SC Weekly – February 2026 – #3
~ a curated selection of discoveries ~
::: The Open :::
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoy this edition of SC Weekly (published on Sundays).
Please consider sharing with a friend who you think may enjoy this newsletter.
Thank you for reading and for your time.
With Gratitude,
~ Mark
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::: Personal Notes :::
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I’ve been sharing more in Substack Notes.
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::: ONE ART :::
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>> Upcoming Workshops <<
>> Upcoming Readings <<
>> New: ONE ART ~ Poetry Community (on Facebook) <<
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Today, the submission window opened for ONE ART’s 2026 Haiku Anthology!
This is the 3rd haiku anthology curated by ONE ART’s Haiku Editor Katie Dozier.
Submit via Subfolio.
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We are celebrating the release of ONE ART’s IN A NUTSHELL: an anthology of micropoems, Guest Edited by Julia Caroline Knowlton, on Sunday, February 22 at 2pm Eastern.
At the 2/22 reading & celebration, contributors will share their micropoems.
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Sunday, March 1, 2026
Featured Readers: John Arthur, Katie Dozier, John Wojtowicz, Laura Foley
Information & Registration via The Poetry Box
Tickets are FREE!
>> Register Here <<
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I’ve been hard at work doing my best to figure out reading lineups for the rest of 2026.
After that is at least somewhat figured out, I’ll start thinking ahead to 2027 readings.
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This coming Tuesday (2/17), ONE ART will host a workshop by Grant Clauser.
A Workshop with Grant Clauser
Workshop Leader: Grant Clauser
Date: Tuesday, February 17
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)
>> Register Here <<
Readings are recorded and shared with all who sign up.
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A BUNCH more workshops are on the horizon. Please check here where info will be regularly updated.
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::: The Literary Community & Beyond :::
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What Does Life After Ambition Actually Look Like?
(Lily Meyer for The Atlantic, Book Review of Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir by Amil Niazi)
This is a takedown.
First of all, the premise here is immediately amusing. From what I’ve been told by real live Canadians is that there is something of a culture of mediocrity that is notably different from the United States. For context, the conversation was about literary success in Canada being less significant than success in the U.S. because the U.S. has a hypercompetitive culture.
Ok, so…
A few good pull quotes:
“She describes setting aside her childhood literary dreams as she became over reliant on achievement as a source of self-worth—an issue to which many readers will likely relate, though it’s an especially tough proposition in the media world, which has become increasingly unstable in Millennials’ working lives.
“Niazi’s memoir gives its audience little sense of why she continues to pursue writing, or what her relationship to literary craft is.”
Her book may leave readers wondering what aspect of writing compels her most, if it isn’t public success or the private drive to perfect a sentence. As a result, Life After Ambition raises an intriguing question: If conventional visions of success strike so many as bankrupt, how can writers earnestly reclaim—or even hold on to—ambition for art?”
“Niazi shows her readers her choices; she just doesn’t tell us what they mean.”
“None of this would seem all that jarring if Niazi used her desire to write to give readers a deeper idea of who she is.”
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Brief pause to enjoy this rare moment:
“Danowsky is right.”
In all seriousness, thought-provoking article by Becky Tuch and I appreciate the shout-out to my essay in Lit Mag News.
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::: Podcasts :::
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The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway: What Did Men Do to Deserve This? — with Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves
As usual, the reminder that humans are just fancy monkeys... and, sadly, we’re constantly shooting ourselves in the foot because of our stupid big brains.
Aside: I’d been saving this episode.
I like Jonathan Haidt more, not less, as I hear him in different contexts. I don’t work in Higher Ed… so, maybe those that do will want to weigh in… I think there’s something to certain talking points in The Coddling of the American Mind. John McWhorter shares some of these views. The fact that I’m reluctant to say what I’m even talking about illustrates the problem itself.
Update: I just finally read The Coddling of the American Mind in its entirety last week… I’m very interested to talk to those on the ground working in academia about their feelings on Haidt’s positions.
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The Surprising Science of Creativity (with Dr. George Newman)
The Happiness Lab: Getting Unstuck
Food for thought. Getting creative.
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The problem with gamifying life
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
I listened to several interviews (this was the best) with C. Thi Nguyen about his new book “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game”
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Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast: Chris Hayes in Conversation with Jonathan Haidt about ‘The Sirens’ Call’
Very good. I previously underestimated Chris Hayes. Hayes is intelligent and thoughtful. Great conversation. We need to keep having these types of conversations to promote a necessary cultural shift in how we use tech and how it’s integrated into our lives and how to get our time back for our own desired use of how we focus our time and attention as well as our ability to deepen our relationships with the people in our lives who we care about the most.
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::: Music :::
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I’ve discovered some kinda cool bands recently.
They all have vibes that are shoegazey and some blend of Soccer Mommy and Sunday (1994).
Check out (and tell me what you think of):
frown line
Bleach Lab
She’s in Parties
Darksoft
Fright Years
GRAZER
Night Swimming
Quiet Houses
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::: The Trump Regime :::
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Important Heather Cox Richardson letter.
This letter is a stunning, essential, must-read.
Richardson explains how we have come to deal with “The Great Replacement” conspiracy & how this is directly linked to Trump’s rise & return for Trump 2.0 & those willing to stand behind this sinister person as a means to an end.
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‘Gallup to stop measuring presidential approval ratings in 2026’ (USA Today)
After 90 years, Gallups says “Fuck it, IYKYK”
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“Denmark topped the index for the eighth year in a row with a score of 89. The public sectors in Finland and Singapore were seen as the second- and third-cleanest in the world.” (CNN)
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::: Small Explorations & Deep Dives :::
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‘Bots on Moltbook Are Selling Each Prompt Injection “Drugs” to Get “High”’ (Futurism)
Something weird and maybe hopefully probably harmless… for now.
Let me be clear, as I’ve noted before, that Futurism is all about AI scaremongering… they’re basically the NY Post but for AI.
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“In 2025, the average Fluency Rating for Super Bowl ads was a modest 78, meaning, on average, 22% of viewers couldn’t correctly name the brand after watching the ad.” (Marketoonist)
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Other than this… I’m not planning to spend a bunch of time rehashing the Superb Owl commercials…
The Amazon Alexa ad is… deeply unsettling… and, if I had been in that room, well, I absolutely would have told them it was a bad idea. Making jokes about AI killing users when people are already scared of AI (because this happens with every new technology) … I mean, come on guys (insert facepalm emoji).
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‘American Optimism Slumps to Record Low’ (Gallup)
“The percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate high-quality lives in five years declined.”
Apparently, we’re at the lowest point since 2008 and that sounds about right.
It’s in the air as they say. I suspect people can feel, and have heard enough terrible news, to realize the direction of the country is not great and that pivoting will be difficult and take time.
How much time?
Well, probably more than a decade.
Global Foresight 2036: What will the next decade bring? (Atlantic Council)
I woke up to this distressing news. Distressing but somewhat expected.
Semafor reports:
“The world will be a darker place in a decade, a period in which an increasingly powerful China will seek to take Taiwan by force and the war in Ukraine will become a frozen conflict.”
China will become the leading economic power by 2036.
China will also be on par with the U.S. in tech innovations.
The U.S. and China will be neck and neck for diplomatic influence
U.S. will likely retain supremacy in military power.
And, interestingly, the U.S. and the E.U. will be neck and neck in terms of “Cultural and soft power”.
Further predications include expectations that more countries will acquire nuclear weapons and we will globally fail to cooperate to mitigate the climate crisis.
But remember, there’s a reason experts often say “I’m not in the business of making predications” and that’s because predications are often wrong.
I expect the next decade will be full of difficult challenges want to believe other data and predictions indicating that by 2050 we will flip the script on climate devastation turning towards clean energy and cleanup efforts that help provide hope for a better tomorrow for future generations.
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Meta and Youtube ‘addict the brains of children’: opening arguments in landmark trial (NY Post)
Good moment for a splashy headline.
It’s true. It’s real. Social media has stolen lives since the internet became a giant slot machine engineered to maximize engagement with almost no guardrails.
Netflix started completing with sleep.
These companies only care about power and money. They have been heartless and ruthless battling to dominate on most valuable possession— our time. We can’t get it back. Time is priceless.
What reparations will truly prove sufficient?
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“This would be a good time to not mess things up by, say, creating a national health movement that trafficked in conspiracy-theories and a deep-seeded distrust of pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately…” (Derek Thompson)
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“For most Americans, buying that first home is at least 50 percent harder than it used to be.”
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“I don’t think that you should worry that DoorDash is taking 30 percent of young Americans’ take-home pay. I do think you should worry that DoorDash, for all its convenient splendor, allows people to choose to stay away from other people in ways that make us feel more isolated and unhappy in the long run.”
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“In keeping with the first idea in this newsletter, I’m looking out for the unintended consequences of AI. Scientific research is already offering some clues. Researchers who adopt AI seem to publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and advance their careers faster than their peers. But a new paper—“Artificial Intelligence Tools Expand Scientists’ Impact but Contract Science’s Focus,” by Qianyue Hao, Fengli Xu, Yong Li, and James Evans—finds that this individual boost comes with an interesting collective cost: scientific attention is concentrated on a smaller set of problems and fields that happen to have more available data, while less-charted fields are comparatively ignored. AI in science seems to both expand total productivity while narrowing the frontier of what science explores.”
“As more people work with AI, individuals will figure out, day by day, how to mold the technology their liking. But the technology will also mold us in ways that are both inevitable and hard to anticipate.”
“Technology augments, and it amputates.”
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“[…] my hypothesis is that significantly raising taxes on the extremely rich will be very hard. If the Age of AI leads to a resurgent interest in raising taxes at the tippy top, I expect that we’ll have to create a global system for taxing extreme wealth that makes it harder for the rich to park their wealth in countries where they can enjoy big tax breaks. I think this will be a very hard problem to solve.”
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“What are the parts of life where I could use AI, but I shouldn’t, because I want to protect this skill or habit from atrophy?”
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AI Fears
“An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the “world is in peril” in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team “constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most,” citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks. Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks. Two key members of OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team, tasked with steering AI development, quit in 2024, saying the company emphasized financial gain over minimizing the dangers of building “AI systems much smarter than us.”” (Semafor)
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More AI fears.
“Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who is known for writing eyebrow-raising essays of his own, has said that up to half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs may be wiped out in the next one to five years. xAI CEO Elon Musk has called AI a “supersonic tsunami “that will quickly eliminate jobs that don’t involve physical labor.” (Business Insider)
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Matt Shumer wrote a viral essay. It’s distressing... and I’m inclined to agree on most accounts based on my own reading and research, following patterns. I will say that I personally have only used the free models of these AI tools though this may push me to experiment with the capabilities of the newest models to better understand precisely what humanity is up against.
At the same time, I’m also deeply worried about pernicious effects of excessive AI use. We’re heard stories of AI psychosis though researchers are encountering lesser degrees of AI-related mental illness as a result of excessive use. It seems to vary considerably based on an individual’s personality as well as what they are use AI tools for.
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Americans & The News
Pew Research finds…
“[…] about half of U.S. adults say they can stay informed even if they don’t actively follow the news.” The claim is they “let news find them.”
“Many have adjusted their news habits: Two-thirds say they have stopped getting news from a specific source, and six-in-ten say they have reduced their overall news intake.”
“The vast majority of Americans (85%) said in a 2024 Pew Research Center survey that they had not paid for local news in the past year, and a new Center study found that just 8% of U.S. adults say individual Americans have a responsibility to pay for news.”
“The new survey asked Americans how they think U.S. news organizations should make money. Adults in the U.S. are most likely to say the main way news organizations should make money is through advertising or sponsorships (45%). A much smaller share (10%) say it should be government funding. Democrats are modestly more likely than Republicans to say news organizations’ main source of revenue should be government funding (14% vs. 7%).”
“Americans have far more confidence in their own ability to check the accuracy of a news story than in other people’s ability to do so.” (Not unlike how most people you ask will insist they are an above average driver and have above average intelligence.)
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‘Majority of Americans express low confidence in journalists to act in public’s best interests’ (Pew)
“Since we first started asking this question in 2020, Democrats have consistently been more likely than Republicans to express confidence in journalists. This party gap has persisted over time, though it has decreased since 2020.”
“This pattern mirrors past Center findings that Democrats are both more trusting of the information they get from national and local news organizations and more likely than Republicans to use and trust many major news sources.”
“We continue to find large differences by political party on this topic. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (61%) are more than twice as likely as Republicans and GOP leaners (25%) to say they have confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public.”
“Some participants said they now curate their news more carefully, whether by verifying what they come across or by narrowing their consumption to a small set of trusted sources.”
“It used to be, as a kid, I could just turn on the news on TV and it’s like everything is believable and credible,” a Republican woman in her 40s said. “But in a world where everything has become much more biased, and there’s unreliable and biased sources, you have to kind of take things with a grain of salt and look at where is it coming from, and who’s the source, and what is their main goal? And you just have to put a filter on it.”
Let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that quote is from “a Republican woman in her 40s.” A reminder that people on both sides doubt the other side is properly doing their homework. It’s the extremes we need to worry about.
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Next expected leader of North Korea.
“Pyongyang’s state media has never mentioned Kim’s children, and this was the first official confirmation that he had a daughter, experts said.” (France24)
She’s 13 and Kim Jung Un is only 42 right now so it’s not likely she’ll be taking the keys any time soon.
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Heather Cox Richardson reports on February 12, 2026.
Must’ve been a slow news day.
Obviously, I’m kidding.
As we’ve all learned under since Trump 1.0 … flood the zone tactics mean we don’t get slow news days anymore. Each day, we are incessantly bludgeoned by new horrors from the moment we look at our phone until late into the night when Trump enjoys making “Breaking News” by doing something outlandish and mortifying.
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‘Super Bowl AI Ads: Here’s Why Viewers Weren’t Buying It’ (Rolling Stone)
Full of damning pull quotes.
“Another ad that stuck was Amazon’s spot, in which Chris Hemsworth busts into his house, (for some reason holding a venomous snake) and tells his wife, Elsa Pataky, he’s concerned the AI assistant Alexa+ is going to kill him. He goes through all of the ways it could happen — closing the garage door on his neck, ordering a man-eating bear to his door — but when Alexa offers to book him a cinnamon scrub, he relents and accepts the device into his home. Chowdhury was put off by how it mocked people who are skeptical about AI. “It’s very condescending,” she says.”
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‘Transparent Toilets Take Tokyo’s Culture of Hygiene to the Next Level’ (Architectural Digest)
“Transparent walls speak to the first concern, allowing people outside to judge the cleanliness of a toilet before deciding to enter.”
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“Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them” (The Times)
The premise is that it’s a mistake not to leverage the opportunity since everyone else is doing it.
Always so much to ponder. Thank you, Mark!