Article Club

If AI writes for us… do kids even need to learn how to write? English professor Piers Gelly tasks his Creative Writing class with using AI throughout the semester to figure out: "Do you even need me anymore?" Check out the piece:https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-myself-with-chatgpt-in-my-english-classroom/

**This caption was written by a human. 

It's a super light super not-that-deep topic this week... (it's not like we're questioning all the human emotions that ever existed or anything!!) In Gal Beckerman's mind bending piece, he spends time with historians who are trying to understand how feelings felt to people in the past. What did pain actually feel like to a medieval blacksmith? What did happiness feel like for a Widow in WWII. One researcher in particular thinks our guess is farther off than any of us might imagine.

Check the article out in The Atlantic here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/human-ancestors-emotion-history/684959/

Are you guilty of the automated respose, "I'm busy... but good!"? You may be a victim of Busy Culture and we're here to help. For our Season 2 opener, we're taking it to Substack for "The Cult of Busyness" and digging into busyness as a proxy for being useful in society. If we aren't busy what value do we have? Yet, it's not cute to complain about it. Press pause notifications and let's revolt against our busy addiction.

Say it ain’t so! It’s the season finale of Article Club and the millennial midlife crises are upon us. In his Vox piece, “The Midlife Crisis is Coming for Milennials lol” Alex Abad-Santos explains why we’re not buying red sports cars and having affairs (who’s got the time and money for that?). It's cool. We’re freaking out over being half-way to death in a whole new way. Check out the piece here:
vox.comhttps://www.vox.com › culture › millennial-midlife-crisis

If you've developed the attention span of a mosquito over the last 10 years, you're not alone. In her piece, "How I’m Fixing My Broken Attention Span," Rebecca Jennings discusses how the endlessly scrolley, always-on-ness of our lives has us playing focus whack-a-mole. TLDR (because who has the time to read?)...we're a mess. Tips for how to reclaim your focus are ready for a listen on Ep 11 this week (while you respond to emails, clean up the kitchen, and remember to do that thing you need to do, of course).

Is Big Milk back to stay? We’re uncovering the underbelly of the milk industry with Kelli María Korducki’s piece, “Why everybody’s drinking milk again.” This one’s got it all: binders full of “Got Milk?” Ads, questionable subsidies, and yes… the raw milk debate. Grab a frothy one and buckle in.

Check out the article here:  https://thehustle.co/originals/why-everybodys-drinking-milk-again#:~:text=Milk's%20protein%2Dpowered%20comeback,Farms%20of%20America%20Dairy%20Brands

This week we’re heading on an ayahuasca retreat with Sarah Miller and her piece, “Pirates of the Ayahuasca" in N+1 magazine. She makes the trek to Peru to drink the trendy hallucinogenic potion which she says, “compels the drinker to vomit, witness their own death, or — my hope — develop a capacity to endure life.” She’s deeply depressed and also deeply funny and boy do we have a lot to talk about. Get your puke/poo buckets cause Ep 10 is coming right up!

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/essays/pirates-of-the-ayahuasca/

Do our siblings have more of an impact on our success than our parents?! This week we’re talking allllll about “The Surprising Ways That Siblings Shape Our Lives,” Susan Dominus’ new piece in NYT that explores patterns in highly successful siblings. Did you know, eldests are more likely to attend an ivy league school and youngests are more likely to play a sport professionally? If you’re “siblinged” you’ve undeniably felt some diffusion and differentiation (maybe without even knowing it!). Come for psychological sibling juice. Stay for the baby pilots blowing up the group chat.

Check out the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/magazine/siblings-families-parents-influence.html

Move over NYT, this week's article is coming in hot from the Hedgehog Review. In his piece, "The Department of Everything," Stephen Akey, a former librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library in the 80s, takes us into the underbelly of the "Telephone Reference Division" aka the people you called when you had a question aka the Google of yesteryear. He and his team (led by a boss who ruled with a "3 citation per answer" fist) had a strict no-judgement policy and helped everyone from "game show aspirants to police detectives" find the facts. This all got us thinking 1. Will thinking like a librarian (i.e. being an expert in how to find and piece facts together) save us in a world of AI? 2. What are we missing out on in a world where we can get any answer we want to hear without hearing from a human at all?

Check out the article here: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-varieties-of-travel-experience/articles/the-department-of-everything

Working hard feels good. But...why? Shouldn't we conserve energy and take the path of least resistance? This week we're reading, "The Paradox of Hard Work" by Alex Hutchinson. He digs into the psychological theories behind motivation (even some birds like snacks they have to fly further for!) and we tiptoe around our shared, lifelong, do-good-reach-for-the-stars-people-pleasing disease.

Read along with the article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/effort-paradox-hard-work/682156/