Anna Wiener

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Anna Wiener

The new essay collection “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” by Vauhini Vara, opens with a transcript. “If I paste some writing here, can we talk about it?” Vara asks. Her interlocutor, the large language model ChatGPT, responds, “Of course!” The chatbot asks what specific themes it should focus on. “Nothing in particular,” Vara replies. “I’d love to just hear your reaction, if that’s OK?” This is, of course, O.K. with the chatbot. “I’m nervous,” she admits.

1 month ago | businessandamerica.com | Anna Wiener

Longstreth is a musician, composer, and producer, best known for his work under the band name Dirty Projectors. The group, which he started as a college student, was a paragon of the Obama-era indie-rock ecosystem. “Is there a 23-year-old alive in northern Brooklyn who’s not making music right now?” New York magazine asked in 2009. “What are they all after? It could be that they want to be David Longstreth.” He has collaborated with Joanna Newsom, Solange Knowles, Major Lazer, and David Byrne.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Anna Wiener

In 2020, California was swept with some of the worst wildfires in its history. One morning in September, David Longstreth woke up at his home in Los Angeles to find the sky glutted with smoke. His wife, Teresa Eggers, was three months pregnant, and the couple decided to book a last-minute trip to visit a friend in Alaska. The Burbank airport was deserted. They boarded their flight wearing masks and plastic face shields, and discovered that they had the plane nearly to themselves.

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Anna Wiener

20 underrated albums from 1995 that still matterIt happens with practically any decade in pop/rock music at some point - it gets neglected for a while and is labeled as ‘less consequential.’ The …

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Anna Wiener

No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In the right light, the social network for professionals is a lavish psychoanalytic corpus, bursting with naked ambition, inspiration, desperation, status-seeking, spiritual yearning, brownnosing, name-dropping, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. Novels have been written about less, but no one is on LinkedIn for the prose.