new writing + a scandal in plain sight
Arthur c brooks, looksmaxxers, evangelical cinema + a request
Hello all,
Here’s some of my recent writing:
-for The New Yorker on looksmaxxing and personal beauty (I’m not sorry to subject you to more looksmaxxing writing, partially because I think personal beauty is a genuinely fascinating topic and partially because I will never apologize for enjoying a deranged internet wormhole. If you don’t enjoy the spectacle of weird people doing weird stuff on the internet, you are bereft of the novelistic impulse): https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/the-captivating-derangement-of-the-looksmaxxing-movement
-for The New Yorker on Arthur C. Brooks, who irritates me to no end because his brand of anodyne “the science made me do it!” punditry absolves him of having to actually defend the things he advocates: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/the-meaning-of-your-life-arthur-c-brooks-book-review
-and finally, something I wrote before I started at The New Yorker, on Christian nationalist cinema and its thematic similarities to Nazi cinema, for Art in America. Yes, I have seen 50+ evangelical movies; no, I do not really have an excuse, but I was glad to put my weirdly encyclopedic knowledge to good use: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/maga-theory-of-art-evangelical-film-nazi-weimar-1234779167/
Finally, a call to action! Here’s Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, openly admitting that she uses AI in ways that blatantly violate the Post standards policy. The policy states, “We are transparent about how and when we use AI,” but McArdle has not appended notes to her columns explaining how she has used it in each, although she is apparently quite heavily reliant on it!. The policy states, "Attribution of material from other media must be total. Plagiarism is not permitted…. Readers should be able to distinguish between what the reporter saw and what the reporter obtained from other sources such as wire services, pool reporters, email, websites, etc.” McArdle admits here that she often asks AI to generate ideas for stories for her, yet she has not attributed anything to it in any of the resultant columns, at least that I’ve seen. Finally, the policy states “Washington Post reporters have primary responsibility for reporting, writing and fact-checking their stories,” yet McArdle is outsourcing fact-checking functions (and idea-generation functions!) to a technology with a documented track record of hallucinations and inaccuracies. To this I would add that she is deceiving her audience, many of whom presumably read her under the assumption that she is doing the intellectual heavy-lifting herself:
Fact-checking, generating ideas, and shaping questions for interviewees are not “grunt work.” They are at the heart of the journalistic process, and if you cannot do them yourself, you should leave your coveted full-time writing position to someone who can.
What can we do about this? I think we have an opportunity to demonstrate what is and is not acceptable to the Reading Public by writing to the Post standards desk, demanding that they enforce their policies by asking McArdle adhere to them moving forward.
Here is the email of the Post senior standards desk editor. Please avail yourself of it! karen.pensiero@washpost.com.
Here’s the whole masthead, if you want to email all on down the line: https://helpcenter.washingtonpost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002940991-Leadership-of-The-Washington-Post-newsroom.
There are plenty of people who will tell you that widespread adoption of AI by newsrooms is inevitable, but that is simply not true. Thinking so might make it true, but we don’t have to think so. It’s early days. “The situation,” as they say, is evolving. If we do not turn away from such scandals but instead confront them head-on, we have a chance to shape policy while it’s still malleable—and a chance to show that most readers who pay for magazines and newspapers do not want to read slop.