Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 3

• June 30, 2025
• thoughts  
• reviews  
• creativity  
• art  
• artist  
• computer science  
• writing  
• blog  
• essay  
• nonfiction  
• journalism  
• AI  
• social media  
• the internet  

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

Gay Talese, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is one of the most famous celebrity profiles ever written, and I think it’s particularly notable because it’s a type of journalism that is 100% dead: no one would pay for a writer to write this nowadays, and even if they did, no one would read it. Half of the people claiming to have “read” it would just read an AI-generated summary, but the problem is that those summaries give you bare-bone facts at best, and articles like this aren’t about the facts or the big picture, but about the details and the atmosphere. Both of the nonfiction writing classes I took in university mentioned this profile and say it should be required reading for any writer, but I should note that neither of the professors I had actually made students read it, probably because it’s way too long for modern attention spans. I was surprised by the length when I was reading it, and I like reading long articles. I don’t think I’ve ever read a feature published within the last decade or two that even begins to approach this length, because it’s quite literally a novella-length piece (15,000 words or so).

It’s impossible to overstate how impactful this article was on the conventions of contemporary essay writing. It’s part of the canon (or, perhaps, the beginning of the canon) in a genre of nonfiction writing called New Journalism that began in the 60s and lasted until the late 70s, where journalists embraced subjectivity in their reporting, borrowing techniques from narrative writing and telling the story from their point of view. This was different from traditional journalism at the time, where the reporter was meant to be “objective” by completely erasing themself from the story.

Today, we just call this kind of writing “long-form journalism.” I’m serious. These techniques, while used less flamboyantly these days, are a staple of feature journalism now.

The story of this piece is so funny. Gay Talese was assigned to profile Frank Sinatra, who continually refused to talk to him. In fact, Talese never talked to Sinatra in the entire writing of this piece, and only ever managed to get close to him twice. Instead, he followed Sinatra around for three (!!!) months and interviewed everyone in Sinatra’s entourage who was willing to speak for the article. Esquire, the magazine that commissioned the piece, paid $5,000 USD in expenses for the story, which is around $49,608.80 USD in today’s money.

As I said earlier, this type of journalism is totally and utterly dead. For obvious reasons.¹

Talese is known for his profile writing for good reason: it’s vivid, evocative, and so so fun to read. Like, here’s this “description” of why Sinatra having a cold was such a big deal:

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.

And the profile is so interesting. There’s this bit, towards the end or perhaps somewhere in the middle, where Talese describes this confrontation between Frank Sinatra and Harlan Ellison² where they’re both in the poolroom at this really fancy private drinking club, and Sinatra is really not having Ellison’s attire. He starts questioning Ellison, making fun of the screenplay he’s writing, and eventually, Ellison leaves, and Sinatra tells the assistant manager that he doesn’t “want anybody in [t]here without coats and ties.”

Like… wow. What a personality.

I can’t believe I waited so long to actually read this article. It’s long, and written like 60 years ago, but it still holds up, and there will never be another like it.

Reese Chong, On AI

This blog post starts out with a very interesting paragraph:

There’s a dying type of blog where I can’t help but open every single article in a new tab because they all pique my interest. I have a hunch that these really original blogs aren’t done with the help of AI.

And continues with some very disturbing sentences:

As a Gen Z who has found much convenience in ChatGPT as a learning tool and as something that I use to write job applications and cover letters, I find it difficult to write a piece of (non-academic) text without checking it through GPT for grammar and restructuring.

The best way to put it is that my writing muscle shrunk. Sometimes I’m writing this blog, and I just want to auto-complete the rest with ChatGPT. It’s actually bad.

The author then vows to reclaim his own writing voice in the future by starting to write everything himself.

This is a very short blog post. Go read the whole thing. (I very much agree with the overall sentiment expressed in the blog post, by the way.) After reading the blog post, go look at this person’s Twitter and note the irony of him saying this while promoting an AI explanation generator that he made. The summary he wrote of this blog post is “I’m writing everything on this website” and yet, I highly doubt he actually writes that much in reality outside of Twitter posts.

God, I love computer science students.

Like, I’m being too harsh on this kid, right? He wrote this perfectly reasonable quick blog post about what AI is doing to his writing skills, which doesn’t give me permission to judge the (lack of) internal consistency in his belief system by going to his Twitter and looking for evidence that he actually believes what he says.

But then again, he linked to both his blog and his Twitter on his website’s home page. And this AI explanation generator thing is pinned on his profile, so it’s not like I personally went looking for it. I didn’t have to go to any sort of effort to find this sort of discrepancy between what he’s saying and how he’s promoting himself.

And this, right here, gets to the foundation of why I mostly am suspicious of blogs created by CS students, and why I hate the culture of my field so much. So much of public tech culture seems to be about buzzwords and clout and externally proving that you can be fluent in whatever buzzword technology is out there now. Tech bro culture is now finance bro influencer culture, except that being a finance bro requires you to spend time writing cringe posts on LinkedIn, and being a tech bro requires you to shitpost on Twitter (okay, maybe I’ll call it X this one time, since we’re talking about tech bros here) but also actually have skills. In fact, it’s best if you can shitpost in a way that shows off that you have skills, and it’s best if those skills involve using whatever buzzword-trendy thing of the week is important right now.

What I liked about this blog post was that it felt honest. So many blogs written by CS majors in the “help, I’m trying to be employable” phase of their lives don’t. It’s not that they feel dishonest, per se, but they tend to feel like they were written with a hiring manager as the imagined ideal reader. In other words, they feel like they’re written with the purpose of getting a job, or of getting discovered by some important tech person, or, idk, some other thing that isn’t just sharing thoughts and knowledge on the internet. And for that reason, they tend to avoid having too much personality,³ stray away from sharing the author’s own worldview, and try not to criticize anything. To put it bluntly, they feel self-censored, which makes them significantly less interesting. A blog that never says anything remotely risky is a blog that isn’t worth reading.

I guess once again, I’m being too hard on people. This is the modern internet: everyone self-censors to some extent, so why am I judging students for wanting to put their best foot forward? I guess it’s out of some belief I have that we should be people first, students and employees second, and that being a real person on the internet is more valuable than being a bland corporatized version of one’s self. But it’s not like I’m immune to the qualities I’ve described above. I try very hard to stay honest and real on this blog, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that an employer is never going to stumble on this page, and I’m mildly concerned that having written so many publicly available criticisms of AI and academia is going to screw me over someday.

In any case, Reese Chong has passed the “is this blog interesting?” test, which is good. He’s not a great writer—his prose isn’t quite there yet, but he’s trying and he’s at the very least willing to try to say something new.⁴ I think I’ll keep an eye on it.

Avalon Days, I Need To Be Liked: Interpersonally Second, Digitally First

I think reading this article made me feel seen in a way that is particularly rare for me these days. Abby (the author) is around my age, and in a lot of ways, we’ve grown up in very similar digital worlds. Also, she’s super eloquent and kinda funny.⁵ More than anything, I love reading solid and interesting blog posts by people who are more or less my peers. She is so refreshingly honest. She is willing to put forward an idea and own it by putting herself in it.

This article perfectly captures what it’s like to be a young artist on the internet right now. It’s about wanting to be seen, being desensitized to the number of followers you have because of your digital distance from and the relative anonymity of your followers, and going viral for work you never really liked or cared about in the first place. It’s about valuing numbers over impact because numbers are easy to measure and impact isn’t.⁶ And she talks with how she confused wanting connection with others who shared her creative interests with wanting to get attention online, and ended up making significant changes to how she uses social media.

There is something so especially violent about the social media machine for creatives, too; we are what we make, and if what we make is not loved, then it is dangerously easy to assume that neither are we.

I find everything Abby says to be extremely relatable. I think social platforms are as much a curse as they are a blessing: I’ve met some really interesting people because I exist online, but I also don’t frequently post art on the internet anymore because I think doing so warps my perspective of what kind of art is worth making.

Actually, I don’t collect any kind of metrics or analytics on this site either, for the same reason: I don’t want to know which topics are more popular and which pages get read more. I don’t want to be silently tricked into playing the engagement game. The only way for me to know if anyone is reading this thing is for them to tell me, and I much prefer it that way.