further and framed my response as if l'd read every word. That was wrong. [Everything is a Wave]