Dave Lee
My WorkBlogupdated 12 hours ago

Interesting links, noteworthy journalism and other miscellanea from around the web.

I'm not a car guy. Nor a guy who can spend $2 million on a reimagined vintage Porsche. But this Louis Vuitton-Singer-Porsche collaboration is beautiful work.

On the outside, the two latest vintage Porsche 911s reimagined by automotive design company Singer have little in common with a Louis Vuitton bag. But look closely at the interior of the cabriolet and coupe, and you’ll see patterns and finishes intrinsic to the French fashion house.

Louis Vuitton’s Next Release? Vintage Porscheswsj.comIn a collaboration with Singer, the fashion label made over two vintage sports cars.

Slate on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's plans for motherhood:

[W]hen Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram recently to announce she is freezing her eggs, surely MAGA was resoundingly grateful to her for carrying forward this pro-baby message, right? Not quite. As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”

In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count. Being pregnant isn’t enough. Conservatives also seem to require the “barefoot” and “in the kitchen” parts of the traditional job description.

AOC exposes MAGA’s motherhood hypocrisysalon.comThe New York congresswoman freezes her eggs, and Republicans show their true feelings

The Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council had an important task: to attract foreign investment into Nigeria. It had a line in the federal budget, a sought-after office inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja, where ministries are housed, and a website on the official government of Nigeria domain. There was only one hitch. It did not officially exist.

How a made-up agency found its way into Nigeria’s budgetft.comAlleged head of fictional investment council was allocated government funding and met top officials

An Australian man wanted to use AI agent OpenClaw to automate the booking of classes at his local gym. It was... rather good at it. TechCrunch:

When he asked the bot to book him a spot, the best it could do was No. 4 on the wait list, he told ABC. Then his agent told him it had found a way to book him into the classes in advance. Far in advance. Months before the gym made those classes available for sign up.

Bird asked if it could move him up on the waitlist. It did as asked and attempted to do so. The bot had found a vulnerability in the authorization portion of the appointment software the gym was using. It hacked in and canceled the No. 1 reservation on the wait list. The bot cheerfully told him, according to logs of the chat published by ABC:

Tech industry is buzzing after a Claude agent hacked into a gym | TechCrunchtechcrunch.comAn OpenClaw agent hacked into a gym's reservation system to bump its human boss higher on a class's waitlist. And the tech industry took notice.

The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards.

Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they losenytimes.comThese days, we dissect athletes' every utterance in search of hidden meanings and innuendo. The hypocrisy is both comical and frightening.

social mediasportculture wars

A horror lede from Bloomberg's Olivia Carville:

When TikTok tweaked its algorithm in 2021 to stop users from being overwhelmed with harmful content, the company didn’t roll out the safer version to everyone, a confidential internal document shows. Instead, to see if the change might reduce the app’s stickiness, the company conducted an experiment. It created a control group of 10% of US users — at the time, that would have been about 15 million people — who kept the old version of the app. This group, according to the document, included 16-year-old Chase Nasca. TikTok’s algorithm pushed him thousands of videos about suicide, sadness, hopelessness and loneliness, right up until he killed himself.

TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature From Millions. One Died by Suicidebloomberg.comA confidential document says an algorithm adjustment was kept from many users “by design,” as part of an experiment to measure engagement.

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Today and its TV counterpart, Breakfast News, then shared the same open-plan office at Television Centre, separated only by a row of possibly plastic pot-plants. On my first day, making sure that everyone could hear, Rod stood on Today’s side of the Berlin Wall. ‘That side, television,’ he said. ‘This side, journalism.’ I’m hearing there’s a vacancy for the breakfast TV editorship, I said with mock innocence. ‘I’d rather clean the toilets,’ said Rod, loudly.

Andrew Gilligan on his old boss, Rod Liddle, who died this week.

Rod Liddle was the most exciting boss I ever hadspectator.comThe best word for my feelings about Rod Liddle’s death is one that Rod was occasionally heard to use himself. Fuck. Rod was my editor at the Today programme, the most exciting boss I’ve ever had. He hired me, from a newspaper, to be part of a team he was building because he wanted reporters who would

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What's a podcast?

In an age of content blurring across multiple platforms at once, Ashley Carmen on industry efforts to define what exactly constitutes a "podcast":

Here’s where the group ended up: “A podcast is an on-demand show rooted in the spoken word and fully intelligible as audio. Typically episodic and conversational, podcasts cover wide-ranging themes and formats. They are accessed as audio or video via open RSS feeds and other distribution methods.”

A shorter version boils down to: “If it works with your eyes closed, it’s a podcast.”

Finally, Podcasting Has a Definitionbloomberg.comAfter months of secret meetings, a group of industry heavyweights are releasing a white paper codifying new podcasting frameworks

mediabloombergpodcastsashley carmen

I confess: it was the title that lured me. Tell me you don’t feel the same.

Nigella Lawson (who else?)

Girdlebuster Pienigella.comI confess: it was the title that lured me. Tell me you don’t feel the same. I came across this in a recipe by Elinor Klivans, whom I often turn to for chocolatey solace, in her The Essential Chocolate Chip Cookbook, which includes the wonderful phrase “let the chocolate chips fall where they will”. Although her recipes always work to the letter, my recipe is not hers. I am inspired by the digestive and chocolate base and coffee ice cream filling (though if you’re feeding children, I’d suggest vanilla) but I like a butterscotchy topping, which sets the minute it hits the ice cream. Sometimes bits of ice cream bubble up to the surface, making the top gloriously Florentined. And the joy of the girdlebuster (as it is known for short at home) is that, should there be any left, you can put it back into its dish and just stash in the freezer again for midnight feasts. Admittedly, this is not huge, but a small slice is all that’s needed. Do not let it “ripen” out of the freezer before slicing because it all gets too sticky and drippy and messy.

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Interesting examination of whether therapists are too quick to suggest patients cut off ties with their parents. Of 7,000 estranged parents in a recent survey, some 3,000 said they believed a therapist had played a role in the split.

Is it really good therapy to break your mother’s heart?

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?wsj.comMany moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice—and a growing number of researchers agree.

therapywall street journalfamily

Often imitated, never beaten — for decades now the BBC's closing montage for major sporting events has been a treat. Sunday's World Cup finale was no exception.

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The AP explores one important facet of why US soccer, even with an eager and enormous population at its disposal, struggles to produce world beaters.

In Argentina, one of the greatest honors for a local soccer club might be to produce a player who moves to an even bigger club, then maybe becomes part of the country’s storied national team. In the United States, if a player like that walked into a local soccer program, it would surprise nobody if that program tried to eke every penny out of the player’s parents before showing him or her off to the world.

Therein lies one of the crucial differences between a nation of 46 million that plays Spain on Sunday for a fourth World Cup title and another with more than seven times the population that has never sniffed that kind of success.

US must learn to navigate its pay-for-play world to find a pipeline to World Cup competitivenessapnews.comAmerica’s early departure from the 2026 World Cup raised a question that arises every four years: What would it take to produce a global soccer superpower in the United States?

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