WEEKEND READS: In with the new
The best writing and thinking for December 27, 2025
Happy Saturday, Ink readers!
We hope you’re all getting some time to connect with friends, family, neighbors, and community this week. We’re going to be doing the same, and posting a bit less frequently — look out for some choice pieces from the archives and transcripts of key conversations in the coming days. We’ll be back to our regular schedule in the new year.
Meanwhile, as we do each weekend, we’ve collected some of the most interesting writing and thinking we’ve come across as we’ve done our research this week. In our last roundup for 2025, that includes some thoughts on the year’s best (and worst) writing, and why we should treasure both in the age of chatbots; a new perspective on the business of war; writers’ perspectives on reading; and much more.
Welcome to today’s edition of Weekend Reads. We invite you to read along with us.
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In defense of bad writing
Even in an era where humans are supposedly ingesting and expelling a larger volume of text than ever before, it seems that we can hardly be bothered to sit down and compose much original language ourselves. That’s why I’m grateful for the yearly ritual of the Shamsys, even the candidates that make me feel concussed after we read them aloud in our deliberations. They are each a testament to human oddity. I find that LLMs produce sentences that are smooth, glib, poreless, smiling, somewhat like a beluga whale. But every busted sentence written by a human is busted in its own way. Each of these sentences is unwittingly an act of resistance against the onrushing techno-homogenization of language. [Defector]
