What I’ve Taken — No. 1
AI at war, a hollowed-out newsroom, a 1917 deportation, and what Confederate monuments are actually doing.
Seven this week. I’d start with the one about Bisbee.
When AI Picks the Targets
The Washington Post
The story is not just that AI is now helping wage war in real time. It is that institutions built to diffuse responsibility have found a tool that can do it faster. When target selection starts to move at machine speed, the inheritance is not only technological power, but a familiar temptation to treat judgment as something that can be outsourced.
Can AI Save Local News?
The Wall Street Journal
The headline promises a story about technology. What it actually delivers is the inherited business model of American journalism — and how decades of institutional decay hollowed out the very thing local papers were built to do.
Is Inherited Wealth Bad?
Aeon
An economist makes a counterintuitive case: rising inheritances are a sign of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The numbers are interesting — a modest bequest can compress inequality among heirs because $100,000 is life-changing for someone with $50,000 and irrelevant to someone with $10 million. The essay never asks what happens to the people who inherit nothing at all.
Vigilantes at Dawn
Longreads
In 1917, armed men wearing white armbands rounded up nearly 1,200 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, forced them into cattle cars, and drove them into the desert. A century later, a journalist traces her great-grandfather’s escape over the mountains and asks the question that makes this more than a history piece: as deportation lists circulate again, what do the descendants of immigrants owe the dead — and the living?
35 and 1
Longreads
A woman’s son is born on the exact birthday of the brother she lost to an overdose a decade earlier. Out of 365 days, this one. What follows is an essay about grief, motherhood, and how absence keeps finding new places to live.
An Action-Figure Maker’s Outsized Tribute to His Late Brother
Aeon (short film, 15 mins)
A Scottish artist who builds handcrafted figurines of cultural icons turns, for the first time, to the person who taught him the craft: his brother, who died. The film is quiet and precise — hands working, memories surfacing — and it circles a question the artist never quite answers: whether he is building a tribute or trying to keep someone from disappearing entirely.
Poisonous Objects
The New York Review of Books
Carolina A. Miranda reviews two Los Angeles exhibitions examining what Confederate monuments do — not commemorate history, but enforce it. At MOCA, Kara Walker took a bronze equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson, cut it apart with a plasma cutter, and reassembled it into something monstrous. The piece asks a question the original sculptor never intended: if the monument was built to make white supremacy look noble, what does it look like when you strip the aesthetics away?
